They were bought by IBM a few years back, but even aside from that they’re a corporation and they care about making money above all else.
It looks like Red Hat is doing its damnedest to consolidate as much power for themselves within the Linux ecosystem.
I don’t think the incessant Fedora shilling is unrelated.
It seems like there isn’t much criticism of the company or their tactics, and I’m curious if any of you think that should change.
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IBM is giving us(tge FOSS and Linux world) technical advancements and money but is taking away the Freedom part more and more.
They are locking in linux and the ecosystem according to their own business needs. Gnome, systemd, or most other redhat products, you can see how inconpatible they are with other software and go their own way, which affects the whole Linux world.
I personally really dislike redhat and IBM. Specially IBM itself is an absolute governmental piece of shit with a history not much better than microsoft and facebook.
I do not use any Red Hat distributions (not RHEL, not CentOS, not Fedora).
Red Hat is one of the largest contributors to glibc, gcc, GNU utils, systemd, ext4, Btrfs, SELinux, RPM, and GNOME. I generally try to avoid all those. However, I acknowledge that I am a heavy user of Red Hat software.
Red Hat is one of the largest contributors to Xorg, Wayland, Mesa, KVM, libvirt, dbus, podman, Pipewire, Cockpit, NetworkManager, and Flatpak. I use all of those a lot. Oh, and Red Hat has been one of the top 4 contributors to the Linux kernel for something like 20 years now. I use the Linux kernel.
If you want to avoid Red Hat software (something I see people claiming they do from time to time), you have to stay away from all the software listed on this page: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/contributions
I am ok if people dislike Red Hat and want to avoid them. I am not a user. I am not a shareholder. However, I find it hard to ignore when people claim that they DO avoid Red Hat when I know that they are knee deep in software written by Red Hat. It also bugs me when people I doubt are contributing any code rant that Red Hat are freeloaders. I do not agree with all of Red Hat’s vision for Linux and do not love or all the ways the influence the Linux world. I do acknowledge their contributions and am thankful for the software that I use.
Absolutely, we should talk about this more. Red Hat and IBM can swing their dick around and make literally any change they want to Linux. They control a lot of things, like FreeDesktopOrg (how free is that free?)
I am wary of their bullshit. We need to make sure to keep alternatives to big corporate software in case they decide to fuck us over.
Use GPL software, above all else, and remember, if GPL wasn’t effective in cutting the corpo hand they wouldn’t spread propaganda against it.
Absolutely, we should talk about this more. Red Hat and IBM can swing their dick around and make literally any change they want to Linux. They control a lot of things, like FreeDesktopOrg (how free is that free?)
Well, I guess Freedesktop.org is free because it is free both monetarily and in terms of the “4 freedoms” of the FSF. You are correct though that Red Hat yields an enormous amount of influence. Freedesktop is a great example. Not only is it the basis for Flatpak but with Wayland relying on all the “portals”, it is becoming essential and unavoidable for the Linux desktop in general. I think the IBM boogeyman is overplayed. Red Hat is extremely successful financially and I believe IBM knows that messing with Red Hat could kill the golden goose that is laying the golden eggs. To my eyes, IBM seems quite hands off. Red Hat is the way it is as a result of its own corporate agenda. Of course, that all could change at any time.
I am wary of their bullshit. We need to make sure to keep alternatives to big corporate software in case they decide to fuck us over.
In my view, Open Source is perfect defense against the “in case they decide” timeline. For me, the bigger concern is the level of influence and the fact that, like in most areas of humanity, money talks. The vision that Red Hat has for Linux is the journey that we are all on. I think they are generally decent stewards but I do not agree entirely with their vision. I think Systemd, not just the init supervisor but the “manage everything else too” aspect, is a great example. The “our extensions are the platform” nature of glibc and friends is another. My concern about Red Hat is totally different from many of the other complaints about them in that I am worried that they will continue to “collaborate” really well and, in doing so, totally dominate the evolution of the Linux ecosystem.
