 DistroWatch Weekly |
| DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1025, 26 June 2023 |
Welcome to this year's 26th issue of DistroWatch Weekly!
Open source desktop environments are constantly evolving and shifting, both to adapt to new technologies and to respond to new trends. This week we begin with a preview of the upcoming KDE Plasma 6 desktop. Plasma 6 is expected to be a gentle upgrade from Plasma 5, with some cleaner code and nicer defaults. This week Jesse Smith takes Plasma 6 (running on the KaOS distribution) for a spin and reports on his experiences. What do you think of the plans for Plasma 6? Let us know in this week's Opinion Poll. In our News section we talk about Red Hat changing its policy on sharing source code for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. We also share how SUSE is adding support to its distribution to make better use of hardware security features while Funtoo phases out some of the project's infrastructure. Then we talk about what information might be shared or leaked by a desktop environment and how that affects user privacy. Plus we are pleased to provide details of the new releases published last week and list the torrents we are seeding. Finally, we are grateful to be able to thank our readers who sent donations to help us this month. We wish you all a fantastic week and happy reading!
Content:
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| Feature Story (by Jesse Smith) |
KaOS with Plasma 6 Preview
The KaOS distribution is an independent, rolling release operating system. The KaOS developers publish regular snapshots of the project's live media. The distribution focuses exclusively on one desktop environment (KDE Plasma) for one CPU architecture (x86_64). Along with the April live media update, the KaOS project included an extra technology preview for KDE Plasma 6 (the next major version of the Plasma desktop).
Not only is there a new stable ISO released, but to look forward to the next ten years, there is also a Plasma 6 preview ISO available. This ISO is not installable, only meant to test in live mode. The installer Calamares is not ready for Qt 6/Plasma 6, nor are there many KDE applications available in their Qt 6 version.
This ISO is only linked in the news item, not available from the Download page. Auto-login is not enabled, since it varies greatly, depending on hardware whether X or Wayland is the better session. So, SDDM will show you an empty username. Login name & password are live/live.
I was curious to see what new features and adjustments Plasma 6 would bring. Would this offer a major shift, as we saw moving from KDE 3 to KDE 4? Or would this be a more gentle transition, as we saw from KDE 4 to version 5? I downloaded the 2.5GB ISO file for the Plasma 6 preview.
Before I dive into my experiences, I want to acknowledge this is an early snapshot of KDE Plasma 6, not a final release. This typically means there will be some bugs which have yet been fixed and some features may not be complete. This is a chance to get an idea of where Plasma 6 is going, but one should expect some bumps along the road.
As stated in the KaOS announcement, the live media boots to a graphical login screen where we can use "live" as both the username and password. We can also pick whether we want to run Plasma 6 as a Wayland or X11 session, with Wayland being the default.
Different behaviour in different test environments
I experimented with the Plasma preview on my laptop and in a VirtualBox environment. These two test environments sometimes produced different results. For example, when running in VirtualBox the Wayland session failed to work at all. Upon signing in as the "live" user, the screen went blank and the system would lock up, failing to respond to keyboard or mouse input. A hard shutdown was required to exit the session. The X11 session worked smoothly when run in VirtualBox.
When run on my laptop, both the Wayland and X11 sessions worked and (for all practical purposes) worked identically. I didn't notice any differences between the two session options when running them on my laptop.
KaOS 2023.04.20 Plasma 6 Preview -- Yakuake failing to load Konsole
(full image size: 241kB, resolution: 1920x1080 pixels)
Another area where Plasma 6 behaved differently was launching the Konsole virtual terminal. When KaOS was running directly on my laptop, I was unable to launch a Konsole session. The application would simply crash as soon as I tried to launch it, regardless of the method. Similarly, the Yakuake drop-down terminal failed to work, reporting it was unable to load the Konsole component. This happened in both the Wayland and X11 sessions on my laptop.
When I switched over to running KaOS in VirtualBox, the Konsole application ran without any problems. Yakuake still reported it could not find its Konsole component and failed to run properly, but the Konsole application itself ran without any problems. I found this interesting as it wasn't a Wayland vs X11 bug, but a physical vs virtual hardware issue which was preventing Konsole from working.
