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1 • Red Hat... (by EH2| on 2023-06-26 01:05:49 GMT from Mexico)
Okay, back when Red Hat dropped the RPM support for LibreOffice and people were saying they fell off, I thought they were exaggerating.
NOW is when I say Red Hat fell off. This is just awful. Is IBM forcing them to do this, or did they decide on their own to go "closed" source? Either way, this time it IS concerning. What the F, man.
2 • Red Hat (by Jules on 2023-06-26 01:22:25 GMT from Australia)
Hi,
Closed source - they do this in the name of 'Big Business" and the almighty dollar...
3 • RHEL source code only available to paying customers (by ES on 2023-06-26 02:07:52 GMT from United States)
I wonder how that’s going to affect RHEL clones like Alma and Rocky that were created to replace it after Red Hat took over CentOS and turned it into a testing distro.
4 • RHEL code (by M.Z. on 2023-06-26 03:58:21 GMT from United States)
As with others, I'm disappointed in the general vibe from the latest RHEL announcement. Red Hat has done a lot of good for Linux desktop users via contributing back to core underlying components & upstream projects, even if they haven't been a great go to product directly for anything but businesses. I wouldn't be at all surprised if RHEL had a situation where lots of clone machines were being used on many of their customer IT centers & were getting backdoor support via calls about the handful machines that had RHEL proper. From a straight old fashioned business perspective I can see how lots of RHEL folks may see this as unfair; however, the catch is that they are in may ways sharing a large portion of their development costs with the likes of SUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, etc. not to mention the likes of Google & various other big companies that are contributing in many ways.
From my perspective I always saw the inevitability of a clone like old CentOS, current Rocky & Alma & various others as the trade off for the GPL shifting some of the costs off to others. The upside is the clones essentially keep your customers nearly entirely in your ecosystem, you just have to accept that portion of the cost of doing open source business in order to minimize losses to other free & open projects. Trying to hammer the RHEL clones to me smacks of a sort of Jack Welsh style of corrupt short term thinking that can lead to some great short term profits before leading to an inevitable decline. On net I think their current moves do more for the Debian project & the smaller outfits selling support to their versions of Debian than they do for RHEL, at least over the long term.
5 • Red Hat (by aaro on 2023-06-26 04:07:05 GMT from Venezuela)
"In other words, the source code for RHEL will no longer be publicly available, but will be provided to Red Hat customers."
Unbelievable... isn't this against gpl?
6 • Red Hat (by EH2 on 2023-06-26 04:36:16 GMT from Mexico)
@5 - Not against GPL, but it's a dick move.
7 • RedHat and the GPL (by Andy Prough on 2023-06-26 05:26:27 GMT from United States)
The Software Freedom Conservancy, the global watchdog for GPL compliance, has a new blog post up about RedHat's recent source code actions. The SFC says, 'this completes what appears to be a decade-long plan by Red Hat to maximize the level of difficulty of those in the community who wish to 'trust but verify' that RHEL complies with the GPL agreements'.
It's a very interesting read, fairly long with a number of examples, including a couple of examples of RedHat GPL violations in the past.
About the current RedHat source code decision, the SFC says, 'the business model as described by IBM's Red Hat may well comply with the GPL — it's just so murky that any tweak to the model in any direction seems to definitely violate, in our experience'.
8 • GPL (by Charlie on 2023-06-26 05:52:33 GMT from Hong Kong)
It's a surprise that most of the people (including me) don't know GPL does not require the source code to be publicly available but only available to their customers.
I think there are two sides in a world which becomes more bi-polar than before. Firstly, I understand that Red Hat is sometimes like being free-rode too much, providing they put many resources on upstream development. I found more and more users in the os community act like they are customers but they just did not pay one cent.
On the other hand I hope Red Hat should understand even though they contribute a lot, there are still many independent developers working in the community. A larger, vibrant community is always better than working in close doors.
9 • GPL (by John on 2023-06-26 07:21:29 GMT from United Kingdom)
AIUI, they don't have to provide the source code to anyone, except their customers if they ask for it, but they can't stop anyone who has it from passing it on.
10 • RedCat (by JJ on 2023-06-26 07:45:16 GMT from Australia)
I knew RedCat was going to do something like this, they are just after the big money grab. They get the code for free and make billions of dollars...but screw over the free and open source community.
