I am learning about community-based Linux distros as they are my preferred choice compared to corporate ones. And when I get to Fedora, what I see from the fence is a sofisticated, well-supported OS.

However, seeing that it is sponsored by the Red Hat corporation, the question arises: could Red Hat eventually take control of the project? I suppose the answer comes down to how much weight Red Hat actually has on the development of said distro. From what I know, it has employees dedicated full-time to it.

Let’s rephrase the question and say that the Fedora project ditched Red Hat from its development due to some irrepairable decision; how viable would the continuation of the OS development be as compared to, for example, Debian, which is also community-based but, as far as I know, has no such backing from a corporation?

Please, note that, while I am indeed a Debian user, I am not trying in any way to shit on Fedora. I myself am curious to try it out as I have recently arrived to Linux.

  • tyrant@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 days ago

    Why don’t you look into projects that aren’t related to a company? Aren’t Ubuntu, fedora, and open suse the 3 that have corporate support? There are plenty of distros out there that are stable on the Debian branch and a lot of interesting projects on the Arch branch as well.

    • FoundFootFootage78@lemmy.mlEnglish
      3·
      1 day ago

      The five major upstreams are Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Debian, and Arch. Three of those are corporate, two have some questionable security practices.

      So there’s no perfect distro.

        • pheusie@programming.dev
          2·
          4 hours ago

          Not the one you asked, but here’s my two cents.

          Arch, by virtue of its DIY nature, has little to no defaults. As such, common security measures are not pre-configured either. Thankfully, it makes up for that with its excellent wiki entry on security. Unfortunately, I don’t think most users ever seriously implement what’s found within.

          As for Debian, it actually does come with plenty of relatively sane defaults, including security. And Debian has shown to take security rather seriously. However, (most) Debian repositories are not great at providing up-to-date versions of the software they package:

          • The stable branch has outdated packages for the sake of providing a ‘boring’ (but reliable) experience. While security updates are backported, it is not the preferred way of keeping software safe and secure.
          • The testing branch is in a disturbing condition in which it holds software that is a bit more stable than the unstable branch. However, it does not enjoy the security updates backported to the stable branch. Nor does it immediately receive the security updates as they come to the unstable branch. A rather unsettling middle ground, if you will. Definitely not recommended for the security-conscious.
          • Finally, the unstable branch. Intuitively, this should provide the fix for the above problems. It should provide current software, which should mean that it receives updates as they’re released, security included. But, anecdotally, the likes of Arch, Fedora and openSUSE seem to be doing a better job at offering a (semi-)rolling release distro. But, please be my guest, and prove them wrong.
        • FoundFootFootage78@lemmy.mlEnglish
          22·
          19 hours ago

          Not really, I’ve mostly just heard about their security problems on the grapevine, I don’t have specific concerns in mind.

          Arch is pretty famous for being lax on security. Debian for having a pretty scrappy organisational structure.

    • Cekan14@lemmy.orgOP
      2·
      2 days ago

      I’m just learning about all this stuff but yeah, I’ll definitely take a look at Arch, although just out of curiosity, since I am overall satisfied with Debian.