Use GPL software, above all else, and remember, if GPL wasn’t effective in cutting the corpo hand they wouldn’t spread propaganda against it.
Are you saying that Red Hat “spread propaganda” against the GPL? We live in different worlds. Red Hat is not only one of the biggest GPL supporters but also one of the biggest authors of GPL software. All the software they write is released GPL including tools they originated like systemd, flatpak, libvirt, and cockpit. More importantly, they are not just one of the largest contributors to other important GPL projects (like Linux itself) but often by far the largest contributor. They often employ the project lead or have directors in the “foundation” behind a project. They have tremendous influence over the projects many GPL fans hold dear including GNOME, GCC, Glibc, and the GNU Utils.
Ironically “Use GPL software, above all else” often means being wholly within the core sphere of Red Hat control.
I use Chimera Linux which does not use GNU Utils, GCC, Glibc, or Systemd. I do not use GNOME. I am a bit less directly impacted by the army of people Red Hat has involved in Fedora and GNOME. But a lot of the alternatives to the software listed earlier in this paragraph are Apache, BSD, or MIT licensed. Ironically (or at least I think so) a lot of the people that rail against the evils of Red Hat would also caution against choosing the software I run with the view that their permissive licenses leave me open to “corporate rug pulls” and “commercial control”. This has always struck me as quite ironic given the massive corporate dominance of the core “GNU” projects.
People seem to imagine that GPL software is “written by tens of thousands of volunteers”. I saw this sentence so many times in Red Hat threads last year. But take glibc as an example. Almost all the glibc project leads have been Red Hat employees. Red Hat has been responsible for well over 50% of the commits (sometimes much higher). It is essentially a Red Hat project. Compare that to musl which is MIT licensed but where no single entity dominates development.
You could say the same for GCC. Red Hat may only have contributed 30% of the commits but the percentage on x86-64 is closer to 70% and the maintainers are Red Hat employees.
If you hate “corporate” software then Clang is your worst nightmare. It is permissively licensed (Apache) and the biggest contributors are Google, Apple, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Intel. I mean, other than Oracle or Meta, how much more evil could we get? But even the largest contributor, Google, is less than a third of the commits. And it is clear that Google is mostly contributing to create a compiler for their own in-house use. They are not trying to “control” the user base or monetize the compiler and it would take a massive shift in strategy by them for this to be a concern.
Anyway, this is not meant to be an argument really. Please think and choose as you wish. However, sometimes I wonder if people have looked at the facts or if we are just projecting things we imagine must be true due to idealogy.
I do think we should be wary of Red Hat. They have a massive amount of control over the Linux ecoysystem. However, I also recognize how much benefit I get from their contributions. And personally, I do not see how the GPL stops them from taking Linux in the wrong direction (my concern). Circling the wagons around glibc and GCC especially looks and feels to me like embracing “big corporate software”, not the opposite. Red Hat has made many tens of billions of dollars off GPL software which is why they have always released all their own software as GPL. I really doubt that Red Hat themselves would agree that the GPL is “effective in cutting the corpo hand”. But that is not the argument I want to have. It is a point of view that confuses me but that is ok.
Red Hat wants to create a Linux “platform” which does not always look like traditional UNIX and which is a mono-culture in terms of the core software it requires. This is a smart move product wise so I cannot fault them. And I do want the platform to evolve (modernize). However, I would also like the Linux ecosystem to remain more distributed, more modular, and more robust. More free. I do not like technology monocultures. I “try” to avoid chromium, I resist software like systemd (again not even so much the init system part but its expansion into everything else), and I think allowing GNU and Red Hat to “embrace and extend” the POSIX world with incompatible extensions such that gnome only works with systemd which only works with glibc and software only builds with GCC and such are bad things. My “wariness” of Red Hat makes musl and Clang more attractive to me. Of course, I understand, not everybody agrees.
I think Systemd, not just the init supervisor but the “manage everything else too” aspect, is a great example. The “our extensions are the platform” nature of glibc and friends is another. My concern about Red Hat is totally different from many of the other complaints about them in that I am worried that they will continue to “collaborate” really well and, in doing so, totally dominate the evolution of the Linux ecosystem.
