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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
1 • Poll Response (by Jacob A. Tice on 2021-04-05 01:04:29 GMT from United States)
I wouldn't use a Linux distro purely based on where it came from, but I still like to know.
2 • Distro origin (by Shawn Rogers on 2021-04-05 01:21:45 GMT from United States)
Most of the time it doesn't matter to me unless it's from a communist country like China or North Korea. If a communist government filters what their people can send or receive, then I can't trust them with my privacy or freedom.
3 • Poll (by GTC on 2021-04-05 01:14:11 GMT from Seychelles)
It's not that I choose a particular country, mostly I avoid certain countries. I am biased and I know it. And that list is growing over time. It's about trust. I haven't got the ability to review code myself or pay for it. So I have no other option but trust. And I know source code is audited by people who knows, but still. So yes, I care about the country of origin, even if it's not entirely true. All distros use software and libraries built internationally. I am probably too much paranoid or overconcerned over the issue anyway :-)
4 • Poll (by GTC on 2021-04-05 01:32:11 GMT from Seychelles)
It's not that I choose a particular country, mostly I avoid certain countries. I am biased and I know it. And that list is growing over time. It's about trust. I haven't got the ability to review code myself or pay for it. So I have no other option but trust. And I know source code is audited by people who knows, but still. So yes, I care about the country of origin, even if it's not entirely true. All distros use software and libraries built internationally. I am probably too much paranoid or overconcerned over the issue anyway :-)
5 • Country of origin (by Andy Prough on 2021-04-05 01:39:57 GMT from United States)
I mostly distrust any distro that is developed by a government or by a large tech firm. In either case, their desire is usually to use software for surveillance. They want the users' private data, either to sell it for profit, or in the case of a government to try to control the thinking and the communications of their citizens.
6 • Poll (by LMS on 2021-04-05 02:33:12 GMT from United States)
I make no apologies for refusing anything from Russia or China. The idea that open source is available for all to inspect is wonderful, but does Distrowatch have the knowledge and time to go through all the code to make sure there are no exploits or trojans? Does anyone start wireshark or something similar to watch what bytes are flowing out when you try a new distro? I know I don't, which is why I stick to a few well known one that have trust built up.
7 • LM updates saga (by MK on 2021-04-05 02:42:01 GMT from Israel)
One way to keep the system uptodate is to autoinstall updates, and not tell users, "updates are dangerous, don't need them", which LM devs used to do some years back. What a surprise nobody installs updates. Now, it looks like the snake bit its own tail, and they try to backpedal, which seems like a sane move, and yet, allowing to delay updates for 90 days is crazy.
8 • Poll (by Leanne on 2021-04-05 02:50:23 GMT from Ireland)
I prefer not to use a distro coming from a country where there is an authoritarian government in charge. There is no way to trust the government hasn't interfered with the developers in such a case.
9 • Mint user (by Mint user on 2021-04-05 03:35:51 GMT from Singapore)
I prefer distributions from Europe. I'm moving away from US distro.
10 • Choices? (by mmphosis on 2021-04-05 03:55:06 GMT from Canada)
Most of the components in my "large tech firm" computer come from a variety of nefarious origins. The CPU in my computer comes from another "a large tech firm" and probably runs some undocumented revision of Minix that I have no control over. The operating system that came with my computer came from yet another "a large tech firm" that dictated the executable file format for the Linux kernel for my computer. In all of these non-choices, country of origin is pretty meaningless.
I believe that by running Linux, an open source collaboration from contributors all over the world, I may actually have some choices.
11 • Country of distro origin (by zephyr on 2021-04-05 04:29:52 GMT from United States)
@ 8 Leanne: Kudo's for speaking your mind against authoritarian governments. I'm an American who has Scottish and Irish roots. Quite honestly don't trust big brother or I would never moved from Windows, Now, we have the same mentality permeating Linux!
12 • Choosing a distro (by Bobbie Sellers on 2021-04-05 04:57:43 GMT from United States)
Well I do not care for stuff from Russia. Not really a cold war legacy.
Even if I liked Windows or MacOS I cannot afford those toys. I have to go to Free Software and Open Source all the way.
I was using Mageia for a year or two some time back and wanted to contribute to its
support but found it too difficult due to international monetary transfer rules.
I went to PCLinuxOS which I can support easily via net agencies.
It does everything I need to do.
bliss - “Nearly any fool can use a Linux computer. Many do.” After all here I am...
13 • Country of origin (by Simon on 2021-04-05 05:16:51 GMT from New Zealand)
Interesting that most of the comments relate to the poll: I also find it interesting that 30% of respondents would be happy to install e.g. a North Korean distro, which at first seemed bizarre to me.
Then I thought about it for a while and remembered that we're all running closed source hardware from companies like Intel that have probably given back doors to US government officials. To feel safe being able to audit the code that delivers instructions to hardware that we *can't* audit is pretty ridiculous.
My main reason for being wary of distros originating in non-English-speaking nations is simply that of support and ease of communications with the community. Obviously this isn't an issue with huge distros like Mageia (French), but for smaller distros with a handful of developers, I don't want a language barrier between me and the project, so do tend to avoid any distro that has broken English (or none at all) on its website. It's not a negative judgement re the distros themselves...they may be better than the English ones...it's just that I don't speak Spanish/Russian/whatever so they're not a good fit for me.
Technically that's a language-use issue rather than a country of origin issue...but again I'm surprised at those 30% of respondents who'd just go ahead and install a Chinese distro without checking to see if the project had English lists/forums/etc. (bearing in mind that if they do pause to check that, country of origin has become one factor among many that they're checking...and they said no, it's not a factor at all). Maybe they're all polyglots who can speak so many languages it's just not an issue for them.
14 • Poll (by A.J. on 2021-04-05 06:26:19 GMT from Belgium)
I find it strange that one can determine from what country a distro originates. I am running Arch with Gnome. What country stands behind Arch or do Ihave to look at each individual contributors country or origin? Then I run Gnome. Where does that originates from? I use packages like Darktable and Gimp. Are those packages endorsed by a country? Not that I know off.
With your browser you pass through a multitude of servers, routers, ... Where are those located?
The question would have been slighty better if the word distro would have been replaced with 'package' or 'library' as far as we, users, can determine who are the people behind each package and what country they are.
And no, it is not because a developer is from a certain 'foul' country, that it means he/she is the devil incarnate/
15 • country of origin (by TuxRaider on 2021-04-05 07:52:55 GMT from United States)
i wont use a systemd distro no matter where it comes from, and i wont use a distro if i dont trust the country of origin, i dont trust chinese distros or from an islamic nation either, i pretty much stick to USA made distros because even distros from the EU automatically assume my BIOS clock is set to GMT when i have it set to local time (local time either 12 or 24 hour time) i dont use UTC/GMT unless i am listening to a shortwave radio
16 • Country of Origin (by Someguy on 2021-04-05 07:58:57 GMT from United Kingdom)
Who can one trust in this world? Is distro choice between $$$ or state control freakery? How much personal data can one protect from own government/scammers/ne'er-do-wells? Many non-Brits speak and write better English than Brits suffering years of poor education, notwithstanding languages dynamically change. Just try to be as careful as your abilities permit - and hope!