Before I dive into the list of features and changes I could find for Plasma 6, I'd like to acknowledge that people trying the technology preview will see several programs refer to themselves as being version 5.27 rather than 6.0. In particular, the Plasma packages were tagged with version number 5.27.80 while I was trying this preview. These numbers are likely to bump up to 6.0 rather than 5.28 when Plasma 6 is ready for release.
New features and changes
I had trouble finding an official list of features available for testing, but I did find an overview of features which were either available or works in progress. I'm going to quickly talk about this list of features and give my impression of each one.
To me, the most significant thing about this list is it indicates Plasma 6 is focused on polishing the desktop and improving both its defaults and consistency. This isn't a big overhaul or change in the way the desktop works as a whole. Plasma 6 looks like it is going to be a lot like Plasma 5, with some additional polish and improvements to its workflow rather than a revolutionary adjustment.
Wayland by default - Plasma 6 will attempt to use Wayland by default while maintaining X11 as a backup session option. I confirmed this is the case. As I mentioned earlier, Wayland didn't work in my VirtualBox session while working very well on my laptop. The X11 session worked well in both environments.
Floating panel - I couldn't find a lot of details on this, but it seems as though the desktop panel in Plasma will hover near the screen edge rather than stick hard against the edge of the display. This makes it look like the panel is floating or hovering slightly. On KaOS the panel doesn't float, it sticks firmly to the edge of the display. By default it is placed hard against the right side of the screen, though it can be moved to any screen edge. This might be a feature which is pending or perhaps KaOS is setting its own defaults for panel behaviour.
KaOS 2023.04.20 Plasma 6 Preview -- Changing click behaviour
(full image size: 199kB, resolution: 1536x864 pixels)
Double-click to open - By default, past versions of the KDE desktop have used single-click behaviour to open files and folders, for instance on the desktop or in the file manager. While efficient, it is not the typical double-click behaviour used by most other desktop environments. Some distributions have changed the default behaviour to avoid confusion. With Plasma 6 the desktop will switch to using a double-click from the mouse to open files and folders while single-click will select an item without opening it.
I found KaOS still uses the old behaviour of opening files and folders with a single-click. This behaviour can be changed in the System Settings panel, under the Workspace Behaviour configuration module.
Tinted headers - One small feature I was eager to see was tinted application headers. When using light themes, such as Breeze Light, it can be difficult to quickly tell which of two (or more) windows has focus. A new feature will tint the header area (the menus and button bars) of an application a slightly darker shade. This makes it easier to identify which window is active.
The default theme KaOS uses, while it is light, doesn't support the tinting feature. I switched to a vanilla Breeze Light theme and observed the tinting in active windows. I like the concept and think it serves as an easy visual indicator without being distracting.
KaOS 2023.04.20 Plasma 6 Preview -- Using tinted headers to identify the active window
(full image size: 177kB, resolution: 1536x864 pixels)
Thumbnail grid task switcher - Based on the description, it looks like Plasma 6 will include a task switcher widget which can display thumbnails of running applications. This will help users identify and switch between open windows. This feature is not enabled on KaOS and the thumbnail task switcher is not one of the available task switcher widgets included in the distribution.
Wallpaper switcher in System Settings - While it has long be possible to change the Plasma wallpaper by right-clicking on the desktop, the developers have suggested it could be easier to change the wallpaper from within the System Settings panel. I checked and there is an option for changing the wallpaper under the Appearance section of the panel. It works and offers a straight forward way to adjust the background.
KaOS 2023.04.20 Plasma 6 Preview -- Changing the background image
(full image size: 388kB, resolution: 1536x864 pixels)
Unified desktop view - I think this description sums up the situation with the desktop views and how they are changing nicely: "Currently we have two default desktop plugin types: Folder (the default) and Desktop. Desktop is just Folder without support for desktop icons. This is a bit silly, and internally they're 99% the same because its prior developer also thought it was a bit silly and implemented them with the same backend code. So for Plasma 6, we're going to collapse the distinction in the UI and instead expose a "Show desktop icons" checkbox somewhere. This will make it even easier for people who don't like desktop icons to hide them, avoid putting implementation details in front of the user, and de-clutter the wallpaper choosing view."
I didn't find this setting anywhere yet and perhaps it is still in the works.