I think so too, thankfully we still have stellar projects like Shepherd, S6, dinit and the venerable OpenRC to rely on. Overall, we still have the necessary competition (and we should support them, even if their license is not ideal).
Are you saying that Red Hat “spread propaganda” against the GPL? We live in different worlds. Red Hat is not only one of the biggest GPL supporters but also one of the biggest authors of GPL software. All the software they write is released GPL including tools they originated like systemd, flatpak, libvirt, and cockpit. More importantly, they are not just one of the largest contributors to other important GPL projects (like Linux itself) but often by far the largest contributor. They often employ the project lead or have directors in the “foundation” behind a project. They have tremendous influence over the projects many GPL fans hold dear including GNOME, GCC, Glibc, and the GNU Utils.
No, this was two different things. As a matter of fact, pretty much the only safeguard we have [against RH] right now is GPL, and IBM started fucking with that the moment they took over (RedHat can apparently decide that releasing sources for packages they make from FOSS software that is literally 100% benefit to them is OK and people who were using their sources are “freeloaders” and they are somehow not???)
Software released under lesser licenses is a rug waiting to be pulled from under the developers or the users. Atleast with GPL, even if we have to deal with the politics of it’s authors (hey, nobody said just because something is GPL, it is automatically good) the software itself is safe. With other licenses, even if you agree with the politics of the author, the license itself opens it to different threat aspects.
[All of this is nerd shit anyway. I advice you to use FOSS you agree with even if it’s not GPL. I merely say we -must- strive to keep GPL alive and popular to prevent a different type of corporate takeover. Threats are formed in a thousand ways, by motivated and capable actors]
People seem to imagine that GPL software is “written by tens of thousands of volunteers”. I saw this sentence so many times in Red Hat threads last year. But take glibc as an example. Almost all the glibc project leads have been Red Hat employees. Red Hat has been responsible for well over 50% of the commits (sometimes much higher). It is essentially a Red Hat project. Compare that to musl which is MIT licensed but where no single entity dominates development.
IIRC, RedHat hired the developers, so they’re RH employees now. I must say, under capitalism we live and under capitalism may we struggle; this was a good move because otherwise GCC would’ve been fucked into the ground in the old days. I still disagree with making 1 company god, but GCC is definitely much less corpoware than LLVM which is literally a corporate EEE takeover project designed as a weapon against GCC (because GPL didn’t let the corpos do their proprietary shit with GCC)
I do think we should be wary of Red Hat. They have a massive amount of control over the Linux ecoysystem. However, I also recognize how much benefit I get from their contributions. And personally, I do not see how the GPL stops them from taking Linux in the wrong direction (my concern). Circling the wagons around glibc and GCC especially looks and feels to me like embracing “big corporate software”, not the opposite. Red Hat has made many tens of billions of dollars off GPL software which is why they have always released all their own software as GPL. I really doubt that Red Hat themselves would agree that the GPL is “effective in cutting the corpo hand”. But that is not the argument I want to have. It is a point of view that confuses me but that is ok.
GPL makes their contributions able to be used as we see fit, and binds them to release their code. Other licenses don’t even provide this. We live under capitalism and we must adapt, and GPL is a pretty good tool to even the battlefield.
If tomorrow should Google decide to change the license of their MIT software and fuck off into the sunset, there is little we can do
On that note: NEVER sign a CLA. GPL has shared property for a damn reason.
Red Hat wants to create a Linux “platform” which does not always look like traditional UNIX and which is a mono-culture in terms of the core software it requires. This is a smart move product wise so I cannot fault them. And I do want the platform to evolve (modernize). However, I would also like the Linux ecosystem to remain more distributed, more modular, and more robust. More free. I do not like technology monocultures. I “try” to avoid chromium, I resist software like systemd (again not even so much the init system part but its expansion into everything else), and I think allowing GNU and Red Hat to “embrace and extend” the POSIX world with incompatible extensions such that gnome only works with systemd which only works with glibc and software only builds with GCC and such are bad things. My “wariness” of Red Hat makes musl and Clang more attractive to me. Of course, I understand, not everybody agrees.
