[Spivak]

RHEL has always been more adventurous than Debian. Debian is the pragmatic distro that meets users where they are.

Debian half-heartedly switched to systemd years after it was the only option in RHEL. RHEL switched to firewalld in 7. They dropped docker for podman. They wrote then adopted sssd and relamd. They dropped NIS. Went all in of SELinux and now it "just works."

[yamtaddle]

Red Hat is adventurous in rapidly adopting and evangelizing projects they control, or at least largely steer, in an effort to make themselves the de facto First Party Vendor for so much of Linux that it's hard to justify going with anyone else for commercial support. They've been openly sparring with Ubuntu over this for more than a decade—and Ubuntu's lost every single point. This is basically the story of the direction of the Linux ecosystem in the modern era.

[slondr]

It really is a shame that the community's last, best hope against a Red Hat monopoly is Ubuntu.

Fortunately in the desktop space there's little reason to care what the big names are doing. There will likely always be a distro out there that does exactly what you want it to, it'll likely always be Gentoo, and there will probably be enough folks interested in the space to bring those solutions to binary distros as well.

It's been especially interesting to me to watch Alpine take over the mindshare that Slackware had back in the day. As long as there's enough people on un-"official" distros to file bug reports with software vendors, there's hope for the users.

[yamtaddle]

> It really is a shame that the community's last, best hope against a Red Hat monopoly is Ubuntu.

Oh, strongly agree. It's a "whoever wins, we lose" sort of situation for sure. I think Red Hat's technical... taste, if you will, is consistently terrible, but Ubuntu's gross in its own way, though I feel that way more due to perceived company culture and the owner's statements, admittedly, than their results (though I do think their distro peaked quality-wise some time around '08).

> There will likely always be a distro out there that does exactly what you want it to, it'll likely always be Gentoo, and there will probably be enough folks interested in the space to bring those solutions to binary distros as well.

Hobbyists are kinda safe, to some degree, but the more incompatible choices RH successfully pushes, the more limitations and workarounds hobbyists not running a straight copy of Red Hat's preferred stack will run into.

[Spivak]

I'm not sure I get the fear. Oh no Redhat is making so much high quality OSS that distros adopt makes Redhat commercial support better simply because you can get the engineer that wrote it on the phone? I mean that does happen but I'm not sure it's a bad thing.

They'll never be able to swing an EEE on any of their OSS projects because other distros couldn't adopt them and RHEL only is a death-knell.

Big if for sure, but if IBM continues letting them stay course while they fuck about with Openstack then we'll be better for it. Redhat is the standard for what good stewardship of OSS looks like from a company.

[PrimeMcFly]

> It's been especially interesting to me to watch Alpine take over the mindshare that Slackware had back in the day.

Slackware lost its way by trying to compete with Ubuntu when it was never it's niche.

Ever since they required Samba installed just to run SMPlayer, and then said the full install is what is expected in every case (When I always used Slackware with a minimal install), I was out.

Void seemed interesting as well but I ran into too many issues - Alpine has been smooth sailing so far.