We are in the process of pulling our seats from the evil RedCat, lucky we having been planning for this day since the centos debacle. We are moving to Ubuntu and some to Debian. I would urge all that can do the same, leave them like they never existed.
Lets contribute to free open source... "GNU Debian Linux"... and become one community for desktops and servers. I will never use Fedora again either, I have wiped it from my laptop and will never use anything tied with the evil RedCat company.
11 • RedFat (by the way on 2023-06-26 07:59:55 GMT from Italy)
@9 - this is a strategic move to cut RHEL-like distros out of the market. Anybody can implement a distro on their own, but not many among them can grant they're fully RHEL-certified.
@10 - they don't care about common people, they aim at the business world. As long as companies must use RHEL or similar, this action grants IBM customers either pay them or pay a certified partner (Oracle? Anyone else?).
12 • upcoming: pfSense 2.7.0 (by LAZA on 2023-06-26 08:51:46 GMT from Germany)
Upgradet to 2.7.0 RC today and works as expected.
There is also a update for the Plus version:
https://www.netgate.com/blog/pfsense-rc-2.7.0-and-23.05.1
13 • KDE plasma 6 (by Manolito on 2023-06-26 09:17:40 GMT from Spain)
Although it is an alpha version, it already shows the direction KDE is heading. And I love it. Plasma is, in my view, the best DE and suite of applications. Qt is superior aesthetically. The only problem are those weird bugs and quirks gnome and xfce don't have. KDE 6 aims to fix them, and that is exactly the correct way to go.
14 • RedWhat? (by Friar Tux on 2023-06-26 13:28:01 GMT from Canada)
Hmm... RedHat this... RedHat that... RedHat is perfectly fine in doing whatever they want with their product. It is THEIR product, after all. Fedora was my very first foray into Linux many years ago. I gave up on it, though as every other update killed it, and I just wasn't prepared to deal with that. So I moved to Mandake 3.1 of which, I actually bought the CD, online. It was quite nice and I didn't really need to update - BUT - there really were not that many well developed apps/programs to use for what I needed, so it was back to Windows for my main driver. I'm glad I kept playing with Linux on the side, though, as that whole Windows 10 debacle finally pushed me over to Linux.
My attitude with all the various OSs is this:- they can do with their products whatsoever they wish. It is still their product after all is said and done. If I don't like what is going on with a particular OS, I'll move to something else. It's as simple as that.
By the way, I like the KaOS principle behind their product, but it broke after the first update/upgrade as all rolling releases seem to for me.
15 • RHEL (by Kazlu on 2023-06-26 16:02:07 GMT from France)
I do not understand the criticism stating Red Hat is only after profit and this would be despicable... Well, yes, Red Hat is a business, their are not a non-profit organisation. So yes, they are trying to make money, how is that bad? The only problem would be if they would not respect laws or licences. Except GPL does not require them to make the code publicly available, but only to provide it to anyone getting software from them (as someone else stated earlier). In the end, who is this going to impact? Users who would like to use Red Hat but would not like to pay for it. You are one of those and you don't like that? Change ship and go for Ubuntu or SUSE, competitors who still provide code publicly even to people who won't buy. Really want Red Hat? Find other peole with the same desire, get together in an association and purchase one copy of RHEL to be granted access to the source code, that you can then share. Better still, do that by financially contributing to an already existing RHEL clone (Alma, Rocky, etc.) who could use the help to purchase RHEL and keep their RHEL clones alive!
To talk about another example, Ubuntu's business model is based on services (cloud and support) revolving around a freely distributed distro. On the other hand, RHEL sells support but cloud services, not so much. They put more focus on the OS development and charge for that.
Most open source software is free and we have gotten used to that. But it is not a requirement for open source software to be free. However, we still have plenty of free choices out there!
The only issue is what @7 regarding verifying that Red Hat complies with the GPL.
16 • @14 "Is is their product" (by Microlinux on 2023-06-26 17:07:27 GMT from France)
> "RedHat is perfectly fine in doing whatever they want with their product. It is THEIR product, after all."
Clones like Rocky Linux are being called "parasites" in various narratives obviously spread by a bunch of white collars at IBM. So here's a gentle but firm reminder. Red Hat would be NOWHERE if it weren't for the work of thousands of hobbyists all over the world.
