What would an ENSH*TTIFIED Linux distro look like? [video]

makmarian@kbin.social to Linux@lemmy.ml – 157 points –
What would an ENSH*TTIFIED Linux distro look like?
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117

What would it look like? I'd guess Amazon ads in the search bar, proprietary package managers overriding the old open package manager, and popup ads for distribution Pro?

Wait...

What Fuckbuntu spin is that?

Ubuntu has had all three of those things. Amazon ads in the search bar was awhile back. Not sure but I assume they still hijack installing Firefox using apt and instead install it using snap. And Ubuntu Pro popups are a new thing.

It's ridiculous how Ubuntu went from the easiest entry to Linux to one of the most hated distros in the community. Seriously, I'll never understand how the broken brains of their leadership even work.

Not so much broken as change of focus. Their focus now is money, and it's hard to turn down hundreds of millions of dollars.

There are ways to not having to turn them down while still providing a good product.

You forgot selling user searches to amazon

Now that I was not aware of. WTF?

That's insane.

Does anyone know if this is still the case? This video is 11 years old, but logic and common sense tell me that, if anything, it should be even worse now.

No clue, but they did their "whoopsie, didn't know you wouldn't like it, now it's opt in" pretty quickly.

A while back I've read about some allegations that they're illegally collecting data from Azure Ubuntu instances and sending Ubuntu pro marketing material.

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Ubuntu

Increasingly so, and following the path that RedHat was taking prior (and probably worse to come given their new ownership)

What did RedHat do? Did I miss something?

RedHat is one of, if not the, biggest contributors to Linux. They offer RHEL, which you license as a business or use for free for personal use.

RedHat became pissed off about contributing so much to the Linux ecosystem when a number of other corporate distros simply took their product, changed the name, then shoved it out the door with a price tag that undercuts them, taking money while contributing virtually nothing to the wider ecosystem.

And to be clear I don't mean distros based on RHEL, like Pop/Elementary/Mint is to Ubuntu, I mean literally clones. The exact same software with zero differences other than name.

RH then changed their subscription terms so that redistribution of their source code means they can drop you as a RHEL customer. I.e. you wouldn't have access to further to source code.

This is widely believed to be compatible with the GPL licence that Linux uses β€” GPL only guarantees users need to be able to see source code, not necessarily that it has to be completely open for anybody to see. GPL also doesn't compel the developer to provide updates for everyone, so if the developer thinks you've broken other terms they've set, they are allowed to drop you/not deal with you further. GPL doesn't force a developer to have you as their continued customer.

People argue that RH may well be complying with the GPL legally, but they aren't in spirit.

I'm still not sure where I come down on it tbh. Philosophically I want RH to go with the spirit of the GPL, but I do find it really shitty that a number of other projects just straight up take RH's product, put a different name on it, and skim money away from an organisation that has transformed the Linux desktop and made it usable.

Thing is, I don't even think it's worked. They can still get all the packages by pulling it in a slightly cumbersome way from CentOS.

That's actually not what I was referring to.

First of all, RedHat now belongs to IBM, and they've never been shy about squeezing customers for a buck.

Second, having dealt with their support, it's hit or miss to get a somebody helpful or an endless cycle of tickets. Patching and versioning is sometimes a complete mess.This especially sucks as the main reason most organizations go with RH versus others is for patching and support.

There's also a lot of things where there's a RH-specific implementation , which is further distancing fun other Linuxes and often ignores standard ways of configuring things.

RedHat actually benefitted from Fedora, CentOS etc as it allowed the community to develop products in a way that could be tested to be reasonably compatible, and to develop our port back fixes etc. It wasn't just "RedHat made this and others just took it" but in many ways a symbiotic relationship. Yeah some orgs just went with CentOS but often it was those who worked on RH corporately would run CentOS at home in order to have a similar environment.

I know they're owned by IBM now. Doesn't change anything about my comment.

And yeah there was a symbiotic relationship. There still is. Fedora is still quite alike RHEL in many ways, as is CentOS, as are the RHEL clones.

None of this goes against my comment.

I think what they tried to achieve was to get rid of the "bit to bit" copypasted distributions which they at least made harder to make. So I suppose at least the cost to "steal the RHEL source" is higher.

btw I dislike that Free Software is also free (0.00 €) software. I feel like there should be some kind of chimera license which would first be proprietary with source available and after a certain time after purchase the code would be open source for the buyer. So you could actually sell it unlike Open Source Software which you can sell only once because the first person can just start giving away free copies. Sadly people in the open source realm tend to get pretty defensive when they see "proprietary". Would cool if flathub at least implemented some kind of way to sell software even if Open Source, that would be a nice start.

Nothing, someone who never needed access to the RHEL snapshot source is butt hurt that it only exists as part of centOS stream, making it harder for community rebuilds to exist.

It's no big deal for 95% of users, truly a nonissue. That last 5% can buy RHEL for production or use it for free for personal hosting or development.

honestly canocical was doing some enshittification type stuff even before redhat was acquired by the corporate overlords.

I legit thought that was about to be the joke he was going for at first.

Android?

MiUi for sure

Oh definitely.

I still hate my old phone for locking ADB behind a Mi account registration and when I wanted to go into the theme settings some stupid marketplace app opened from which I could quit by hitting the back button to het to the actual android theme settings

yeah, also the constant wait times when you install APK... it used to be a decent OS but starting with MiUi 11 they started really enshitifiying big time.

And now they changed the name to HyperOS (my dad has a phone with it installed and is constantly complaining about it)

sounds like a perfect opportunity to use this account to unlock the bootloader and swap out the os for something not enshittified

I thought about doing that but if I remember correctly they wanted some information during account creation that I was not willing to share (it was probably my phone number).