I very much agree. I strongly HATE The centralized, anti-unix method of software development (hey, as a developer, I can be opinionated). I also hate how going from one corposphere to the other merely changes the aspects of the threat.
I conclude that we need a new current in GPL software ecosystem. We need to individually put in more work in GPL software so that they may survive. I have plans of my own (I have no less than 4 GPL software in the oven right now); but in the end we need more outreach to motivate people to continue.
First off, while we may disagree on some stuff, let me just say how awesome it is to have a reasonable conversation on the Internet. Thank you for that (and your thoughts).
I look forward to leaning more about the software you are working on. Keep us posted.
We want our software to be communist, but it is a capitalist world (at present). Navigating in the grey area between the two will always lead to controversy. We’re like China, trying to walk a tightrope between the ideal and the practical.
Normally I sit back from this sort of drama: there are certainly bad actors and bad attitudes in various places, but in the end, for most purposes, it’s just another distribution?
But one commenter here, by looking so strongly like an idiotic shill, has now turned me against RH and Fedora. Hopefully the sour taste will fade soon and I’ll forget, but for now: Use Debian-based or Arch-based, people! Or SUSE! (I know they had their controversial moment, but AFAIK all is forgiven.) Or another! But keep control and consolidation out of Red’s hat.
Does your distro use systemd? wayland? gnome? glibc? gcc? flatpak? If so, Red Hat has a lot of influence on the evolution of your distro.
Shills or no shills, using Debian does not reduce your reliance on Red Hat software all that much. Well, stuff like the above at least. Debian ships a lot more software than RHEL does.
With Leap 16, SUSE are dumping YaST (their signature software) for Cockpit (largest contributor is Red Hat) and moving to Wayland exclusively (a Red Hat project) and Pipewire (same). I mean, these are objectively good moves but they also make SUSE more like RHEL. So jumping to SUSE is not exactly jumping off the Red Hat train.
I would say the same about Arch but it is certainly possible to run a less Red Hat centric stack on Arch (though you are probably using glibc and GCC on Arch for sure and there is of course the problem that a significant percentage of the Linux kernel is Red Hat code).
Anyway, I have no intention of shilling. I am not here to make you like Red Hat. However, I also think not being idiotic means acknowledging facts.
Shills or no shills, using Debian does not reduce your reliance on Red Hat software all that much
Maybe, but if, based on one loud mouth in a Lemmy thread I began a whole intensive programme of de-redhatting my life, that would be a bit dumb ;-)
But veering a little more away from using Redhat or Fedora, seems a proportionate response to finally feeling there really is bad faith shilling and genuine red flags. My inflammatory language was perhaps just an emotional expression of that.
Does your distro use systemd? … If so, Red Hat has a lot of influence on the evolution of your distro
And that was part of the controversy, wasn’t it? And part of why, if vague memory serves, Debian resisted it at first. Perhaps your comment vindicates them!
I also think not being idiotic means acknowledging facts.
Sounds like a pretty sensible policy :) Thanks
What happened to the Internet? Reasonable people everywhere.
Yes, I think that the skepticism towards systemd was deserved even if we have to acknowledge that it also brought improvements in some areas.
I also concede that actively supporting a distro like Debian is important for the role they play in the ecosystem, regardless of the software overlap with other distros.
I too was oversimplifying obviously.
Thank you for the reply.
Not really
It isn’t a black and white thing. Redhat simply exists like anything else. I don’t like everything they do but they also fund a ton of research and development. If Fedora ever becomes problematic people will just move. Ubuntu desktop used to be good but after it turned to shit many people moved.
IBM sucks. They have bought up a bunch of small data centers and made them worse.
I’m still pissed about CentOS as well. Long live Rocky.
Alma is actually a real community distro. They deserve so much more support than Rocky does.
