Distro suggestions

MiddledAgedGuy@beehaw.org to Linux@lemmy.ml – 57 points –

I've happily been a Fedora user for many years now, but RHEL's recent choice to put their source code behind a paywall has me pondering ethical considerations of my distro choice.

It's my understanding that this doesn't have a direct impact on Fedora, and I feel confident that it will continue to be a great distro for the foreseeable future, but I want the commercial/enterprise/corporate influence on the distro I run to be as minimal as possible. For it to be as free as possible.

With that in mind, what distros would everyone recommend?

I only have recent-ish experience with Fedora, Debian, Arch, and Ubuntu. I don't really know much about any others.

Ideally, I'd like it to fit within these boxes as well:

  • Reasonable release cycle time. Debian as an example tends to be too stale by it's nature. Edit for clarification: doesn't have to be bleeding edge, just don't want to fight with outdated dependencies if I'm compiling something from source. I feel distros generally ride this line well, but I've run into a handful of times in the past with Debian.
  • Doesn't try too hard to be user friendly. Obsfucating system internals, forcing a specific DE on you, that kind of thing.
  • Not overly time consuming to maintain. Arch would be an example of that in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, Arch is awesome. But maintaining a rolling release and a bunch of AUR's gets tiresome.
  • Doesn't try to force you to use a flatpaks, snaps, etc.

Seeing it all written out, that's pretty picky. And maybe this unicorn distro doesn't exist. But on the other hand, maybe it does.

A final thought. I know Debian has a testing branch. Anyone have any experience using that as a daily driver? Is it viable?

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OpenSUSE checks everything except the part about enterprise influence. Mint maybe? I don't know much about it though.

Yeah, I was going to suggest the same. Probably one of the best rolling distros that is low maintenance.

Mint is based on Ubuntu LTS. IMO it's fine for gaming since you can use Liquorix or an Ubuntu OEM kernel plus the kisak-mesa PPA to keep more up-to-date, but seeing as how OP wants to be close-ish to the latest and greatest, only upgrading wvery 2 years is probably too slow for them.

openSUSE also has sponsors other than just SUSE. They have a very good and close relationship with SUSE, but it is also somewhat different than Fedora.