17 • I'm global (by Mr.Gaia on 2021-04-05 08:09:28 GMT from Norway)
What #13 said, however I avoid corp/instiution shit as much as I can, I would not judge a fellow/distro from a nation I distrust just for living there, that would prejudiced I suppose..
18 • Coutry of origin (by Sean on 2021-04-05 08:36:07 GMT from Australia)
It's a little important. I mean, North Korea has Red Star OS. That is slightly concerning for me. Same as Deepin too, because the Chinese communist party basically regulates everything in China, so I definitely have some bias there. It's a privacy concern for me. But sometimes also, if a distro is made in a particular country, then the blog or website might not be written in English. So, you don't feel like you are part of their community. So, I guess it's just easier to pick distros from countries that speak the same language and are on the same page - so you can read their blogs etc. You can understand what the developers are doing etc.
19 • Poll (by useer365 on 2021-04-05 08:50:09 GMT from Spain)
I do agree with many of the previous comments. I would never, never, ever choose a distro from North Korea or China, because I don't trust treir governments.I would not choose a russian distro because I don't trust the Russian government either. I do prefer distros from EU because their privacy policies are the least intrusive (due to EU personal data protection laws)
20 • Country and linux (by Hank on 2021-04-05 09:47:12 GMT from Canada)
A guy from USA, from the country which along with others in 5 Eyes 12 eyes or how many is it now spys on everyone wrote.
Most of the time it doesn't matter to me unless it's from a communist country like China or North Korea. If a communist government filters what their people can send or receive, then I can't trust them with my privacy or freedom.
One country I trust less than nil with regards to privacy or human rights is his homeland.
Regarding human ruights look at new police laws in Germany UK france and other areas of EU.
I will never use a systemd distro no matter where it comes from.
And I would also not touch a distro from many other countrys too.
Look in to EU personal data protection laws, you will find they protect criminals more than their victims.
21 • Country of origin (by Pierre on 2021-04-05 09:50:06 GMT from Australia)
it's certainly an Issue to be considered,
when one larger country has Software Licencing Controls,
and even some Software Patent Controls,
that it will then expand onto any other Country that it desires to influence.
when this same Issue then extends to some Linux Environments as well,
then that Same Large Country has to be avoided, when considering any Linux System.
22 • Does a distro's country of origin matter to you? What? (by DarkFader on 2021-04-05 09:52:27 GMT from Greece)
First of all very few distros have one sole owner and therefore are from one country.
Many of them since they were founded have been collective projects of people from many countries, so there is one single origin.
Then, how accurate is DistroWatch declaring "an origin for a distro"?
Not at all and I know this for a fact.
What is important to most users is documentation and support in a language they can adequately communicate. Countless "distros" here have an English description on DW and their documentation and support are all in a different language.
So the survey as conducted, question and answers, is meaningless .... and not only that it leads to very biased conclusions.
23 • Does a distro's country of origin matter to you? (by John on 2021-04-05 10:08:29 GMT from United Kingdom)
Like others, I avoid distros from countries with authoritarian governments. I prefer Europe based distros, and am wary of US based distros, as they seem to be more vulnerable to software patents and sometimes seem to assume you are in the US. As others have said, a distro can be from many countries, but the origin shown on Distrowatch is as good a guide as anything. At present, I am running Kubuntu, Mageia and OpenSuse.
24 • Country of origin (by Didier Spaier on 2021-04-05 10:21:05 GMT from France)
I answered "Makes no difference to me."
Anyway I run Slint that I created and maintain and I trust myself (to some extent).
I am French and live in France. Does that make France the country of origin of Slint? Partially, as Slint is based on Slackware, created and maintained by Patrick Volkerding, who lives in the USA. But I do trust Patrick, indeed, and as he is the only one who maintain Slackware, I trust Slackware too.
I would not use a distribution originating of a dictatorship, regardless of its political regime or dominant religion (by the way, despite the name of its unique party China is a capitalist country, not a communist one. But this indeed doesn't make of it a democracy, And I don't care for the religion of the developers and maintainers, even if I have none).
All this being said the risks come certainly as least as much from the software in use as from the distribution. Not to forget the firmware, and the programs built-in the CPU. And of course the user.
25 • Origin? Is one factor of many in choosing a distro (by Jyrki on 2021-04-05 10:32:02 GMT from Czechia)
I am trying to favour European distros or distros from Canada or Australia/New Zealand. But it´s not the most important criterium but obviously this poll is one the most stupid I have ever seen here on distrowatch.
26 • Country of origin (by James on 2021-04-05 10:38:21 GMT from United States)
I had used Point Linux from Russia, but it didn't last long. It was a great OS, what Debian should be but is not. I would avoid China or North Korea for an OS. There as some that also do not support my native language, English. I had used Rubutu, which is now only Russian and a Spanish one that I can't remember the name anymore, but went to Spanish only and is now defunct too.
I also use Parrot as a dual boot, it is great if you need more safety, security or anonymity.
27 • Distro Location (by Dan on 2021-04-05 11:18:39 GMT from United States)
As long as the distro is in English, it makes no difference to me.
28 • Poll: (by dragonmouth on 2021-04-05 12:54:16 GMT from United States)
As previous posters have said, very few distros, if any, can be said to be from a single country. Therefore, one needs to avoid ALL distros because one or more of their components might be from Russia, China, N. Korea or some other dictatorship. There is no guarantee that even democratic governments are not spying on their inhabitants. If one is worried about being spied upon, one needs to move to an uninhabited island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, dig a hole, get in and pull the hole in behind oneself. Even then there are hundreds of satellites looking down. Paranoia will destroy you.
My answer is not one of the choices - It's irrelevant what the pedigree of a particular distro is. It all depends on how paranoid one is.
29 • Country of origin (by SideshowBob on 2021-04-05 13:48:27 GMT from United Kingdom)
For typical home desktop level computing:
- knowing a system's installation media; update and application repositories are all digitally signed while being located in mirrors with secure protocol access
(reducing risk of organised criminals appending malware)
will likely be far more important than any personal threat from hostile state snoops.
So unless you are a political dissident, journalist or a lawyer defending the interests of activists your data just isn't going to be of much interest to a few thousand civil servants with finite resources busy protecting state-level interests.
That is not to say that we don't need to consider a societal need to provide ground cover to whistleblowers etc - but the unfortunate 'Streisand effect' of doing so would be to attract more interest/intrusion into your system due to the false flag signal intellegence that running torr / hush / tails etc would generate (i.e. potential digital honeytraps).
