Today's episode of Veronica Explains is brought to you in part by corporate greed.
Corporate greed.
It's the greediest!
[chiptune and guitars intro]
Greetings and welcome to another thrilling episode of Veronica Explains!
I'm Veronica!
And today I'd like to talk a bit about Red Hat, Debian, and why I'm going all-in on community
driven distros.
There's been some... news lately, and I'm in the middle of building my new basement
space, but you've been asking me about the recent news, so I figured I should take a
break mid-project, bust out the YouTuber lighting, and do a quick video.
If you're interested in following along with the work I'm doing in this basement, I'll
be posting updates to channel members on Patreon, Ko-Fi, and YouTube's membership feature thing.
Channel members are basically footing the bill for this work, and I appreciate all of
you for your support.
By now, you've probably heard about what's happening with Red Hat, but to sum it up,
they've decided to restrict access to the source code for Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
or RHEL for short.
You used to be able to freely download the source code for RHEL over on git.centos.org,
a curious domain choice which I'll get to in a little bit.
But now, despite the fact that Red Hat has been open source since its inception, RHEL
has moved to a "source available" model where you basically have to agree to restrictive terms in
order to download the source.
This restriction of the source code is, frankly, an insult.
But what's worse is that it jeopardizes the entire Enterprise Linux ecosystem.
See, RHEL is upstream for a few distros, but most importantly among them is Rocky Linux,
AlmaLinux, and Oracle Linux.
These distros have repackaged the freely available Red Hat source code into something we all
can use.
And while "the code is still available" behind a developer account, that isn't exactly the
same as a typical "open source" model, because the terms of that developer account indicate
that republishing the code in your own open source project is not allowed.
One might question Red Hat's previous wisdom in offering their source code in the first
place, and, you know, that might be fair.
I'm not a business economist...
I'm just a nerd out here making YouTube videos.
But here's the thing- Red Hat built themselves on the audacity of open source.
They actively told us in the community that Red Hat source would remain free, encouraging
these other distributions to build on and add to the Enterprise Linux ecosystem.
And now, in an IBM-esque move which surely won't bite them in the end, Red Hat has torn
open source Enterprise Linux apart.
This feels so malevolent I'm going to have to set my YouTuber RGB lighting for "malevolent
mode".
[Witch-like cackles]
Remember earlier when I talked about the curious domain choice of centos.org?
Well, if you're new to this space, you might not remember it, but CentOS was the first
"RHEL-clone" that Red Hat embraced, extended, and then extinguished.
In fact, they extinguished it mid-cycle.
They've moved their "community" focus to the upstream "CentOS Stream", which despite their
best marketing efforts, is far from a drop-in replacement for the complete RHEL source code.
Per Red Hat's own documentation, CentOS Stream is not designed for production, making it
unusable as a true CentOS replacement.
It always felt like the continued use of the CentOS name and domain is like a poorly-healed
scar against the goodwill of the open source community, who actively promoted Red Hat for
years, unaware of how this saga would unfold.
If not for Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux stepping in, I couldn't have migrated workloads for
customers back in the CentOS 8 days.
It was a nightmare for many sysadmins, and now, so is this.
To make matters worse, a few days after the initial announcement, Red Hat's Mike McGrath
doubled down in a blog post essentially saying the supporters of open source RHEL rebuilds
are moochers stealing code off of Red Hat's hard work- code that they promised earlier
to keep open source.
To put it mildly, Red Hat: this isn't a good look.
I mean, it's not like you're struggling to keep the lights on.
Thanks to Red Hat's frustrating decision here, Rocky and Alma are going to have to put themselves
in legal grey areas, or completely rebuild their development process.
It looks like at least Rocky has figured out a solution to this for the time being, and
by the time this video goes live others might have too.
Either way, it's a mess.
And now, I'm over it.
Thanks to this, I no longer have confidence that anything Red Hat tells me is going to actually
hold up.
I wish their developers well, and I hope Red Hat finds a way toward a healthy relationship
with the open source community again.
But I just can't keep recommending their products to customers after seeing this uncertainty
over the last few years.
So I've already migrated most of my development targets to Debian.
Why Debian?
Well, I'll talk about that in a bit.
As a background- I'm a system administrator running mostly onsite legacy application workloads
and a few modern web-based applications.
I also use Linux everyday in running my business, including on my work computer, and the computer
editing videos for this channel.
In the past, I've used a melange of Ubuntu, Debian, and Enterprise Linux offerings like
CentOS, Rocky, and Alma.
My desktop computers have been running Pop!_OS for the last couple of years, and I've done
videos talking about my Linux history, going back almost 20 years.
Now, I've migrated most of my Ubuntu and Enterprise Linux workloads over to Debian 12.