17 • RedHat's changing legacy (by Otis on 2023-06-26 17:30:04 GMT from United States)
Is that evolution or degeneration? Like many many Linux users.. OLD Linux users, I began with RH; 5.2 I believe, a long time ago. It was a serious breath of fresh air from Windows 95 crashes and other issues.
But I began to sour on it after a bit, as it'd just lose its ability to function after a few updates or even with just a mouse or keyboard upgrade. It was great to see others come along.
Now they're behaving like Microsoft (in their own special manner). Fortunately we've got dozens of choices out there now, and I can (mostly) avoid feeling like I've been betrayed by an old friend.
18 • @8 @16 (by Cheker on 2023-06-26 17:54:45 GMT from Portugal)
"A larger, vibrant community is always better than working in close doors. "
"So here's a gentle but firm reminder. Red Hat would be NOWHERE if it weren't for the work of thousands of hobbyists all over the world. "
Suits are the dumbest people on Earth and never learn. They'll be satisfied when everyone moves on to Debian/Ubuntu and no one uses RH. Lol, lmao even.
19 • RedHat policies (by Denethor on 2023-06-26 19:25:30 GMT from Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Only last week I commented here on distowatch regarding debian "Anyway, I believe that Debian is the best general purpose distribution and the most important one for the interests of the open source community (Red Hat important only to corporations and their agenda). "......
Red Hat made billions on the shoulders of GNU, on Linux and the community (as well as their contributions of course). And now they decided they do not like GPL and free software any more... However, I am not blaming IBM only, they started heading towards this direction a long time ago, they just accelerated since the acquisition. Long live debian, devuan, slackware and the rest of community driven projects! That said, I fear about debian, it is being infiltrated little by little and patiently by corporate "spies" who try to navigate and control it and I believe that they will achieve their goals in time. I just hope we always have other community projects to lean to when this happens.
20 • Redhat (by Ken Harbit on 2023-06-26 20:02:48 GMT from United States)
I agree with @19 "I believe that Debian is the best general purpose distribution and the most important one for the interests of the open source community." I use Debian and have been using it for quite a while. Mainly because I can download the source code and take it apart and learn things like what happens when I open a terminal, then what happens if I type "su". Who knows, maybe by learning what is there now, I can contribute something useful in the future and see it in operation. Yeah, I could do the same thing with Fedora, but I would never see it in operation because I can't afford nor do I need Redhat.
21 • Red Hats business (by Robert on 2023-06-26 20:24:30 GMT from Czechia)
A good article about the ongoing RH vs GPL issue (makes a few good points I haven't read anywhere else before):
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
@1
> Is IBM forcing them to do this, or did they decide on their own to go "closed" source?
I can't answer that question, but let me tell a small piece of trivia: when I was working at IBM and IBM announced the then-about-to-happen acquisition of Red Hat, they kept emphasizing that Red Hat would remain an independent entity (even tho they also said RH's CEO would report to the big boss of IBM). Yeah, sure, they paid ~32 billion so that "that other company" could remain independent...
22 • @16 Redhat's Scumbaggery (by Semiarticulate on 2023-06-26 20:28:42 GMT from United States)
Amen. But this is what corporations do. Redhat found a way to monetize Linux. That's awesome. In exchange, code was pushed upstream and everyone benefits. This is how it was all intended to work. But now they want to weasel their way around the license that gave them everything they have. This is just plain scummy.
If you're a corporate apologist who doesn't understand the spirit of the GPL, that's fine, but don't try pulling everyone else into your delusion. Whether it's legal or not will be up to the lawyers, but on a human level, this is disgusting behavior. But looking around me at this point in history, there seems to be no shortage of that. And everyone wonders why young people are railing against capitalism. Not exactly difficult to suss out. It's a race to the bottom, and companies like this will get there first.
23 • Software Freedom Conservancy about Red Hat after their recent move (by Denethor on 2023-06-26 20:40:52 GMT from Bosnia and Herzegovina)
An interesting read...
https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/
24 • Red Hat (by lincoln on 2023-06-26 21:13:07 GMT from Brazil)
Predictable movement of the Suits, years ago I saw that the market share among servers was something like 1-2% RHEL vs 31-36% CentOS vs 33-34% Debian. Why wouldn't RHEL advance over its clones? I think it's even possible that Red Hat's business strategy includes prohibiting RHEL subscriptions to competing companies or making the code available to third parties. The more important question is: is Debian vulnerable to Red Hat? Even indirectly through GTK, systemd, wayland, ..., flatpak?