Clicking in scrollbar track jumps scrollbar to that location - This feature seems straight forward, allowing the user to jump straight to a specific location rather than moving up or down the displayed document a page at a time. This would also bring scrollbar behaviour on Plasma more in line with other desktops. This change is available on KaOS, but the distribution uses the old behaviour as its default. Scrollbar behaviour can be adjusted in the Workspace Behaviour module of the System Settings panel.
KaOS 2023.04.20 Plasma 6 Preview -- Changing scrollbar track behaviour
(full image size: 199kB, resolution: 1536x864 pixels)
Other observations
I made a few other observations about Plasma 6 while I was exploring its new features. One was the desktop does not appear to have changed in terms of performance and resource consumption. Plasma 6 used about 900MB of RAM on KaOS, which is about the same amount Plasma 5 uses on the same distribution running the same services. This makes Plasma a little heavier than average (when compared against other desktops), but still lighter than GNOME on most distributions.
In terms of responsiveness, Plasma is still in the middle of the pack. It performs well, but isn't as snappy as lighter desktops such as LXQt.
A concern I had was the System Settings panel crashed frequently. About half of the time, when I opened a specific configuration page, System Settings would crash. This was also a problem with later versions of the Plasma 5.x series and it has become worse in the preview of Plasma 6.
On the whole, Plasma 6 looks like it will be a minor evolution forward. There are some nice little touches, some more predictable and consistent defaults, and some streamlining of the experience. Nothing big or surprising, just nice little improvements and a few visual tweaks that I think most people will enjoy.
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Visitor supplied rating
KaOS has a visitor supplied average rating of: 5.5/10 from 24 review(s).
Have you used KaOS? You can leave your own review of the project on our ratings page.
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| Miscellaneous News (by Jesse Smith) |
Red Hat changes the ways it provides source code to the public, SUSE offers a range of support for confidential computing, Funtoo trimming its infrastructure
Red Hat is making an effort to reduce the number of different ways the public accesses the source code which goes into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The company explained through a blog post that source code for the RHEL family will be provided to the public through CentOS Stream repositories only. "CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases. For Red Hat customers and partners, source code will remain available via the Red Hat Customer Portal. To be clear, this change does not signify any changes to the CentOS Project, CentOS Stream or source availability for CentOS Stream or CentOS SIGs. Why make this change? Before CentOS Stream, Red hat pushed public sources for RHEL to git.centos.org. When the CentOS Project shifted to center on CentOS Stream, we maintained these repositories even though CentOS Linux was no longer being built downstream of RHEL. The engagement around CentOS Stream, the engineering levels of investment, and the new priorities we're addressing for customers and partners now make maintaining separate, redundant, repositories inefficient. The latest source code will still be available via CentOS Stream." In other words, the source code for RHEL will no longer be publicly available, but will be provided to Red Hat customers.
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SUSE is taking a step toward providing additional security and verification to their SUSE Linux Enterprise distribution. The company announced this week their plan to support an entire range of "confidential computing". The Register reports: "SUSE's latest release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 5 (SLE 15 SP5) has a focus on security, claiming it as the first distro to offer full support for confidential computing to protect data." Confidential computing refers to using hardware features to verify and restrict the software running on a platform. "Confidential computing relies on hardware-based security mechanisms in the processor to provide this protection, so enterprises hoping to take advantage of this will need to ensure their servers have the necessary support, such as AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization-Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) and Intel's Trust Domain Extensions (TDX)."
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The Funtoo Linux project has published a newsletter for April and May which outlines a number of changes to the project. Multiple entries in the newsletter talk about aspects of the project being phased out. Specifically, Funtoo Linux 1.4 will reach the end of its supported life at the end of 2023, the support forums will likely be discontinued, and the documentation wiki is being removed. "The wiki has historically suffered from massive amounts of unmaintained pages which confuse users. Also, at its heart, MediaWiki (what we use) is a MySQL database with a very complex schema which is used to store documents. I don't like dumping our documentation in there. There are more modern ways to do documentation. Using MediaWiki is essentially locking all our valuable community and official content in a black box where we don't have a great programmatic way to interact with it. Yes, MediaWiki has an API -- but it's cumbersome. It just takes a valuable resource and doesn't give us quite enough power to manage it properly. It's just not the right solution for the future. It's time to build some new tech to serve our project. MediaWiki will continue to linger around like an old appendage until we announce its retirement and start publishing on a new system. So that's what we're doing."