Irrespective of the published country of origin
- most large user base distributions are not likely to be doing system medling or data exfiltration for commercial gain - without it being caught and called out.
- see the historic outrage / blowback at: sony CD trojan, ubuntu search, lenovo superfish and dell self-signed certificate (authication bypass), HP leaky keylogger 'debug code'.
Suffice to say - big brands - even home-grown ones, don't necessarily afford you any more protection (and arguably less privacy due to their commercial conflict of interest).
From a perspective of trust...
it can be more helpful (than the country of origin) to do some objective PEST and SWAT analylis.
Political:
- what are the core values (the 'mission') of the systems you intend investing your trust in, do they align with your own expectations?
Social:
- who will the system you trust in benefit or exploit?
Economic:
- who are you being bundled into trusting behind the device drivers and toolkits of the systems you use?
- what are they getting in return (your data / resources / vendor-support dependency?)
- how well resourced / resilient are they?
consider also: licence, royalty and patent issues.
Technological:
- what architecture (hardware and software) stacks are being supported in the system you trust?
- are development resources overstretched, tied-up supporting legacy systems or perhaps too narrowly focussed for long-term continuity?
Strengths:
- what forms of security do you need your system to provide?
see also:
intrusion detection versus intrusion prevention systems,
password-hash validation versus multiple factor / key-based authentication,
data encryption, duplication/archival, and bit-level destruction.
Weaknesses:
- what weaknesses would be acceptable (i.e. of little of no impact to your use case)?
- how much 'excessive' support/analysis/maintenance/resource could your system consume?
Opportunities:
- what other things may you need your system to be capable of doing, migrating to interoperating with or withstanding in the future?
Threats:
How well has the system been able to respond to the most significant / time-critical threats of the recent past - for example Speculative Execution vulnerabilities.
Does the project/system's PEST values help or hinder their colaboration and mitigation efforts?
How proactive are the security auditing / penetration testing of systems being employed in syndicate.
Do the systems tend to fail-safe (gracefully)?
30 • Origin (by Tad Strange on 2021-04-05 13:50:36 GMT from Canada)
So long as it's not ESL, I'm more or less ok with it. I'm more concerned with support - how far from the tree it is; example being all of the me-too-buntus out there. I'm less likely to bother with something derived from something derived from something derived from something than I am with a distribution no more than once removed from the original, so I tend to go with things like Ubuntu, SuSE, Manjaro. The further downstream you go the more you're mostly getting someone else's playlist of software and themes rather than real value. An exception *might* be if some re-spin does a really good job of putting together a DE that I want which is not under the care of the upstream distribution, since I've had many a bad time getting good results from installing a non-standard DE to replace one that I don't like.
31 • Origins? (by Origen on 2021-04-05 14:04:58 GMT from Switzerland)
The question is whether you trust or not a distro. I trust Debian.
32 • response to Origen (by SideshowBob on 2021-04-05 14:22:12 GMT from United Kingdom)
Agree Debian is great, however...
Debian doesn't 'just trust' Debian
- as a huge system ecosystem - it is simply too huge to implicitly trust
instead they trust in the Debian community and partner contributors good intentions and deeds which includes periodic peer (source)code review, default system configuration penetration testing and server log audits.
33 • Funny (by Anyhow on 2021-04-05 14:30:44 GMT from Spain)
It's funny how western people do not trust chinese software but trust the hardware made in China.
The people from the west are disgusted with governments "oppressing" their citizens but are not disgusted with governments that bomb other countries.
We from the west like very much to teach the others what the "correct" and "beautiful" life is.
From security point of view I trust more a distro with many (hundreds or thousands of) developers (from many countries) than a distro with one to five devs. For any agency (or person) is much more easier to pressure(threaten) one, two... five individuals to put a backdoor.
Mandrake - the best and the most flexible graphical installer of all times. You could first select a category of programs and then individual package selection that would do the dependency resolution. And if you removed any preselected package, then it wold warn you if any dependency was broken. Not so fast but very comfortable.
34 • File permissions (Q and A) (by Morton.F on 2021-04-05 14:43:22 GMT from Ukraine)
I thinks it makes sense instead of chmod 700 ~/ use
chmod go-rwx -R ~/
This will prevent setting an executive bit on all files at home directory.
35 • Mageia 8 and country of origin (by Pepe Le P...oops, too soon on 2021-04-05 15:40:10 GMT from United States)
Two guesses on Mageia 8:
1) Mageia uses shorewall. shorewall has separate configurations for ip4 & ip6. Yes, I thought this a bit different, too. They may just be following shorewall.
2) Until recently, at least, firefox DoH ignored /etc/hosts. It seems to have started using it, but I haven't tested it over several domains. The spottiness might come from that.
I basically don't use distros from anybody that gives me the creeps. That includes Russia, China, N. Korea, Oracle, Google, Apple, Amazon, Fox News, Chick-fil-a, and, yes, the US Govt.
36 • @25 stupid poll (by how stupid on 2021-04-05 15:42:11 GMT from United States)
What is "most stupid" to me is when someone calls something or someone "most stupid."
I believe that distrowatch (or anyone for that matter) has every right to ask any question for the purpose of what they deem interesting.
37 • Trust? (by Jeff on 2021-04-05 15:53:57 GMT from United States)
@33
It is not so much that we trust the hardware as there are really so few options, by unfair trade practices they have eliminated most competitors. Sell it for less than it costs to make until the other guy goes out of business, then you can raise the price as much as you want and make back the losses.
@24
Not so much capitalist as fascist, still a totalitarian regime but those who are connected to the party in charge get rich, and they are now more expansionist than in the past.
So yes the country of origin matters, quite a bit though perhaps not enough to be the only factor in most cases.
38 • Origin (by David on 2021-04-05 15:57:28 GMT from United Kingdom)
How do you know the country of origin? Ubuntu is listed as originating in the Isle of Man, but all that's based there is a small office for tax purposes: the Canonical head office is actually in London. PCLinuxOS is listed as USian because that's where the chief developer lives, but it's hosted on a server in the Netherlands.
Does it matter? The software in the distro is all open-source. It's possible that China might slip something into the code for some application, but it's just as likely that the USA would.
The only think that really matters is whether you can find a user forum in your language. I'd be happy to use the excellent ALT from Russia, but the forum is Russian only
39 • @33 Anyhow: (by dragonmouth on 2021-04-05 16:23:17 GMT from United States)
"For any agency (or person) is much more easier to pressure(threaten) one, two... five individuals to put a backdoor. "
Ultimately, the pressure needs to be applied to one individual (no matter how many contributors there are) - the distro developer, the person that puts all the pieces together. That person can incorporate any number of backdoors without anybody being the wiser.
40 • Origin factors (by Somewhat Reticent on 2021-04-05 16:25:32 GMT from United States)
Amusing survey in an age of global businesses "bigger" than most governments.