TIL; though I moved my servers to Debian … having the ability to sanely upgrade without a reinstall is a major plus.
Good luck with Debian. Trixie is looking quite nice.
I’m pretty sure Alma had a way to upgrade major releases. I know RHEL has Leapp, but it is always recommended to do a greenfield reinstall. Although with image mode and ostree that is changing.
Interesting … yeah it looks like Leapp can do some upgrades for Alma and possibly others as well (TIL). I’m not sure how well that upgrade process would compare / be supported vs Debian though.
What’s the image mode and ostree stuff? Is that required for RHEL and/or Alma going forward?
No image mode is not required. It is the immutable mode for RHEL. Using image builder and bootc to create and upgrade your images. Ostree is sort of like putting your entire OS in git. For an upgrade it checks out a new branch, updates that branch, then you have to reboot into that branch. That makes the upgrade atomic and gives you the ability to rollback. It’s what Core OS uses and what the Fedora Atomic desktops use. It’s a much bigger thing in RHEL 10 and I suspect will take over a lot of the duties of Satellite at some point.
Ahhh so leapp will simply become less relevant because a better upgrade mechanism will take over
That’s my thoughts anyway. The entire linux world seems to be heading the immutable direction.
@Dark_Arc @LeFantome I’ve had mixed luck with debian in this regard. Bullseye to Bookworm was a smooth upgrade but some of the others have not gone so well.
Fuck Rocky. They are a leech on open source. They break user agreements to get at Red Hat source and don’t contribute upstream. Use Alma, they actually work with the community and contribute upstream.
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It’s not.
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Profiting off of someone else’s work without giving back is practically the definition of being a leech.
Ok, but why is there even an agreement required to access to source to something, uh, open source?
Because CIQ, the company that bankrolls Rocky, was poaching Red Hat customers. They were hiring Red Hat sales people, then using their contacts to swoop in and drastically undercut Red Hat because they don’t do any engineering. It is an effort to stop leeches like CIQ/Rocky.
They were hiring Red Hat sales people, then using their contacts to swoop in and drastically undercut Red Hat because they don’t do any engineering.
There’s an easy solution to that. RedHat could just pay their salespeople what they are worth and keep them at RedHat.
I don’t see the problem with that. Red Hat is bankrolled by IBM. I don’t have any qualms about them facing competition, even underhanded competition which I don’t think this is. Contributing to open source doesn’t and shouldn’t guarantee financial compensation, customers, whatever.
So, you’re okay with one company taking another company’s work, contributing nothing to it themselves, then hiring company A’s employees, and finally taking company A’s customers? Not even Oracle was slimy enough to do that.
IBM does not bank roll Red Hat. Red Hat acts and reports independently of IBM.
I guess you consider the parts of open source that are contributed to be owned by the contributors? I don’t think that’s how open source works nor how it should work.
IBM doesn’t bankroll Red Hat? Buddy, IBM owns Red Hat https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-closes-landmark-acquisition-red-hat-34-billion-defines-open-hybrid-cloud-future
Buddy, I know IBM owns them. I also know that Red Hat is basically the only thing making IBM money. Look at the financials a little more closely.
I guess you consider the parts of open source that are contributed to be owned by the contributors?
What would that have to do with anything? That’s not at all what I’m saying. I’m against companies that take an open source project to profit off of it without making any contributions to the community. CIQ and Canonical to a lesser extent. I have no issues with people like Red Hat, SUSE, Alma, etc…
@FlexibleToast @zero_spelled_with_an_ecks If that company built upon open source and had then to release their work because of the original license, then I can’t speak for others, but I’m ok with it. They can do original work or they can build on others, if they do the latter then they have to expect the same.
Right, I think you’re basically saying what I think most of us would agree with. Don’t just copy the homework and poach customers. You can copy the homework and add your own value to it and earn customers. Bonus points for adding that value add back into the community like Alma does with their HPC work.
The GPL says you can get the source to software that people distribute to you. Red Hat does not distribute to Rocky.
