this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2023
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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.