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These and other news stories can be found on our Headlines page.
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| Questions and Answers (by Jesse Smith) |
What information is shared from different desktop environments?
Protecting-privacy asks: In terms of privacy, are all Linux desktops the same? Will it matter if I run GNOME, Xfce, or KDE?
DistroWatch answers: Most of the time, for most actions and daily usage, you probably won't experience any more telemetry or data leaking out of one open source desktop or another. They all tend to be respective of your privacy and avoid data collection.
With that said, there are some edge cases where one desktop may end up sharing information where another would not. For instance, on some distributions KDE Plasma's telemetry may be enabled. Plasma has a number of telemetry options which are normally either disabled entirely at build time or turned off in the settings, requiring users to opt-in to any information gathering. However, distributions may choose to enable these features so it's worth checking if your Plasma applications have any reporting enabled.
The Unity desktop, or at least the build supplied by Canonical for Ubuntu, famously enabled sending searches for local files and applications to Canonical and third-party organizations. This led to some people, particularly the Free Software Foundation, labeling Unity as spyware. This label may have been a bit harsh as it was possible to disable the on-line search feature through the Unity settings panel, but it was unfortunate Canonical chose to include the sharing of information by default rather than making it opt-in.
GNOME has a tool called gnome-info-collect which can gather some data about the system. Again, this tends to be an opt-in experience, similar to KDE's approach. GNOME also offers the user an opportunity to connect with cloud services, such as Nextcloud, Google, and Microsoft services. This is, again, opt-in and only a matter of concern if you voluntarily connect to the cloud services offered.
In short, these desktops do not report back on your activities or track you, by default. But they do provide some services and functions which can upload information if the user (or their distribution) enables these services.
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Additional answers can be found in our Questions and Answers archive.
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| Released Last Week |
SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP5
SUSE has announced the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 15 SP5, the fifth service pack of the company's enterprise-class Linux distribution designed mainly for developers and administrators to deploy business-critical workloads. The company's new release streamlines the install media and provides wider support for IPv4 addresses. "The Unified Installer and Packages DVDs known from SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop/SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation Extension 15 SP1 are deprecated and have been replaced by the following media: Online Installation Media - all SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 products can be installed with this stand alone media, after entering a registration key. The necessary packages are fetched from online repositories only. For information about available modules, see Section 3.1, 'Modules in the SLE 15 SP5 (prerelease) Product Line'. Full Installation Media - all SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop/SUSE Linux Enterprise Workstation Extension 15 products can be installed without network connection with this media, for offline installation scenarios. The media contains all necessary packages." The release notes offer additional details.
Univention Corporate Server 5.0-4
Univention Corporate Server (UCS) is an enterprise-class distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux. It features an integrated management system for central administration of servers. The project has published a new update to its 5.0 series which streamlines the Management Console Server and Web Server programs. There have also been a number of Samba updates with a focus on improved performance. "Univention Management Console Server and Web Server are now merged into a single program and the implementation uses Tornado instead of the UCS specific Python Notifier. The integration of Keycloak has been improved for operation with accessibility from the Internet, for outgoing passwords and for the migration of existing SimpleSAMLPHP based connections. We will inform you about details of the upcoming Keycloak developments in a separate blog article. At radius it is now possible to add the user name mailPrimaryAddress to register, which guarantees more flexibility when registering. Samba has been updated to version 4.18.3. The latest version of Samba contains numerous optimizations that lead to improved performance. Upstream maintenance is also ensured by using the latest Samba version." Details can be found in the release announcement and in the release notes.