Sometimes a forum based on a language you don't know has a section for others.
And sometimes a developer handles more than one language well (ALT).
41 • Q&A : guest access (by nanome on 2021-04-05 16:58:29 GMT from United Kingdom)
Q&A: I suspect the Firejail example has one simple flaw: the jailed guest can type "exit" and escape into the wider system. I tried this. What am I missing? Note that the private-etc parameter now has a different syntax.
Even if Firejail [or preferably bwrap] can be coerced to trap a guest in a jail, it is a particulaly dangerous activity, requiring some care.
42 • origin country (by mircea on 2021-04-05 17:07:25 GMT from Moldova)
when choosing a distro from an exotic country there is a question of safety.
if there are backdoors contained, or weak crypthography, or the crypthography can be avoided like a MitM security certificates.
So if a distro comes from a dictatorship like china, saudi arabia,
or an autocracy like Russia, Belarus, Venezuela
it raises questions of reliability.
But if the distro provides repos from abroad, and it provide reproducible builds,
maybe it is ok to use it...
So here is the question:
does Deepin Linux, ROSA linux, Calculate Linux provides repos in foreign countries ???
43 • Firejail (by Jesse on 2021-04-05 17:09:57 GMT from Canada)
@41: "Q&A: I suspect the Firejail example has one simple flaw: the jailed guest can type "exit" and escape into the wider system. I tried this. What am I missing?"
You need to set up your login session so that it exits if Firejail closes. The super simple approach would be to run "exit" right after Firejail is called in the login script. Alternatively (though I haven't tried this personally) you could possible make Firejail your guest user's login script. Then if Firejail exits the session ends.
44 • Trust? (by kaczor on 2021-04-05 17:27:26 GMT from United States)
Can you trust distros from the US? Or from tax havens like Isle of Man? Or, can you trust distros from China? Well, who doesn't use a laptop, a mobile phone or any type of a computer that's not made in China?
I think the question is xenophobic, rather than political.
45 • response to dragonmouth (by SidehowBob on 2021-04-05 17:33:00 GMT from United Kingdom)
It would be interesting to learn what percentage of people have reason to believe they have a backdoor channel / ports nefariosly communicating on their system.
Of those people, what percent would have the technical expertese and opportunity to confirm their suspicion.
Of those what percent would have reason to believe they have been specifically targeted by state officials.
Drilling down, I expect the percieved threat is grately exagerated.
The majority of cyber crime before fraud etc - is blatent publication of hate speach and cyber stalking.
With existing dragnet surveilance of communications, including cloud storage of user tweets and data - most surveillance for the purposes of law enforcement can be conducted the old fashioned way (after gathering sufficient posted data).
Sure further evidence may be gained from listening-in via Alexa Siri Cortana or Nest/OKGoogle, skype or xoom - but that likey still requires a warrant.
Ask yourself, if it was your job to investigate offences,
- what existing lawfal communications intercepts are at your disposal (which may include previously agreed contractual terms of use making provisions for law enforcemment / data sharing) would you seek utilise before going to the trouble of seeking a physical search warrant?
If anybody is a person of interest - let alone a suspect within a juristiction of treaty - their IT equipment would likely just be seized as part of routine evidence gathering after meeting a low theshold of signals-level evidence.
46 • Distro country of origin (by Otis on 2021-04-05 17:43:25 GMT from United States)
I'm partial to linux and bsd development that's being done in Canada. I'm not Canadian, but I sense a certain hard-to-explain nuance about those distros that I like. Yes, it's also good to have codecs etc out of the box, but.. there's something else.
Also, I like very much distros that are developed by a core team that is international. That seems to help with various other nuances too numerous to mention.
47 • Trust... (by Min on 2021-04-05 17:58:51 GMT from Singapore)
Some think that there is a free world, and the US is leading that, so things from that world is sort of safe. On the contrary. There's a certain pointed attack going on at the Chinese, Russian, even Indian tech, trying hard to turn it into a political matter. So, the question, do you care for the country of origin of a distro. A hidden question.
Is Archman created in Turkey bad? Or Deepin created in China bad? Or, Calculate Linux from Russia bad? Or, should you use Lubuntu, LDXE or LXQT based distros at all, as the developer of PCManFM is Chinese?
Come on!
48 • Distro origin and Mageia (by Trevor on 2021-04-05 19:36:12 GMT from Canada)
Where a distro comes from doesn't bother me. I've tried distros from China and Russia and I've found they do the same thing as every other distro (somewhat differently in some cases but nothing too major). Not worried about "spying" either. Any distro that does that would definitely be found out in the Linux community, called out for it, and dropped very quickly. Now do those distros that I've tried do "spying" in their home country - who knows? But that's their issue - not mine. I live in Canada by the way.
As for Mageia: I have to agree with the author on his conclusions. It does run very well and its quite stable. However the interface is quite "clunky" - and dated at that. But maybe that is why it's so stable as an OS. It's nice having all "the bells and whistles" in a distro. However those of us who prefer to use used computers rather than new ones, prefer stability over "flashy".
IMHO: It's always best to see both sides of an issue, and come to your own conclusion (after doing research).
49 • Country of Origin (by nanome on 2021-04-05 19:57:27 GMT from United Kingdom)
These usual suspects: TLAs->IBM->RedHat->systemd->*; Russia; China; 5Eyes.. Most governments like to spy on their people.
Organised crime likes to pick up on flaws in individual packages, whether deliberately introduced or discovered. They are not limited to nations.
The myth that open source empowers us belies the eye-watering size and complexity of operating systems and software packages. Bugs and malware can easily hide in packages with upward of million lines of source code. We must choose what to trust and hope for the best.
[note to "min"@47, PCManFM is developed in Taiwan not PRC]
50 • Mageia (by pengxuin on 2021-04-05 22:13:08 GMT from New Zealand)
quote" it doesn't feel as though Mageia is doing anything to improve"
it does things differently and the improvements are usually to the in-house tools.
about the installer. it too does things differently and behind the scenes.
It is a Live System Installer, and has been for several years, as opposed to a "usb/disk system copy to HDD and make bootable" installer.
It retains all user changes and settings prior to the install, down to your web-browser tabs open at the start of the install.
simple test:
create a document in a non-persistent Live system of your choice and save it. then install.
does the installer copy and save the new user document to the new installation or did it loose it?
51 • @SideshowBob: (by dragonmouth on 2021-04-05 23:01:57 GMT from United States)
"So unless you are.......................... your data just isn't going to be of much interest to a few thousand civil servants with finite resources busy protecting state-level interests."
There certainly are "thousands of civil servants" but they are not the ones looking at the peta or zettabytes of data the government(s) collect. We are in the 21st century. Data is scanned and analyzed by algorithms and we don't know what they are looking for. Governments can mobilize infinite resources.
