As someone who works in an environment with many Windows and Linux VMs, I can pretty accurately state that Windows updates have caused far more critical problems than Linux ones over the past 2 or 3 years. Microsoft’s Patch QC has been AWFUL. (Print Nightmare fixes caused ongoing problems that are still breaking printing. You mentioned the EFI change, there’s also patching completely failing for machines that had too small a recovery partition. Fine if there was none, or it was large, but all updates fail after that if your machine has a partition that Windows itself silently created.) There’s literally dozens of major Windows update failures recently.

As you say, shit happens. Paying for something doesn’t make that any less.

Fedora is a fork of Red Hat, the same way Ubuntu is a fork of debian.

I think you’ve got your ordering and terms a bit confused, there. There’s no forking as such going on in the EL ecosystem.

To explain it as simply as I can, as there are quite a few people mixing this up in here.

Fedora is *upstream *of Red Hat (Or RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to be exact - Redhat is a company owned by IBM that does a bunch of stuff, not just RHEL).

Fedora feeds into CentOS Stream (Essentially a staging area for RHEL). This has no relation to CentOS Linux, which is dead.

RHEL is then built from CS at point releases and sold commercially through licencing.

There are distros such as Rocky, Alma, Oracle Enterprise Linux and possibly some smaller ones that strive to be near exact clones of RHEL (Rocky claims bug-for-bug compatibility, Alma doesn’t any more as they build in a different way) - these follow RHEL’s point releases, and might be considered a poor and loose definition of forking, but rebuilding is a more accurate term.

All these distros are under the blanket term of “Enterprise Linux” because it’s shaped around RHEL, even though most are free. Historically this worked well, as people learned Enterprise skills using Fedora and Centos Linux which turned into careers (including for me). Then Redhat went a bit mad and that all changed.

The only similarity to Debian/Ubuntu is that Ubuntu uses Debian as a base, and builds upon it. Like RHEL, it adds commercially licenced bits to its distro and rebuilds other parts into something unique, and like RHEL, Rocky, Alma and OEL do with Fedora, it feeds back improvements and development into Debian.

Have you played War for the Overworld? Based on DK but reworked and (imo at least) improved

War for the Overworld (I have many thousands of hours in this)

Settlers 2 Gold

(Both the above have a lot of user generated maps, which has given them most of their longevity.)

Factorio

I’m pretty sure he’s using Twitter as some sort of home project science experiment.

The amount of sheer hate and vitriol I was getting ramped up hugely in recent months - the algorithm is definitely promoting hate, despite my almost never replying/posting. Lots and lots of far right political content also, it really didn’t feel random.

I bailed a couple of weeks ago.

I’m not in the US - and who was talking about genocide? We’re talking about tax and it’s software here.

Bad? It’s a couple of decisions made by organisations or politicians who are ignorant of free software alternatives and open standards.

Certainly better than the US’s tax system, where you have to pay to file your taxes or at the least, have to spend a lot of your time working out complex tax submissions each year.

In the UK, your income tax is automatically paid by your employer when you earn it. Unless you’re self employed - or doing your own business accounts like OP, you don’t have to submit any tax information, ever.

I think you have to be exceptionally strong to resist this sort of thing. You can justify sponsorship in a hundred ways - not least to yourself. But in every case, it changes everything. That, of course, is why companies spend money influencing the influencers.

Buyer beware, as always.

No - it’s the kernel image - the actual operating system, rather than a service that runs on top of it.

If you just want to restart your ssh service after updating the packages, then “systemctl restart sshd” is all that’s needed, although you should probably reboot whenever the package manager suggests as a general good habit.

Because choosing a distro to begin with isn’t easy. Ask ten people and you’ll get eleven suggestions.

I stand corrected that Redhat are no longer publically traded - I was misled by stock prices showing prices in months, and not including the year.

But that muddies your point even further, doesn’t it? We can’t see RHEL’s value, nor even Redhat’s. (And you did mix them up!)

Rocky is only comparable to Debian in terms of the licencing model, but IANAL. Both are owned by a non-profit organisation that can’t be bought.

Would Rocky survive? Nobody knows - but that’s why I said I think Rocky and Alma will pool resources with Fedora in the interests of all. R&A could just rebuild downstream of Fedora and invent their own release cycle, so they may do that.

A non technical answer: Don’t interact with other players and don’t give out any personal information.

Use a unique and non-memorable username in steam and in game. Don’t use any of the social functions in steam.

It’s often overlooked that the biggest risk to personal information is the person themselves.

(Obviously you need to give some information to Steam for purchasing, and others have shown other methods to limit what information is sold about you as much as you an. It also depends where you reside - the EU has better protections than most)

All good points and I appreciate and enjoy the discussion.

In my view, CentOS Stream is already a lot more of a “community” distro than the original CentOS was.