I used to think that the fragmentation of the open source universe was a waste of resources, but today I see that it is actually its greatest strength. Even if companies and institutions go into decline or change direction, open source has the ability to perpetuate itself if a community of developers so desire.
25 • Unfortunate changes (by David on 2023-06-26 21:46:39 GMT from United States)
As people like to say these days, we're "living in the worst timeline." The KDE change to double-click by default was boneheaded and disappointing, and reading their attempts to justify it just led to self-contradictions (like a lot of other things these days). As for the Red Hat thing, while yes, the GPL only requires you to share the code with people with which you're sharing the binaries, the recent discussion on this has also brought to light that the GPLv2 at least also says you can't place any additional restrictions on redistribution, and there's been suggestions that Red Hat will cancel people's accounts if they share the code, so IANAL but that sounds like a GPL violation to me. Also, if you think about most of what they're *not* going to be sharing now, it's patches and changes for security updates. Withholding that from the community only serves to make all of us less secure. It's also a very leechy move, considering that most of time they're getting those patches shared to them from other distributions or upstream developers. I guess the suits never learned "treat others how you'd like to be treated." If you're benefitting from sharing those things, you ought to do so yourself. In the long run, what Red Hat is doing will help nobody.
26 • My office has officially dumped RH today (by jINGER on 2023-06-26 22:54:15 GMT from United Kingdom)
OK so we're a small shop (only 30 people or so) but we've just revised out 2 devops job ads from RH to Debian specialism as a key requirement.and have anounced no further customer work will be taken on for RH based gear, which seems strange but our customers seem to have dictated that with a sudden preference for Debain boxes today and one or two even wanting urgent changovers of there RH-derived boxes to SUSE or Debian.
Will be interesting to see what pans out here - as a longterm Debian user I'm naturally thrilled but with 2/3rd of our devs RH diehards they are not gonna be so happy.
Kinda surprised at the kneejerk reaction so soon.
27 • For all of the Red Hat haters..... (by TonyVanDam on 2023-06-26 23:18:05 GMT from United States)
Where was all this much needed outrage during the systemd controversy from a few year ago?!? I think it puzzling that people are hating on Red Hat for looking too much like closed-source [by choice OR by force from IBM] when the same people should have walk away from Red Hat, Fedora, AND any distro within the Red Hat family a lot sooner. But instead of THAT, everyone [including Debian, Ubuntu, Arch, etc.] bow their heads and continued accepting every new cutting edge idea, good or bad, that always starts from Fedora & Red Hat.
You got to love selective outrage!
28 • Redhat & SystemD (by Stefen on 2023-06-26 23:56:30 GMT from United States)
So now that they've locked away their source, can we get rid of systemD now? :P
29 • Redhat again (by Charlie on 2023-06-27 01:57:24 GMT from Hong Kong)
Well after reading the discussions again, I turn more and more to Red Hat now.
They contribute to upstream directly by starting or funding a project and hiring developers. Which is the first level. They sponsor Fedora, which is RHEL's far upstream, and people are free to download and use. That's the second level. They also put their final upstream source aka CentOS for free. That's the third level. And you can get all the code from all these three levels.
Now they just close down the nearest source, which, they spend hundreds of hours and millions to do QA. If people want RHEL for free for production use, they can clone CentOS for a stable cycle, which is still 99% compatible (not bug-to-bug though) to RHEL.
And suddenly Red Hat is described as an evil monster more than Microsoft.
Old wisdom is right, once you gave it out people would see it as normality, and when you take it back you are the bad guy.
30 • RedHat (by Arghalhuas on 2023-06-27 10:47:36 GMT from Luxembourg)
RedHat and its various agents have been a cancer for many years now. Way before the IBM deal. Always pushing questionable technologies that, they believed, suited their agenda.
This move, on the other hand, will be for the better, as it will bring about the complete divorce between RedHat and the community, thus freeing the community from RedHate's nefarious influence.
31 • RH hate; RH "goodness" (by Koloman on 2023-06-27 11:16:15 GMT from Czechia)
@27 "Where was all this much needed outrage during the systemd controversy"
I don't know where you were then, but there was much controversy. As it is, there still is regular debates and rants about systemd. You must have missed something...
@29
You totally missed the point. RH built their whole operations and services on free (as in freedom) software. All their additions (later own software, donations, paid developers, what-not) will not change the fact that what you say they gave away was not their own in the first place (except for their relatively few self-developed software). Also, their contributions in no way invalidate the requirements of the GPL.