Getting back to the poll. It is irrelevant if, what and how many backdoors are in each/any distro or what the pedigree is considering the amount of data that already has been collected on everyone of us by governments, Facebook, Google, Apple and countless other private entities. With airlines instituting "travel passes" and countries instituting "vaccine passports" it won't be long before we all are like bugs in a display case, We will all be wishing for the good, old days of "1984".
52 • A distro's country of origin matter (by Jules on 2021-04-05 23:39:39 GMT from Australia)
Yes it does to a degree.
I steer clear of distro from communist countries...
53 • TNO (by Sid the Kid on 2021-04-06 00:30:10 GMT from United States)
I have been using Linux OSs since 1993 when I bought a Yggdrasil Linux CD disk. I used over a hundred Linux distros since then, and served as the secretary to my Linux SIG on campus. I have also used Microsoft Windows from its beginning and Apple too. I started out on Commodore 64 before the 1990s when it was in many American homes that had computers. I also ran a C64 club on a college campus in Philly.
Over the years, I have listened to the podcast Security Now! that features Leo LaPorte and Steve Gibson, and as far as the question posed, "Does a distro's country of origin matter to you?," goes, I'll repeat a phrase that Mr. Gibson has used several times over the years, and I think that it covers it all, and that is "TNO." Trust No One!
Stand up and fight, or sit back and suffer!
54 • Made in where exactly? (by CS on 2021-04-06 00:43:34 GMT from United States)
I wouldn't run a distro from China. I don't believe that is xenophobic at all. China makes it no secret that it is an authoritarian surveillance state with heavy state censorship. As far as I can tell most Chinese are ok with this and sympathetic with these goals. China has proven they have the resources and sophistication to be effective at surveillance and censorship. China is suspected to be a haven for ransomware hackers which puts them on a very short list of bad actors.
Add these together and I would prefer to not do things like online banking from an OS originating in China.
If someone else wants to run an OS maintained in China to prove a point, moral or otherwise, help yourself.
There's a bunch of other nonsense in the comments today about my hardware coming from China. My Mac was made in Austin, Texas and my Samsung phone was made in Vietnam. Samsung shut down all their manufacturing in China and Apple has been reducing their dependence on China aggressively.
55 • response to Anyhow (by SideShowBob on 2021-04-06 00:44:31 GMT from United Kingdom)
This is not an effective platform for venting shaming or blaming other distrowatch readers
- most of which will have little to no influence over 'oppressive governments'.
I can tell you, the current UK regime is dismantling the very foundations of our contries democractic decision making and accountability while:
- censoring free speach,
- invading people's right to privacy and to free association,
- suspending the right to protest
- and absolving themselves of breaking local and international laws.
These are not manifesto policies anybody voted for.
If you care about curtailing the actions of oppressive governments - regardless if they are western / eastern / northern or southern, encourage the take-up of distributions supporting the circumvention of censorship.
56 • A distro's country of origin matter (by NotTotallyRational on 2021-04-06 01:26:39 GMT from France)
For anything i steer away from countries that are not governed by men choosen for a limited time among frre candidates. That is any countries governed by any kind of intolerant autocrats or oligarchies, whatever their appearance. there is no developer freedom when there is no freedom of thought, especially regarding a government's policies and social issues.
So i mistrust :
- ultracapitalist countries (those who depend on unique parties or feodal monarchies : lots of them around us - i consider China is an example of an ultracapitalist government with a fake communist veil) ;
- theocratic countries and more generally any country that only bear one religion in its population (it always end with the government pretending holding the truth and opponents treated like miscreants) ;
- fascist-like/phalangist-like countries (now they call themselves 'illiberal').
- communist countries (there are mainly 2 countries left in that group nowadays : North Korea and Bielorussia) ;
- military-governed countries.
As far i as can see a country matching at least one of this criteria actually matches several others (or will quickly).
For reasons that follow the previous ones i also avoid distros that declare themselves national or geared towards a specific religion. Software is a tool. What has free software to do with a nationalty or a specific religion? Is there anything such as a national hammer or a religious screwdriver ?
So i tend to favor Northen American and European distros, mainly. i know that their government also spy on people, but at least, democratic control (i.e. freely-expressed population mistrust) effectively limits their wrongdoings.
I have other reservations for Japanese or Taiwanese or South Korean or South American distros, for example : i have only observed so far that East Asians seem to put more of their energies in localization and writing software drivers, in relation with their historically developping hardware. And South American seems to suffer more of money limitations : when they initiate distros they tend to quickly lag behind the rest and die.
Anyway there are too many distros out ther for their own survival. Those who prevail are the ones that are the most open and the most international and the most devoid of any ideology, except the idea of gathering energies at large to produce software intented for the largest user base.
57 • distro review (by Otis on 2021-04-06 01:42:16 GMT from United States)
Yeah, Mageia.. I just can't get a handle on why some rather popular distros get away with regular releases that harbor such obvious, glaring issues as pointed out in the "conclusions" of this weeks review. Don't the devs SEE the strangeness of the Control Panel/System Settings schema? Don't they SEE the schizophrenia of multiple, confusing software update paths/apps? .. and on.
I've tried it and tossed it.. after less than a day. Many times. Perhaps that's what keeps it fairly high the the DW PHR; those of us with hope for the old Mandrake days of a great distro alternative to a few other biggies.
58 • distros from all over world (by jay on 2021-04-06 02:16:28 GMT from United States)
I havent seen anything improper with Kylin and Ubuntu DDE which are technically from China but DDE pass through and are enabled by Ubuntu so their code gets filtered by South African based origins, Kylin less so. I havent noticed a thing that could warrant further inspection, not that it doesnt exist, but I did notice some sloppy behaviors like dependencies BETWEEN these specific two so basically their repos clash with each other and they didnt really care to cleanly separate them, yet oddly not not so much between these China based distros and other Ubuntu/Debian downstream distros. I wouldnt think these would have underhanded code so much as hard sell their shops, as they are privately developed. DDE doesnt include those shops that say, Deepin itself has. But I think thats kinda the point, knowing that oddball Linux distros is sorta academia centric and has a market share of essentially nothing, especially outside their own country, rather than mainstream keeps it out of authoritarians radar, i would think. I would also think they DO NOT want to draw attention to themselves in particular with malicious code, I think malicious code is more a reflection of some amateurish fledgling company's lax privacy attitudes, but again, its Linux so you have fine grained control over that. The core parts are all borrowed from central repos common to Linux/Debian, which is why its even a distro, otherwise the work is too much. Graphics and user interface design seems to be the core of what they are striving for. Given much code is really all built on top, although its certainly possible something could be switched out without knowing. I think as long as there is financial leverage like huge trade deficit in favor of China, and slop shops by the millions, and the authorities make so much damn money they have virtually no incentive to target some esoteric distro and spook foreign academics unintentionally. That said, all bets are off in case of a real cold war or trade blockade. But we arent there YET.
