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]