Your argument isn't invalid, it's non-existent.
32 • Conflation of the Redhat product and the (old) RedHat organization. (by R. Cain on 2023-06-27 21:40:10 GMT from United States)
There seems to be, here (as well as on other similar technical venues), confusion (and, from a reading, an easily-corrected, unneeded, increase in blood pressure) due to the lack of understanding and comprehension regarding one simple fact:
...the FIRM / ORGANIZATION / CORPORATION / ENTITY you once knew as "RedHat" no longer exists, and has not for quite a long time.
"RedHat" is a 𝒃𝒓𝒂𝒏𝒅, 𝒐𝒏𝒍𝒚, owned by IBM--just as "Quaker Oats" is a brand, only, belonging to the much larger international corporation known as 'Pepsico'.
The RedHat "group" (now) does exactly, precisely what 𝑰𝑩𝑴 tells it to do.
33 • Not a panda (by Sad on 2023-06-28 17:51:12 GMT from Bulgaria)
It seems like TAILS Linux has removed their "calendar" of future releases from their site. What a shame. It was nice having some idea of when the next update would be available, now, nothing.
34 • IBM Redhat (by source bottle on 2023-06-28 21:51:03 GMT from Canada)
IBM is undoubtedly making adjustments to the Redhat distro / brand / support services to sell them to businesses - AKA business -to-business, just like Microsoft / Google / Meta / Amazon / Oracle / et al. They are probly not concerned about the open source community's waty of distro coding / using / sharing. As they say, "business is business".
35 • Red Hat (by Goro on 2023-06-29 23:19:54 GMT from Argentina)
As much as I have roasted the people in charge of IT-related deployments at my workplace, I must concede that they did listen when senior developers began to warn against the possible consequences of RH being bought off by IBM. They stopped using RH and went instead with Debian, which not only saved quite a bit of taxpayers' money, but also has given us all a much needed peace of mind.
Wonder how many companies/public organisations will be following suit.
Number of Comments: 35
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| Archives |
| • Issue 1176 (2026-06-08): Redcore Linux 2601, the problem with minimal system requirements, Red Hat account linked to compromised npm repositories, COSMIC to get frosted glass effect, openSUSE shows off system extension manager, Origami merges with RakuOS |
| • Issue 1175 (2026-06-01): PineTab2 with various distros, less common words of wisdom, Canonical shutting down Ubuntu's Pastebin, Murena nears 100k users, DistroWatch turns 25 |
| • Issue 1174 (2026-05-25): Solus 4.9, Linux tablets, Haiku boots on Apple M1 machines, Fedora drops Deepin packages, Mint improves Nemo performance |
| • Issue 1173 (2026-05-18): Sylve on FreeBSD, the benefit of BleachBit, Debian commits to reproducible builds, Debian publishes updated install media, Haiku introduces SMP support on ARM64 processors, Rocky Linux creates opt-in security repository, Fedora reconsiders AI tools, KDE receives generous donation |
| • Issue 1172 (2026-05-11): Fedora 44, dealing with extra fonts, Fedora plans to provide AI tools, problems with Ubuntu's new coreutils, TrueNAS extends its development cycle, postmarktetOS improves the boot splash screen, Redox ports tmux |
| • Issue 1171 (2026-05-04): Xubuntu 26.04, extending memory with VRAM, Ubuntu plans AI features, Devuan developer forks GTK2, Mint introduces hardware enablement builds, Linux running on a PlayStation 5, local kernel exploit found in Linux |
| • Issue 1170 (2026-04-27): ENux 5.2.1, picking a second distro, AlmaLinux expands CPU support, FreeBSD publishes Status Report, Ubuntu MATE skips 26.04 release |
| • Issue 1169 (2026-04-20): Lakka 6.1, free software and source-based distributions, FreeBSD Foundation publishes compatible laptop list, Debian holds Project Leader election, Haiku progresses ARM64 port, Mint to extend development cycle, Linux 7.0 released |
| • Issue 1168 (2026-04-13): pearOS 2026.03, EndeavourOS 2026.03.06, which distros are adopting age verification, Arch adjusts its firewall packages, Linux dropping i486 support, Red Hat extends its release cycle, Debian's APT introduces rollbacks, Redox improves its scheduler |
| • Issue 1167 (2026-04-06): Origami Linux 2026.03, answering questions for Linux newcomers, Ubuntu MATE seeking new contributors, Ubuntu software centre is expanding Deb support, FreeBSD fixes forum exploit, openSUSE 15 Leap nears its end of life |