Seems like they use that to circumvent other parts of the gpl, in spirit and possibly in the letter of the law. Others have more and better things to say about it than I:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/dear-red-hat-are-you-dumb
I wish Almalinux/Rocky would be recognized by Fedora.
What does that even mean? Alma already contributes and is down stream of CentOS Stream. Rocky doesn’t contribute and steals Red Hat source.
Rock Linux isn’t “stealing” anything. They make a exact RHEL clone for those who want absolute RHEL clone. Almalinux on the other hand is just trying to be comparable with RHEL software and tools. It is very similar to RHEL but they do things like fix issues faster. Some people are weary of Almalinux because it is tied to cloudlinux.
No, it is “stealing.” Even worse is that they don’t contribute back to the community. They’re breaking the terms and agreement in order to get the source. Alma is based on CentOS Stream and is ABI compatible with RHEL.
Dude you’re fighting a very uphill battle trying to make us feel bad for an IBM subsidiary.
Red Hat is more than just an IBM subsidiary. They’re a major contributor to open source.
I agree, but they’ve also made deliberate moves to muddy the waters of open source and push the limits of what is acceptable under GPL, and I’m not going to shed any tears over their loss of potential corporate profit.
Remember that in 2023 RedHat restricted access to the source code of RHEL packages, which had a big impact to lots of server distros. This article explains really well why that’s problematic:
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
unrelated, but I love your profile’s display pic haha
Red Hat probably contributes to Open Source and Linux more than any other company around. Are they perfect? Of course not, and it’s fair and good to discuss and criticise them when warranted. But overall they seem to contribute positively much more than negatively.
How are they “doing its damnedest to consolidate as much power for themselves within the Linux ecosystem.” exactly ?
Amount of contributions doesn’t equal quality, mind that. RedHat also does work to sink projects which don’t fit their strategy for Linux development, and I want to ask by what right they even have such a strategy and try to impose it upon others.
RedHat also does work to sink projects which don’t fit their strategy for Linux development
I’m interested in any examples you can provide of this
The way they promoted PulseAudio, SystemD, Gnome 3, now Wayland. All that.
Say, they do almost no development of Xorg, but they don’t surrender the control of the project to someone who’d want to. They don’t accept PR’s, sometimes with responses that the project itself is deprecated or something.
They intentionally keep control, to avoid someone picking it up.
The way they promoted PulseAudio, SystemD, Gnome 3, now Wayland. All that.
I agree Gnome 3+ is bad, but we do need modern components and honestly when the next biggest player in these things in Canonical with there NIH / throw it over the fence and like it attitude, I know which I’d prefer. Especially when these components truly are upstream projects, and they do indeed take community contributions.
almost no development of Xorg, but they don’t surrender the control of the project to someone who’d want to.
Yeah the xorg thing is shit for those that feel they still need it, but no one else really had the resources to maintain it. Its critical infrstructure, they can’t just hand it off until they’re done with it (RH10). Xlibre is happening by one of the biggest community contributors, but honestly it’ll end up like KwinFT.
but no one else really had the resources to maintain it
That’s what I’m saying to not be true. Right now the project is controlled by RH, and they are not interested, but also don’t leave it. Maybe if this weren’t so, we’d see changes.
Its critical infrstructure, they can’t just hand it off until they’re done with it (RH10).
Yes they can, the same way they ship kernels full of backported stuff and patches.
Xlibre is happening by one of the biggest community contributors, but honestly it’ll end up like KwinFT.
The guy is unfortunately accompanying his fork with anti-vaxxer and alt-right statements.
I think Xorg will keep existing. There are a few projects buried many times and still alive, one more.
But RH is intentionally blocking the good things that could have happened without their “leadership” and imposing opinion that it’s deprecated and on life support.
Its not like they’re blocking all contributions, if it was more than niche, they wouldnt ignore the needs of other big players. I’m not fully across it, but the BSDs still make more use of xorg and maintain their own trees IIRC.