That trade deficit doesnt apply to all nations. So i'd honestly expect less from some random other nation than the above, as NotTotallyRational stated, some nations just are religious nuts and have other strange behaviors. I cant vouch for any other China distro than mentioned above since I havent used them.
I've used Makululinux, its from Vietnam, but its a French dude who like, lives there and decided to be a digital nomad or digital expat. So...it really cant be called Communist distro or even truly Vietnamese, although some servers default to VN and even the occasional link to a shop in Vietnamese language. No biggie. I dont stress.
59 • cont'd (by Jay on 2021-04-06 02:51:59 GMT from United States)
Where i'd worry is Windows dll's that arent registered, plausibly used with wine/wine64 in gaming rigs, because Windows DOES have vast market share and therefore would be on a government radar. something akin to that. I also feel a bit strange when i click on alien icon in Manjaro to access AUR...could somebody from some extraplanetary authoritarian regime who sees us as tasty snacks?
60 • distro (by omari on 2021-04-06 03:15:55 GMT from Indonesia)
I avoid distro that talk a lot about freedom, then display messages that threaten the user's freedom to download just because the user lives in a certain geographic area. --satire--
I mean, it would be nice if Distrowatch stay focus on technical area. Tired of the non-technical stuff in Linux world lately. COC war still leaves smoke, the RMS war is on, now even Distrowatch is turning into world war 3. C'mon man, put the fun back into computing.
Thank you.
61 • Mageia (by distrokid on 2021-04-06 04:46:03 GMT from Greece)
Mageia is perfect as it is. Things work as expected and user can control the OS instead of using a simplified OS like Mint.
Of course there's a place for a simplified OS like Mint, as there is for a fully featured OS like Mageia. It's not "stagnant" by any means. It's a mature distribution that provides stability and control. What the reviewer found "unnatural" for his taste comes perfectly natural for others.
62 • Country of origin (by Dan on 2021-04-06 09:01:16 GMT from Denmark)
It is of some importance to me what country a distro comes from. As long as it is not from China, Russia, Serbia, N. Korea, Belarus, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, and a bunch of others, then I will give them a shot. But even there can be an exemption. It depends on project, and people behind it. This goes for many applications as well.
I stopped using Gnome, primarily due to unwelcoming and arrogant DE decisions and executions, but also because I don't share their most recent political and social views.
I am using Ubuntu MATE, Debian, and Linux Mint right now.
63 • distro country (by uncle on 2021-04-06 10:14:16 GMT from New Zealand)
The country of origin is a bit meaningless sometimes. For example Zorin comes from two ex-pat Russians living in the USA, but is 'registered' in Ireland (for tax?), and on DW it lists as "Ireland". Same for Mint, which actually is based in France (mostly). Many distros have a very international team.
I find that I still DO look at the country of origin. Obviously oppressive states are suspect, but also many of the language issues that have been raised by other posts. This also affects font choices, which even in many mainstream distros are poorly thought out. Europe-based distros seem to be the best in quality, stability and longevity. Many distros exists to serve a local need/market and so if I'm not within that target niche it would not really work for me.
Along with the distro itself comes the choice of desktop. Currently the ones I like are Cinnamon and then MATE, with KDE a 3rd choice only if we have to, and anything else would only be used under duress.
64 • Country of Origin (by Kaczor on 2021-04-06 11:17:41 GMT from Singapore)
PCManFM of LXDE, Lubuntu, LXQT fame is created by a Chinese and a Ukrainian developers. We shouldn't start xenophobic polls/questions. The country of origin of Ubuntu is Isle of Man, a tax haven. The US is full of Asian tech people, and without them, the US would fail, if not already!
65 • @63 Zorin and people, origin of a distro (by Min on 2021-04-06 11:30:07 GMT from United States)
Zorin brothers were born in Ireland, so are Irish. They have Ukrainian legacy, if that is a problem. All New Zealanders, other than the Maori are from other countries, in a way occupants of someone else's land.
Ireland and their College are proud of the brothers. https://stconleths.ie/the-zorin-brothers-technology-for-humanity/
66 • Choice in OS (by Peter Gure on 2021-04-06 13:12:00 GMT from Canada)
I trust nothing, new
I stick with old (as you say) outdated OS's
It is the only safe thing to operate with.
Security patches? Ya....add more backdoors please.
Nothing is good and wholesome any longer, it along with folks, have been compromised through threat, belief, ideology or lie
There is only you, everthing else is a contract with illusion.
67 • @39 Dragonmouth re: Backdoors (by SideshowBob on 2021-04-06 13:26:17 GMT from United Kingdom)
If they arn't already capable of backdooring the kernel -
they will likely put them in other key services to get more bang for their bucks
My expectation would be the components we all depend upon
such as within the grub bootloader , or the network stacks
(i.e. a few levels up from minix running as ghosts in 'the management engine' machine)
yes SystemD adoption would appear to fit the bill
but then again the other init systems, and ubiquitous services such as x.org, or openSSL/boringSSL would equally do (even bsd-esc 'void linux' may have been infiltrated, - since project trident rebased from trueos
(and libreSSL would appear to be on on the ropes or death row).
68 • Linux distros only.... (by Torsten on 2021-04-06 15:42:47 GMT from Germany)
Well, I only trust distros from Antarctica - they're simply the best! ;-)
69 • @64 (by Nobody on 2021-04-06 15:51:48 GMT from Canada)
Don't toss out words from the woketionary in an attempt to make some idiot social justice dog whistle from this: You cannot be "Xenophobic" about a government, which is what folks are talking about here. No one is saying "I don't trust asian people" but rather "I don't trust the CPC".
I gave Mageia a shot last month and also found that it felt somewhat like an antique. There's a whole lot to be said for design choices and the utilities that make life easier and work flows better. I understand that there are mechanics out there who are not happy unless their hands are covered in grease, but I've long outgrown my wonder of basic technology and expect things to just work. Mageia, for whatever reason, fell short of the bar for me. I'm certain that my own choices wouldn't be for many others, and it's good to see independent systems out there. It would be a poorer ecosystem were everything based on Debian
70 • Sketchy Distro Countries (by Sn Chapeau on 2021-04-06 20:42:13 GMT from Germany)
I don't care how 'English' a distro is, if it's from a country with human rights abuses, and a meddling government (like pretending government owned businesses are privately owned), not going to happen. A certain COVID-19 info withholding country comes to mind, and the mink and vodka capital of the world...nyet.
71 • distro location (by Will on 2021-04-07 00:47:45 GMT from Australia)
I avoid American distros (and windows) and prefer European software.
72 • Country (by Jan on 2021-04-07 00:58:04 GMT from Germany)
I prefer European distro's, we have far better online privacy/freedom rules than the US
73 • Distro country (by Hu's on first. on 2021-04-07 01:44:27 GMT from Philippines)
The question calls for some ponderous pondering. I'm interrupted by my Chinese phone while getting a cold drink from my China-made refrigerator and a snack warmed in my Chinese microwave. Back to sit on my Chinese chair in front of my China-made PC and Chinese monitor. Been considering a new car, and the ones with the best prices and the best features are Chinese. Meanwhile, my China-made aircon keeps me cool, aided by a Chinese floor fan.