Doesn't matter anymore. My new phone is a pixel 7 on which I immediately installed GrapheneOS

Exit codes from processes are damage points that you take against your HP. When your HP runs out, the distro reformats itself to a clean state.

Instead of reformatting it just logs you out and demands buying a Heal Crystal for 350 Linux Diamonds. You can buy Linux Diamonds in packages of 400 for just 9.99 or buy the 800 package to get a 10% discount!

I know this is a joke but "Enshittification" requires there to be a monopoly that abuses commercial customers along with users. Linux distros can't really have monopolies since the switching costs are so low.

Except if you are locked out of system management and you just can't switch. Or only at the price of hardware incompatibilities and consumer apps refusing to work when they see you after practicing your ownership of the device.
See Android.

The video actually addresses that by mentioning a company coming in nice at first and then doing EEE to kill off ll competition and leave them the only significant player in the space

it can happen if you have some form vendor lockin, or if you are an oligarch in a cartel. it doesnt need a monopoly strictly speaking.

Real question, how difficult is moving from Red Hat to SUSE?

How hard is it for you to install a different distro? That's how hard.

Not really. On Lemmy, it seems to just refer to anything these days

And that includes theoretical predictions for things that never happened yet

Updates are available for $14.99 a month.

what if you are sponsoring a dev by means of something like regular donations?

I'm ok with dropping a few bucks if I like them, but monthly is just more bills to worry about. Dropping $20 once is a lot easier than drip feeding it over a year and hoping I remember to manage it. It also comes with the expectations of delivery/trade vs buying the dude lunch.

Ads on terminal

i would have been fine with them if it was only actual announcements like canonical implied it would be. but well as it turns out it wasn't.

Made by Microsoft

Yes, that does exist, and no, it's not for consumers, but if it did, it would look and feel like an enshittified Linux distro.

We have this already. It's called Ubuntu + Gnome

Gnome isn't bad, at all. The team has caused controversy and made mistakes, but gnome's experience is great.

Talking about ubuntu, snaps suck, and it is more "bloated" than what you'd expect, but still, ubuntu isn't half bad. Is mint better for what the ubuntu audience wants? Yes. Does ubuntu still work well? Yes

And ubuntu server rocks

I tried Ubuntu again recently for the first time in years.

Between Snaps and having to create an account to get security updates, I quickly gave up on it.

even with all its faults and shitty maintainers, gnome is among the best ux of any de.

Gnome isn't enshitification just because you prefer a different DE ffs

To quote Clem, head of Linux Mint: "At a time where GNOME applications are less and less designed to work anywhere else than in GNOME, a project like XApp is extremely important."

Libaidwata breaks backward compatibility with older gnome versions and amongst other things doesn't allow theming natively, so the Cinnamon team are going to have to fork off and maintain the older code which works so they can continue to have theming and stuff with Gnome apps.

Gnome seem to like doing the opposite of the Linux philosophy which says interoperability should always be a priority so that the code can be shared as freely as possible.

I can't tell whether they are stupid or lazy over at Gnome. It's not enough to strip the DE down to nothing but now even the code that worked with previous, gnome still widely used, is being dumped.

They are a little island unto themselves.

That's a whole lot of waffle without saying anything of substance.

"Gnome apps are designed primarily to fit into Gnome 😑😑😑" is not what enshitification means.

Purposely breaking backwards compatibility knowing full well that other FLOSS DE's rely on it is enshitification of the worst kind.

We all lose in the end.

Not πŸ‘ what πŸ‘ enshitification πŸ‘ means πŸ‘

Gnome can theme their own apps however they like. It's their project.

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LinuxFX...

fine by me if they can imitate windows, sans all the ads, dark patterns, and shitty business model.

windows is actually a halfway decent os underneath all the enshittification crud.

sans all the ads, dark patterns, and shitty business model.

To me it's enshitification because they grabbed Linux and KDE and added all the unethical spyware on top of it, EDGE browser comes to mind...which last I checked shares you data with 927 advertising companies.. Maybe it's a higher number now..

windows is actually a halfway decent os underneath all the enshittification crud.

even that I would argue is enshitified due to all the spying stuff they put into it.. Microsoft is real life E Corp

Ensh*ttification = Capitalism. Every point, every annoyance, every spy attack, all lock-ins, and so on, is a result of that archaic sponsored belief system..

not Linux but some open-source software with premium features that have menu items with diamond icons or something like that pointing to those features. you cannot hide the menu items and it keeps sending you notifications to subscribe to an annual license.

GNU/ME

Yeah that would be terrible, imagine if you were to run some updates and the package manager went like "Get Pro! You will get better updates and support"

How about the maintainers blocking a package that's included in the default repository for ideological reasons?

Huh ? Not aware of this one, which distro and package ?

Some distro that uses the Ubuntu repos blocked users from even installing snapd manually without jumping through a bunch of manual hoops. It's one thing to not preinstall it, but that reeked to me of exactly the "we know better than our users" attitude they were accusing Canonical of.

what happened on this one?

Some distro that uses the Ubuntu repos blocked users from even installing snapd manually without jumping through a bunch of manual hoops. It's one thing to not preinstall it, but that reeked to me of exactly the "we know better than our users" attitude they were accusing Canonical of.

Anything with systemd, flatpak and any other type of vendor lock-in.

You may as well just complain about the kernel itself being the vendor lock in to Linux

Dude heard about vendor lock-in, but has no clue what it is.

Stop pushing your pro vendor lock in agenda!

What is vendor lock in? It is so simple to understand we don't need to tell you.

Might as well use Windows at that point

Someone doesn't know what "vendor" means.