I really only saw headlines about Xlibre, hadnt followed up on it
I’m all for Linux distributions run and owned by the community. With those we don’t have to be afreaid of weird business decisions. Debian is a good example, and very democratic. But I believe several other distros are maintained by a community as well, including Arch, NixOS…
Fedora is also community operated. Although there’s a bit of an informal understanding between RedHat and Fedora to work together.
I didn’t know that. Wikipedia says it’s only 35% of contributors who are employed by RedHat. But isn’t governance split equally between the community and RedHat? So it’s not entirely independent, but more a mix?!
They make you sign into their support portal to view most of their documentation and download most of their software. That right there is a deal breaker for me because it violates the spirit of open source.
I’m wary of them and I refuse to use Fedora (because it’s basically their testing bed) due to their support of the US military, in addition to the reasons you’ve mentioned. Also, I’m trying my damnedest to #BoycottUSA
I prefer LMDE. It doesn’t check all my wants, but it finds a great balance and I don’t feel like an unpaid tester.
I refuse to use Fedora (because it’s basically their testing bed)
interesting take
due to their support of the US military
What?
Sure… I mean why are you wary of them because they work with the US military?
Yeah but its pretty easy to avoid them. They survive on government contracts not community support. There’s lots of better alternatives than Fedora.
It definitely makes me suspicious, considering they’re a standard ‘money above all else’ company (though they’re better at playing the long game than some other companies) operating in a fascist state. They don’t seem to abuse their power much, yet, but that can change rather quickly.
I do think there are quite a few linux users and developers who are suspicious of Red Hat, they are a small-ish but pretty vocal minority. Suspicion of Red Hat was a major reason why systemd was so controversial.
No…systemd was controversial because it complicated an entire ecosystem and caused lots of growing pains for very little payoff at the time. SysV was fine for many, but now so is systemd, and it’s solved many growing pains for distro maintainers.
@just_another_person @rumschlumpel The idea of replacing system-V init with an init system capable of parallel start-ups in an era where multi-core CPUs became the norm makes sense. If it had stopped at this I would have been fine with it.
But it then goes and takes over DNS and in a way that breaks some mail sites that have spf records in a single record longer than 512 bytes which is officially against the DNS standard but which bind9 was fine with, then it had to take over system time keeping, and then user home directories, and then it wants to containerize everything.
The original Unix and by extension Linux philosophy was make one tool to do one thing and make it do it well.
Systemd by contrast is now one bloatware that wants to do everything and doesn’t do everything well. It does perform it’s function as a new init well.
I mean, systemd-networkd and systemd-timesyncd are both completely independent and are not required by systemd. I use connman and chronyd on my arch box and systemd gives not one fuck.
There’s still some totally valid concern to be had over how bundled a lot of this stuff is, but it’s not all one big blob.
@Badabinski @just_another_person @rumschlumpel @propitiouspanda Yes but they are becoming the defaults on many distros. In particular systemd-resolvd is an issue because it enforces the 512 byte limit on txt records. The problem with doing this is many large sites have spf records longer than 512 bytes and fail to break them up into separate txt records, so if you enforce this limit and they initiate mail from one of the truncated hosts, it gets rejected. This is not good and so I’ve worked around this by disabling networkd-resolvd and installed bind9 instead. I’ve actually had no problem with timesync but why re-invent all the wheels? To me it seems Poettering is a control freak and wants to take over my systems.
To be honest, stuff not working when it breaks the standard is unfortunate, but I wouldn’t blame this on the tool that adheres to said standard.
You’re not inconvenienced by systemd-resolvd, you’re inconvenienced by those mail sites doing stuff that doesn’t work, possibly as a result of them needing to do something that was slightly flawed to begin with: using DNS records to possibly hold more data than they can per the spec, which, if I understand things correctly, is because of the limitations of UDP traffic.
Not that that helps you, of course, it’s annoying and I recognise that.
@dnzm Some of us live in the real world where we have customers that expect to receive their e-mail and aren’t interested in the details of a standard, and since prior to systemd this was not an issue, I see no benefit to making an issue. UDP packets can be any arbitrary length up to 65535 bytes (including the header), there is no sound reason for limiting them to 512 bytes.