So, should I avoid Chinese distros to deny China and the CCP my puny data and keep them from being in control? Got new for you: The already have control.
74 • "It came from Where????" (by tom joad on 2021-04-07 02:51:23 GMT from France)
What a chuckle.
Have never ever considered the country of origin when using, buying, evaluating, etc. I supposed that is a factor...I guess. I would not ever consider using software from Chi-com-land though. I might consider Russian stuff though if the software "worked" for me.
75 • safest OS (by marshun on 2021-04-07 05:41:09 GMT from Canada)
By this poll's reckoning, the safest OS to use is Plan9 - because it comes from outer space.
76 • Guest Access (by nobody on 2021-04-07 07:58:24 GMT from Finland)
@41 @43 Instead of making a script or setting the login shell you could just use ssh's ForceCommand.
Other options for limiting access of ssh user could be GNU rush (restricted user shell). It lets you very easily create shells with limited sets of command and also restrict the arguments passed to them.
Personally I'd probably pair the rush with TOMOYO. With TOMOYO it would be very easy to restrict the access that the processes started from the sshd have.
77 • Chinese control (by Otis on 2021-04-07 13:25:45 GMT from United States)
Nope. Nopetty Nope. Items mentioned in @73 may be manufactured in China, but that does not necessarily mean that they are invented, developed, and maintained there. Yes, they are shipped from there and possess a "made in China" stamp embossed, sewn, or inked somewhere on the product and/or packaging.
"Control" is an interesting fear some have about these things. Perhaps the O'Leary's and Greiners are controlling things and people and thoughts.
78 • @77, Chinese control (by Hu's on first on 2021-04-07 15:40:38 GMT from Philippines)
I don't run Ubuntu Kylin or Deepin, but that has to do with my preference of desktop and distro than country of origin.
"may be manufactured in China, but that does not necessarily mean that they are invented, developed, and maintained there."
@77, You may want give a look past the US borders. The China of today is not the China of 30, 20 or even 20 years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Intellectual_Property_Indicators
79 • Chinese control (by Otis on 2021-04-07 16:47:06 GMT from United States)
@78 .. the provided link bears out well to my point. Please note my, "...does not necessarily mean that they are invented, developed, and maintained there." Look at the list of items in @73, then do a search on manufacturers, inventors, patent holders of said items. Some American, some German, some Japanese, some Chinese. Etc.
Etc. ad infnitum. I'm worried about a couple of trends in the Linux/BSD world, but not about China.
80 • The country of [origin] MIRRORs for a distro (by frc-kde on 2021-04-07 17:42:22 GMT from Brazil)
Were does a distro have mirrors is a key question for me, while brazilian internet stays dependant on USA to reach Europa and all the world.
Happily, most of main distros have local mirrors, but it is not the case, e.g., of ROSA, which I have tried some years ago. Download updates was a hell, even from its mirror in Ecuador, near here.
81 • In reply to Comment #6 (by A-Style on 2021-04-07 19:12:48 GMT from United States)
FreeBSD may be American (Cal-Berkeley University, anyone?), but there's quite a few Russian names on the FreeBSD dev list if you know where to look. Linux may be Finnish in origin, but these days, it's developed in Oregon. and the Internet as we know it was developed by US Army, and Al Gore was the one who paid for that development with taxpayer dollars.
82 • Distro origin (by MarkH on 2021-04-08 00:24:54 GMT from United States)
I do not trust those from China or Russia; too many hands in the pot we know nothing about for their government's purposes. Not saying my government's (USA) hands are clean, just saying two countries that seem to be looking for a fight with us shouldn't be running my desktop. Then again I'm typing this on a Win10 box while sorting out a Linux issue (Hi, everybody illegally monitoring me!), but I was never actually here, and you never saw this message. The tennis ball whistles loudly; there is a moose in my basement. :)
83 • always check the country (by PicoReno on 2021-04-08 00:54:10 GMT from Australia)
i won't touch an OS developed in some countries. I am even skeptical of the "globally" developed OS.
It is a deciding factor, one of many things but I could find the best distro for all my purposes but if it comes from a country with huge communist government control, I don't want it.
I need to be clear, I don't feel there are inferior products, or some without resources to maintain/complete a cycle. It's purely government intervention I want nothing to do with.
84 • In reply to comment #81 (by R. Cain on 2021-04-08 02:35:23 GMT from United States)
"...but these days, it's developed in Oregon...".
You made your very good point, but it may have been missed--or worse: misinterpreted--by the xenophobes among us.
My guess is that there are (indeed, there must be) a *LOT* of Chinese, Russian, Iranian...names on the dev lists of any / all of the fairly large, popular Linux distributions...Red Hat, SUSE, Debian...
Linux is a *world-wide* phenomenon. There is absolutely no way that developers of *any* and *all* nationalities are not going to be involved in the on-going creation of this phenomenon.
It's all very well and good to be suspicious and to bring a very large and HEALTHY (that's the key word, by the way) dose of caution--dictated by serious and hard critical thinking**--to your distro-selection party...but demand that anyone who has nothing to offer except paranoia be excluded from the selection process.
{For all you who think that 'paranoia' is just some 'cutesy', off-the-cuff term to be applied lightly--check out the definition. It is nothing to be *taken* lightly. It is a serious pathological condition which affects more than just a few.}
** "Five percent of the people think. Ten percent of the people think that they think. The other eighty-five percent would rather die than think."--Thomas Edison
85 • Re: Limiting commands available through secure shell (by LiuYan on 2021-04-08 03:22:07 GMT from China)
> There are still ways to exploit a system with these guards in place
When I wrote an IRC bot which allow IRC users issue shell commands, then send me fork bomb. I don't dare to enable this feature again even the bot is running inside Docker container.
One user even make CPU usage go up to 100% when they use a specific regular expression to match a string, the user said that regular expression will hang a lot of regexp parsers.
86 • country of origin (by hulondalo on 2021-04-08 08:14:31 GMT from Indonesia)
it doesn't really matter.
but it's sad to see the development of distros from my country (igos indonesia go open source, based on fedora and blankon, based on debian) stalled. never used them but still..
87 • Country of origin (by House Keeper on 2021-04-08 12:01:52 GMT from Brazil)
My concern is about US distros, but yes, i do tend to use Russian ones. It is just my choice abut who will collect my data.
88 • Country of origin (by rijnsma on 2021-04-08 14:01:06 GMT from Netherlands)
What is really good is okay for me, also with Linux or whatever. The rest is not important to me although human rights etc. and digital safety matter...