| • Issue 1166 (2026-03-30): NetBSD jails, publishing software for Linux, Ubuntu joins Rust Foundation, Canonical plans to trim GRUB features, Peppermint works on new utilities, PINE64 shows off open hardware capabilities |
| • Issue 1165 (2026-03-23): Argent Linux 1.5.3, disk space required by Linux, Manjaro team goes on strike, AlmaLinux improves NVIDIA driver support and builds RISC-V packages, systemd introduces age tracking |
| • Issue 1164 (2026-03-16): d77void, age verification laws and Linux, SUSE may be for sale, TrueNAS takes its build system private, Debian publishes updated Trixie media, MidnightBSD and System76 respond to age verification laws |
| • Issue 1163 (2026-03-09): KaOS 2026.02, TinyCore 17.0, NuTyX 26.02.2, Would one big collection of packages help?, Guix offers 64-bit Hurd options, Linux communities discuss age delcaration laws, Mint unveils new screensaver for Cinnamon, Redox ports new COSMIC features |
| • Issue 1162 (2026-03-02): AerynOS 2026.01, anti-virus and firewall tools, Manjaro fixes website certificate, Ubuntu splits firmware package, jails for NetBSD, extended support for some Linux kernel releases, Murena creating a map app |
| • Issue 1161 (2026-02-23): The Guix package manager, quick Q&As, Gentoo migrating its mirrors, Fedora considers more informative kernel panic screens, GhostBSD testing alternative X11 implementation, Asahi makes progress with Apple M3, NetBSD userland ported, FreeBSD improves web-based system management |
| • Issue 1160 (2026-02-16): Noid and AgarimOS, command line tips, KDE Linux introduces delta updates, Redox OS hits development milestone, Linux Mint develops a desktop-neutral account manager, sudo developer seeks sponsorship |
| • Issue 1159 (2026-02-09): Sharing files on a network, isolating processes on Linux, LFS to focus on systemd, openSUSE polishes atomic updates, NetBSD not likely to adopt Rust code, COSMIC roadmap |
| • Issue 1158 (2026-02-02): Manjaro 26.0, fastest filesystem, postmarketOS progress report, Xfce begins developing its own Wayland window manager, Bazzite founder interviewed |
| • Issue 1157 (2026-01-26): Setting up a home server, what happened to convergence, malicious software entering the Snap store, postmarketOS automates hardware tests, KDE's login manager works with systemd only |
| • Issue 1156 (2026-01-19): Chimera Linux's new installer, using the DistroWatch Torrent Corner, new package tools for Arch, Haiku improves EFI support, Redcore streamlines branches, Synex introduces install-time ZFS options |
| • Issue 1155 (2026-01-12): MenuetOS, CDE on Sparky, iDeal OS 2025.12.07, recommended flavour of BSD, Debian seeks new Data Protection Team, Ubuntu 25.04 nears its end of life, Google limits Android source code releases, Fedora plans to replace SDDM, Budgie migrates to Wayland |
| • Issue 1154 (2026-01-05): postmarketOS 25.06/25.12, switching to Linux and educational resources, FreeBSD improving laptop support, Unix v4 available for download, new X11 server in development, CachyOS team plans server edtion |
| • Issue 1153 (2025-12-22): Best projects of 2025, is software ever truly finished?, Firefox to adopt AI components, Asahi works on improving the install experience, Mageia presents plans for version 10 |
| • Issue 1152 (2025-12-15): OpenBSD 7.8, filtering websites, Jolla working on a Linux phone, Germany saves money with Linux, Ubuntu to package AMD tools, Fedora demonstrates AI troubleshooting, Haiku packages Go language |
| • Issue 1151 (2025-12-08): FreeBSD 15.0, fun command line tricks, Canonical presents plans for Ubutnu 26.04, SparkyLinux updates CDE packages, Redox OS gets modesetting driver |
| • 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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Gentoox
Gentoox was an adaptation of the popular Linux distribution called Gentoo. It was compiled from Stage 1 with full optimisations to run on a Microsoft Xbox games console. Software or hardware mods are required.
Status: Discontinued
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View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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