Some of my Enterprise Linux legacy application workloads are a little bit more challenging to migrate,
and I'm performing some legacy code modifications in order to help things complete the transition
smoothly.
Where customers have an active Red Hat subscription, I'll continue supporting that.
But everyone else in my stable is getting moved over to Debian, unless their upstream
requires something RHEL or SUSE compatible.
For those, I'll be evaluating what's best on a case by case basis.
So what do I like about Debian?
It's best to talk about Debian in two contexts- as a server and as a desktop.
On a server, Debian is a slow distribution.
And slow in this case is a great thing.
Debian on a server isn't quite "set it and forget it", but it gets pretty close.
Package stability and availability are top notch on a Debian server without needing to
futz with things like PPAs.
On a desktop, Debian is still a slow distribution.
And that can be a problem, particularly if you rely on software in the apt repos for
the distro.
[ominous organ music]
But Flatpak is getting really good, and is a great option to keep your important applications
up to date.
I've been using the Flatpak versions of LibreOffice, Lutris, and even Kdenlive, the video editor
that's creating this video right now.
It's fine.
In the past, I've personally recommended against Debian on most laptops because it was hard
to install, between a challenging-to-navigate website and confusion over "free" and "non-free"
drivers.
But they've fixed so many of those issues in Debian 12, with a new installer which does
away with the driver distinction dilemma.
And unlike Ubuntu, Debian isn't run by a for-profit enterprise with a murky future outlook- Debian
is run as a non-profit for all of us.
After the hell of the last couple of weeks in the Enterprise Linux community, that's a breath of fresh
air.
I'm not saying I *think* Ubuntu's going to put profit before their users.
I *know* they are.
And that's understandable.
Any company with shareholders and a profit motive is going to work to increase profit.
It's the nature of the beast, and a problem well beyond the Linux and open source community.
Debian isn't developed with a profit motive.
It's not developed in secret by some company.
It's an open process.
Now that doesn't mean it's free from corporate influence- I mean, I'm not naive.
Corporations drive Linux development at pretty much every turn, and Debian, Arch, and other
community-driven distros aren't immune to this circumstance.
But there's a difference between Debian - a distro in which individuals and companies
work together to build something, and Red Hat - a distro in which a single for-profit
company has final say on what ships and what doesn't.
I've gotten more corporate-cynical as I've gotten older-slash-further-along-in-my-career,
and in my mind at least, I'm more at ease supporting operating systems like Debian and
Arch, who aren't driven by a single company with a single agenda.
Speaking of companies, I need to talk about Pop!_OS by System76.
I've talked about Pop!_OS before on this channel, and how I appreciate System76 for putting it out there,
and putting out great Linux hardware.
And none of that has changed.
In fact, my biggest gripe about Pop!_OS development is that so much of the discussion takes place
on Reddit, a website I've never really understood nor appreciated.
It's... not a major deal for me though, and generally I like what they're doing over at System 76.
I don't have anything bad to say about them, or about Pop!_OS.
And if you enjoy using their stuff, that's fantastic.
Right now, System76 feels like good stewards of their project.
Regardless, they are a for-profit hardware company.
If they spun off Pop!_OS into a community-driven project, and invited non-employees to contribute
and guide development, I don't think I'd be questioning it.
But after the boat-rocking we've experienced lately in single-corporation-driven Linux
distros, I'm feeling like it's the best thing for my business to explore community-focused
alternatives, and Debian right now is fitting the bill nicely.
I've switched my main editing machine to Debian Sid, running KDE Plasma for now.
I'm testing Sway, though, and I like what I'm seeing.
You can expect more to come on that in the future.
Speaking of the channel, don't expect much to change in terms of the content of my videos.
I'm still going to be testing on a variety of distros, corporate and non-corporate.
I'm going to cover events happening in all corners of the Linux world, because it's all
exciting to me.
You can bet that I'm going to have a copy of Red Hat running somewhere, and I'm going
to be testing against Alma, Rocky, and Fedora.
Those are all fine distros, even if I'm not recommending them to customers at the moment.
You shouldn't take my word as the final word on this- do your own research.
Read about this stuff.
Spin up virtual machines.
You don't have to listen to the algorithm-driven bombast of "STOP USING X USE Y INSTEAD".
I prefer a community-driven distro, and that's great for me.
It might not work for you, and your systems.
And that's just fine.
I'm sure this isn't the end of this story.
And despite everything that's happened in the last few weeks in the corporate Linux
world, I'm still feeling optimistic about our community, our projects, and our future.
Because Linux is awesome!
And so are you.
[child shouting] "1, 2, 3, 4!"
[punk outro plays]
[more cackling]
"Oh, that's silly"
This basement floor is wide open.
Just like Debian's development process!
[Andross cackling]