This is possibly a semantic point, but for me, a community distro is owned and operated by the community without any corporate control. All the points yonu make are true and valid, but ultimately, Centos is owned by a very large corporate entity that could stop it whenever they want to and nobody else can do anything about that.

Some examples of community owned distros are Debian, as well as Rocky and Alma Linux. Both of the latter have commercial arms, but are are fully independent legal entities owned by the distro. Rocky is owned by Rocky. This point was particularly important because that’s what the community thought Centos /was/, but it turned out that Redhat owned Centos. I don’t think either of the new distros would have been as trusted if the same thing that happened to Centos - a corporate entity ultimately deciding what happens - could have happened to them. When abandoning a sinking ship, it’s prudent to check you’re not boarding another with a big hole in it.

I did happen to look follow Rocky’s path closely, and our company chose it to migrate our doomed Centos8 machines to, because our developers didn’t have time to rebuild everything for Debian in that particular window. That decision was largely based on that legal standpoint because we didn’t want Centos repeating on us. It was also reassuring that Rocky was founded by Greg Kurtzer, who founded Centos and had that project effectively stolen from him, and he least of anyone wanted the same thing happening. (BTW, Rocky was named after the other co-founder of Centos, who has since died - a nice gesture)

My cynicism of Redhat and their motives are real and may be misplaced, but I don’t think they’re done piddling in the EL swimming pool just yet. I adored the company once and had nothing but respect for what they achieved. But that was then and this is now.

You’re mixing up Redhat with RHEL.

Redhat is a publicly traded company, so yes, their financials are strong. But my question was about RHEL, which is an internal project and not publically known.

RH had taken over the Centos project and Board by that time. You’re right that Centos was already circling the drain in terms of resources (I remember waiting many weeks for point releases), but the way they did this was brutal and poorly communicated.

And remember those downstream ‘rebuilds’ only appeared to fill the vacuum caused by Centos disappearing. That they’re both doing very well does make you question whether Centos could have been sustained in its traditional form. (As opposed to Stream, which is only of benefit to Redhat and those in its testing cycle)

I actually agree with you, it would survive. It would change, but it’s big enough to have that critical momentum.

Historically Fedora has been suggested as a free way to learn Enterprise Linux skills for a career. RHEL now provide free licences so that doesn’t apply. Has this hurt Fedora at all? Probably not and may no longer be relevant.

Rocky and Alma are RHEL alternatives and are absolutely aimed at the enterprise. Fedora merging with either of these projects would be super surprising indeed. It would make no sense whatsoever.

It would make a lot of sense to Rocky and Alma though - as if RHEL went there would be a huge vacuum and their models would be impossible. I know there was a lot of talk in both companies when the source was paywalled about building directly from Fedora’s sources (Alma may actually be doing that, I’m not sure). Both R & A have significant user bases, both Enterprise and Community, and there would be considerable desire to keep the wheels turning. Some sort of collaboration (or just downstreaming directly from Fedora) feels inevitable as a choice if that were to happen.

The “community” enterprise option from Red Hat is not Fedora, it is CentOS Stream.

Centos Stream is not community by the way - it’s entirely owned and run by Redhat (AIUI, They took over the name from its community origins and replaced the board with its own employees. The vote to end traditional Centos (which was community run) was given as an ultimatum with a great deal of bad feeling) Stream’s purpose is as an upstream staging area for new releases of RHEL. Redhat state it’s not suitable for production use, so it’s of no real benefit to anyone that isn’t part of that test cycle. (In some defence of Redhat here, Centos was struggling with low resources for a long time before this and point releases often took weeks or even months to appear behind RHEL)

RHEL don’t publish sales figures afaik, so they’re the only ones who could say whether they’re up or down. I’m just one guy who’s worked in a mostly EL based world which has been negatively affected by these decisions, so I’m keeping half an eye. I could be completely wrong, but the facts we do know aren’t healthy for someone wanting to enter into a business relationship with them, which is what a corporate company does when choosing a supported distro like RHEL.

And yes, I am quite cynical - you’re right to point that out. I also hope I’m wrong. If I’m not, I have a lot of confidence that the world will continue with or without RHEL, but yes, it would be a big loss to the FOSS contributions they have made and continue to make - as well as a lot of good people losing their jobs.

Also, with the fuckery RedHat pulls lately, it’s a disservice to new users to get them to learn the RedHat ecosystem, unless they plan or need to use it professionally.

We and several other companies that I know are migrating away from EL entirely directly because of those Redhat decisions. We can’t trust them not to be stupid again.

Nice to hear that recommended! Slackware was the first distro I installed at home, thanks to it being included on a special cover CD from one of the magazines some time in the late 90s? Not touched it for about 20 years but glad to hear it’s still going.