I am not concerned at all, mostly because I do not think that they have taken any anti-user actions recently.
There is no circumstance, where I as a user, either as a personal user or in my professional capacity as someone running production systems, am affected by their source code decision. It’s only an issue if I decide I want to release a Green Hat Linux AND I want to be their customer.
The GPL does not force them to do business with me, and it does NOT require them to distribute source to me if they did not distribute the software to me. Many people may consider this move against the spirit of the GPL, and I think that’s what is causing most of the anger. Well maybe it’s time for a new GPL then that codifies that and explicitly says that, and start the herculean effort of driving adoption of that new license. It didn’t go well for GPLv3 or AGPL.
Now the Fedora telemetry proposal… is just that, a proposal. They are being transparent about “hey we are considering this, what do y’all think?”. Well, they’re certainly getting feedback on what the community thinks about that.
Here, people are angry that they are even considering the idea of telemetry. This is understandable. People treat telemetry like it’s a dirty word, because Microsoft and co. have made it so. Telemetry can be used for nefarious purposes, there is no doubt about that.
I believe that telemetry can be a good thing when it is done correctly. The question of whether the box should be checked by default is an important one, they need to be careful that users actually understand and having it enabled is an informed decision and not something they click past without comprehending. As long as the data collected is restricted, strictly filtered to avoid fingerprinting and leaking user data, this can be used to improve the software. Without any data on how your users experience your software, you are flying blind and throwing darts at your codebase trying to make improvements. The people filing bugs are usually not representative of the average user or their experience. Basic information like “does anyone even use this” or “how reliable is this feature” can help them prioritize their efforts.
I’ll take a trust but verify approach on this. The client side code of Fedora is all open source, so if I have concerns I can take a look at exactly what it is doing and raise the alarm if there’s problems. I’m sure someone will make a Fedora De-telemetrified Spin I can switch to in that case. After all Fedora is not RHEL, their source issue is orthogonal to this one.
If you made it this far, you may think I made some reasonable points… or you think I’m on Red Hat’s payroll (I’m not). Well, I gave it straight as asked, this is how I feel. I’m a user if both RHEL and Fedora and I’m not planning to change that anytime soon.
Fuck that noise. There is no reason to support repeated practices which violate the spirit of open source. There are plenty of decent choices out there which are not fedora and I wish people would use them instead of this ibm nonsense.
Not op, but if I’m honest for a laptop user who needs up to date packages. Fedora is the only distro I’ve used which is both stable and user friendly.
An excellent example is when i had Arch installed (both Manjaro and later EndevourOS) when I connected HDMI it never switched over to the new audio source. And whenever I did switch it, it would always go back to the built in speakers if I was to unplug and replug it.
Never had this as an issue in Fedora since it always remembers my last configuration.
Have you tried tumbleweed? As someone who uses both Fedora (or more accurately Nobara) and tumbleweed, my laptop experience on tumbleweed has actually been slightly better on tumbleweed.
Ever since the whole RHEL meltdown here I looked into alternatives if fedora stops getting support. So I’ve tried tumble weed in a VM.
From my initial impression it’s on par with fedora for most things. But a complete lack of community run repos like copr makes it hard for me to switch to right now. Especially since I need XPadNeo support.
However if I was to distort hop again this would be the one I move to next, at least at this time.
I absolutely agree with everything you pointed out here. Fedora has been my go-to distro for awhile now and I’m gonna ride the Fedora wagon till the very end.
Between CentOS and Fedora, I reckon people would’ve started moving to Ubuntu, except Ubuntu is making even worse choices.
My guess is if they want free, they’ll choose Debian.
I’ve seen a lot of “actually debian 12 is the best distro now” stuff lately.
While I agree that Debian 12 is great right now, I’m curious how those opinions will hold in 12 months, when Debian isn’t even half way through it’s update cycle, and people realize they are now a ways behind other distros with regards to package updates.
I love Debian as a rock-solid system. But you have to know what you’re getting into with it too.
Ubuntu LTS has the exact same problem. And unlike Ubuntu, with Debian you have the choice to use sid which is as up to date as Arch usually
I don’t see the big deal around the issue. It does not impact me as a non enterprise user.
Opt out or mandatory telemetry collection may impact you perhaps ? That’s on the table right now
I trust them to use the telemetry to improve my desktop experience. After all I can opt out.
I trust them to run the compiled binary code they provide, why wouldn’t I trust them to do the right thing with telemetry to actually improve the experience?
You can literally see the metrics schema and what is being collected, it’s not some proprietary sneak on your system secretly phoning home. If it gives them actual information on problems, allows them to correlate issues with environment, cause and effect, UX heatmaps to improve common actions, why wouldn’t I want that?
I can be privacy-minded, but also not have the binary black and white opinion that all telemetry is bad and evil. I’ve almost never reported bugs directly to a distro, it’s just not something I have the time or patience for. But in the absence of that as my contribution, my telemetry is likely to help at least paint a picture for developers on where to start with fixing issues, and I think that’s just fine.
Plus, I can just opt out at any time. And I have zero issues trusting Fedora that when I say “opt out” it will actually opt out and not try to do some funny business.
I guess Debian had it right all along. Free and Open Source Software is important.
Debian had a very long and painful public debate to eventually depend exclusively on systemd, from Red Hat. I’m not so sure they choose wisely to heavily depend upon RH/IBM LGLP code.
The new release is the first ever, I think, to offer non-free software by default.
Personal opinion is that Gentoo had it right all along. They spend a lot of time & man hours ensuring pretty much anything coming from Red Hat, that isn’t being filtered by Linus, is optional. They created eudev, elogind & made Gnome portable again when Red Hat tried to shut down portability. Neddy shows that you can run a bleeding edge system whilst not depending on much at all from Red Hat over the past 15yrs or so.
Non free firmware specifically, since it’s a really bad user experience for new users to just not have things work because they don’t have the option to choose to use non-free firmware.
I even ran systemd for a while on my desktop machine. However it was too complex and buggy even so that I switched back to OpenRC. I never used systemd on my server. Nowdays systemd may be more mature, but I don’t bother to switch. Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs. Yuk! I don’t run as RH-free as Neddy does, but I’ve switched from elogind to seatd. I’d like to burn polkit down (why on earth does it use javascript as config syntax? Why not just plain shell then? Or Lua?), but so far I haven’t.
I’ll stop now. So /rant
Also I cannot have systemd without binary logs.
This is literally just false.
Your reply leaves some questions open. So is it possible to drop systemd-journald altogether?