I, too, live in this fabled real world, and I already mentioned I understand your issue. I just think you’re barking up the wrong tree, but luckily you’re able to work around things, and that’s the most important bit, isn’t it?
I think systemd has moved desktop and server Linux towards being more BSD-like … and I don’t necessarily think that’s a bad thing.
Maybe we’ll end up needing an X11 -> Wayland sort of transition where there are protocols instead of “an implementation.”
However, I’ve yet to see systemd be meaningfully detrimental. Are distros a little less different? Yeah. Has it made my life easier when I need to go between distros? Also, yeah.
I think on some level, we’re just getting to a more mature Linux desktop and server … and as a result consolidating on stuff that really doesn’t have strong reasoning to be different.
I do think there are quite a few linux users and developers who are suspicious of Red Hat, they are a small-ish but pretty vocal minority.
Yeah, I’m with you all the way — no shade to OP, but the question has a flawed premise. I think the majority opinion is that they’re both an asset and a liability. They’re a huge contributor to the ecosystem and have done a lot of practical good, but I also think the community will turn on a dime if the suits overstep into FAFO territory.
(All that said, fuck Lennart Poettering. Dude couldn’t design a plan to get himself out of a paper bag.)
Honestly I don’t really see the systemd hate
Unless they system has less than 64mb of storage I wouldn’t use anything but systemd
I appreciate systemd at a high level, and use it all the time, but Nanook’s comment in this thread is dead on the money in my book:
https://lemmy.world/post/30945123/17510444
The CLI interfaces for PA and SysD are janky/verbose af and make it hard for beginners to do simple things as well. E.g. try wiring up a virtual device with
pacmdthat fuses your desktop audio and mic output into a combined source using only the man pages, or putting together a fresh service from memory without looking up any directives.E: even better example, compare how easy it is to set something up to run in cron vs. a systemd timer.
There are pros and cons to verbosity and to using many files vs one.
Cron needs a special tool to edit it because you can break a bunch of stuff trying to edit another, very easily, and by accident.
The commands themselves when I was first learning I found easier to remember than things like dmesg or /var/log/ … they all follow similar conventions and aren’t so chopped up short that you can’t guess what they do by looking at them.
Similar to how most people don’t prefer 3 letter variables in code … I’m glad we’ve largely moved on from 3 letter commands. Granted, if you use them a lot you should definitely make your own three letter aliases in your preferred shell scripting language.
I don’t disagree with OP at all, though. Just because it’s a minority doesn’t mean they’re wrong.
Sorry, bad phrasing on my end. I agree the community should suspicious, but I think the flawed premise in
It seems like there isn’t much criticism of the company or their tactics, and I’m curious if any of you think that should change.
is that there is consistent, well-founded criticism and has been this whole time. And even though the vocal folks are a minority, a lot of people feel ambivalent about the relationship rather than viewing it favorably.
All companies (and people for that matter) are “money above all else.” If you don’t have income you are in trouble.
Funny how the people desperate to make money above all else in this world project their insecurity on the rest of us and try to gaslight people into thinking that’s how everybody works.
Truth is money isn’t everything in life.
I think it comes down to if you can afford basic necessities. If you have your basic needs met money doesn’t buy happiness.
My point is that employment is needed to pay the bills. It is the same thing for a company plus some crazy. For large publicly companies they want the stock price to go up no matter what. Expecting Google to have any care about ethics doesn’t work as there are shareholders to appease. It is the reason SUSE went private.
the world wasn’t born with companies. Trying to argue their morals as the ultimate truth is toxic to our humanity.
if all a company cares about is shareholders, said company doesn’t deserve to exist.
you argument is trying justify the status quo and arguing for a system that is innately oppressive and cruel. “That’s how it is” We should make it not be like that just the same as we made it be.
I don’t trust anyone with a red hat. Is Red Hat the MAGA of Linux?
No that’s canonical