Proxmox 8.0 "Virtual Environment"
Proxmox is a commercial company offering specialised products based on Debian GNU/Linux. the company's latest release is Proxmox 8.0 "Virtual Environment" which is based on Debian 12. The release announcement lists new features in the distribution: "We're very excited to announce the major release 8.0 of Proxmox Virtual Environment! It's based on the great Debian 12 "Bookworm" but using a newer Linux kernel 6.2, QEMU 8.0.2, LXC 5.0.2, and OpenZFS 2.1.12. Here is a selection of the highlights of the Proxmox VE 8.0 final version Debian 12, but using a newer Linux kernel 6.2, QEMU 8.0.2, LXC 5.0.2, ZFS 2.1.12. Ceph Server: Ceph Quincy 17.2 is the default and comes with continued support. There is now an enterprise repository for Ceph which can be accessed via any Proxmox VE subscription, providing the best stability for production systems. Additional text-based user interface (TUI) for the installer ISO. Integrate host network bridge and VNet access when configuring virtual guests into the ACL system of Proxmox VE. Add access realm sync jobs to conveniently synchronize users and groups from an LDAP/AD server automatically at regular intervals. New default CPU type for VMs: x86-64-v2-AES Resource mappings: between PCI(e) or USB devices, and nodes in a Proxmox VE cluster. Countless GUI and API improvements." The release notes offer additional information.
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Development, unannounced and minor bug-fix releases
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| Torrent Corner |
Weekly Torrents
The table below provides a list of torrents DistroWatch is currently seeding. If you do not have a bittorrent client capable of handling the linked files, we suggest installing either the Transmission or KTorrent bittorrent clients.
Archives of our previously seeded torrents may be found in our Torrent Archive. We also maintain a Torrents RSS feed for people who wish to have open source torrents delivered to them. To share your own open source torrents of Linux and BSD projects, please visit our Upload Torrents page.
Torrent Corner statistics:
- Total torrents seeded: 2,881
- Total data uploaded: 43.3TB
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| Upcoming Releases and Announcements |
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Summary of expected upcoming releases
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| Opinion Poll (by Jesse Smith) |
What do you think of Plasma 6?
We began this week with a look at a preview of the Plasma 6 desktop running on KaOS. The Plasma 6 experience closely resembles that of the Plasma 5 series, with a few tweaks, some streamlining, and some effort to improve the desktop environment's default behaviour. We'd like to hear what you think of the upcoming Plasma 6 release.
You can see the results of our previous poll on using protective scripts and aliases in last week's edition. All previous poll results can be found in our poll archives.
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What do you think of Plasma 6?
| I like the preview: | 182 (14%) |
| I do not like the preview: | 21 (2%) |
| I think it is too soon to tell: | 378 (30%) |
| I do not use Plasma: | 689 (54%) |
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| Website News |
Donations and Sponsors
Each month we receive support and kindness from our readers in the form of donations. These donations help us keep the web server running, pay contributors, and keep infrastructure like our torrent seed box running. We'd like to thank our generous readers and acknowledge how much their contributions mean to us.
This month we're grateful for the $143 in contributions from the following kind souls:
| Donor |
Amount |
|---|
| Manjeet S | $47 |
| Christopher E | $23 |
| Jeffrey S | $20 |
| Sam C | $10 |
| Jonathon B | $7 |
| Ross M | $6 |
| Chung T | $5 |
| Darkeugene7896 | $5 |
| DuCakedHare | $5 |
| Joe H | $3 |
| Skye F | $3 |
| PB Coleman | $2 |
| J.D. L | $2 |
| Peter M | $2 |
| c6WWldo9 | $1 |
| Stephen M | $1 |
| William E | $1 |
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New projects added to database
Kumander Linux
Kumander Linux is a Debian-based distribution featuring the Xfce desktop. The distribution's key feature is a Windows 7-like theme and desktop behaviour designed to make the migration from Windows to Linux easier.
Kumander Linux 1.0 -- Running the live Xfce desktop
(full image size: 262kB, resolution: 1680x1050 pixels)
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DistroWatch database summary
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This concludes this week's issue of DistroWatch Weekly. The next instalment will be published on Monday, 3 July 2023. Past articles and reviews can be found through our Weekly Archive and Article Search pages. To contact the authors please send e-mail to:
- Jesse Smith (feedback, questions and suggestions: distribution reviews/submissions, questions and answers, tips and tricks)
- Ladislav Bodnar (feedback, questions, donations, comments)
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| Reader Comments • Jump to last comment |
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 thatโs 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 โ 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 ๐๐๐๐๐
, ๐๐๐๐, 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 ๐ฐ๐ฉ๐ด 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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