As much as I would love to see more interest in Debian I would more like to see less unfriendly/unfree activity by big players in the Linux world. The last thing we need is for to Ubuntu look like the next RHEL and some megacorp buys up Canonical.
this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2023
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Debian operating system
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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.
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some megacorp buys up Canonical.
Some evil corporation who doesn't care about the community and pushes proprietary software?
Hmm.
Would there be any difference?
Canonical at least pretends to care, for now.
I don't think most corporations using RHEL are overly concerned about all the issues that Red Hat's moves/decisions have upon the general Linux community. Their main concerns are for support for in the infrastructure they already have running RHEL. As long as RHEL continues to provide services and support per their contractual agreements, I don't foresee any major shifts.
However, I would love to see a corporate shift from RHEL > Debian.
I remember a show of hands on distro use at a linux conference in the mid 2000s and just about everyone used Debian. I think we were all suprised. I suspect that would be different today with Ubuntu variants, Arch, Fedora but I doubt the handful of actual Red Hat users has changed. They always presented themselves as a much bigger distro than they ever were and their advertising and media coverage gave a very skewed impression.
I would see people using Centos and ask why and it was because they were in IT, but not grass roots linux users, and they thought Red Hat was the major Linux distro because of all the publicity they bought and the certifications. Red Hat's importance was that their relatively small number of enterprise customers brought in real revenue which funded full time developers and was a huge benefit to Linux. But for average Linux users they were and remain a bit of a side show.
I doubt big business will switch. Most customers of RHEL don't care if the general public has easy access to the source code. (I am assuming)
I think what we might see is small business using CentOS, Rocky, Alma etc, switch to Debian. Since they didn't have commercial support, Debian will be the same. Since they will no longer be clones of RHEL there is little incentive to use them
It's just the fact that the distros you rely on become more unstable. For the administrator/company it's just a migration or actually pay up. I work quite a lot with Ansible. But the current moves of red hat makes me afraid that's the next thing they will focus on to put behind a paywall.
2023 will be the year of the Debian server.
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