Number of Comments: 88
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| • Issue 1150 (2025-12-01): Gnoppix 25_10, exploring if distributions matter, openSUSE updates tumbleweed's boot loader, Fedora plans better handling of broken packages, Plasma to become Wayland-only, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1149 (2025-11-24): MX Linux 25, why are video drivers special, systemd experiments with musl, Debian Libre Live publishes new media, Xubuntu reviews website hack |
| • Issue 1148 (2025-11-17): Zorin OS 18, deleting a file with an unusual name, NetBSD experiments with sandboxing, postmarketOS unifies its documentation, OpenBSD refines upgrades, Canonical offers 15 years of support for Ubuntu |
| • Issue 1147 (2025-11-10): Fedora 43, the size and stability of the Linux kernel, Debian introducing Rust to APT, Redox ports web engine, Kubuntu website off-line, Mint creates new troubleshooting tools, FreeBSD improves reproducible builds, Flatpak development resumes |
| • Issue 1146 (2025-11-03): StartOS 0.4.0, testing piped commands, Ubuntu Unity seeks help, Canonical offers Ubuntu credentials, Red Hat partners with NVIDIA, SUSE to bundle AI agent with SLE 16 |
| • Issue 1145 (2025-10-27): Linux Mint 7 "LMDE", advice for new Linux users, AlmaLinux to offer Btrfs, KDE launches Plasma 6.5, Fedora accepts contributions written by AI, Ubuntu 25.10 fails to install automatic updates |
| • Issue 1144 (2025-10-20): Kubuntu 25.10, creating and restoring encrypted backups, Fedora team debates AI, FSF plans free software for phones, ReactOS addresses newer drivers, Xubuntu reacts to website attack |
| • Issue 1143 (2025-10-13): openSUSE 16.0 Leap, safest source for new applications, Redox introduces performance improvements, TrueNAS Connect available for testing, Flatpaks do not work on Ubuntu 25.10, Kamarada plans to switch its base, Solus enters new epoch, Frugalware discontinued |
| • Issue 1142 (2025-10-06): Linux Kamarada 15.6, managing ZIP files with SQLite, F-Droid warns of impact of Android lockdown, Alpine moves ahead with merged /usr, Cinnamon gets a redesigned application menu |
| • Issue 1141 (2025-09-29): KDE Linux and GNOME OS, finding mobile flavours of Linux, Murena to offer phones with kill switches, Redox OS running on a smartphone, Artix drops GNOME |
| • Issue 1140 (2025-09-22): NetBSD 10.1, avoiding AI services, AlmaLinux enables CRB repository, Haiku improves disk access performance, Mageia addresses service outage, GNOME 49 released, Linux introduces multikernel support |
| • Issue 1139 (2025-09-15): EasyOS 7.0, Linux and central authority, FreeBSD running Plasma 6 on Wayland, GNOME restores X11 support temporarily, openSUSE dropping BCacheFS in new kernels |
| • Issue 1138 (2025-09-08): Shebang 25.8, LibreELEC 12.2.0, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, the importance of software updates, AerynOS introduces package sets, postmarketOS encourages patching upstream, openSUSE extends Leap support, Debian refreshes Trixie media |
| • Issue 1137 (2025-09-01): Tribblix 0m37, malware scanners flagging Linux ISO files, KDE introduces first-run setup wizard, CalyxOS plans update prior to infrastructure overhaul, FreeBSD publishes status report |
| • Issue 1136 (2025-08-25): CalyxOS 6.8.20, distros for running containers, Arch Linux website under attack,illumos Cafe launched, CachyOS creates web dashboard for repositories |
| • Issue 1135 (2025-08-18): Debian 13, Proton, WINE, Wayland, and Wayback, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, KDE gets advanced Liquid Glass, Haiku improves authentication tools |
| • Issue 1134 (2025-08-11): Rhino Linux 2025.3, thoughts on malware in the AUR, Fedora brings hammered websites back on-line, NetBSD reveals features for version 11, Ubuntu swaps some command line tools for 25.10, AlmaLinux improves NVIDIA support |
| • Issue 1133 (2025-08-04): Expirion Linux 6.0, running Plasma on Linux Mint, finding distros which support X11, Debian addresses 22 year old bug, FreeBSD discusses potential issues with pkgbase, CDE ported to OpenBSD, Btrfs corruption bug hitting Fedora users, more malware found in Arch User Repository |
| • Issue 1132 (2025-07-28): deepin 25, wars in the open source community, proposal to have Fedora enable Flathub repository, FreeBSD plans desktop install option, Wayback gets its first release |
| • Issue 1131 (2025-07-21): HeliumOS 10.0, settling on one distro, Mint plans new releases, Arch discovers malware in AUR, Plasma Bigscreen returns, Clear Linux discontinued |
| • Issue 1130 (2025-07-14): openSUSE MicroOS and RefreshOS, sharing aliases between computers, Bazzite makes Bazaar its default Flatpak store, Alpine plans Wayback release, Wayland and X11 benchmarked, Red Hat offers additional developer licenses, openSUSE seeks feedback from ARM users, Ubuntu 24.10 reaches the end of its life |
| • Issue 1129 (2025-07-07): GLF OS Omnislash, the worst Linux distro, Alpine introduces Wayback, Fedora drops plans to stop i686 support, AlmaLinux builds EPEL repository for older CPUs, Ubuntu dropping existing RISC-V device support, Rhino partners with UBports, PCLinuxOS recovering from website outage |
| • Issue 1128 (2025-06-30): AxOS 25.06, AlmaLinux OS 10.0, transferring Flaptak bundles to off-line computers, Ubuntu to boost Intel graphics performance, Fedora considers dropping i686 packages, SDesk switches from SELinux to AppArmor |
| • Issue 1127 (2025-06-23): LastOSLinux 2025-05-25, most unique Linux distro, Haiku stabilises, KDE publishes Plasma 6.4, Arch splits Plasma packages, Slackware infrastructure migrating |
| • Issue 1126 (2025-06-16): SDesk 2025.05.06, renewed interest in Ubuntu Touch, a BASIC device running NetBSD, Ubuntu dropping X11 GNOME session, GNOME increases dependency on systemd, Google holding back Pixel source code, Nitrux changing its desktop, EFF turns 35 |
| • Issue 1125 (2025-06-09): RHEL 10, distributions likely to survive a decade, Murena partners with more hardware makers, GNOME tests its own distro on real hardware, Redox ports GTK and X11, Mint provides fingerprint authentication |
| • Full list of all issues |
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Bio-Linux
Bio-Linux was a full-featured, powerful, configurable and easy-to-maintain bioinformatics workstation. Bio-Linux provides more than 500 bioinformatics programs on an Ubuntu base. There was a graphical menu for bioinformatics programs, as well as easy access to the Bio-Linux bioinformatics documentation system and sample data useful for testing programs. Bio-Linux packages that handle new generation sequence data types can also be installed.
Status: Discontinued
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