Yes I know that Cuba, the DPRK, and China have their own distros, but they’re pretty specific to the language and networks of those countries. I use linux because it’s free and open source but I use one of those distros that is privately owned and I’m thinking of upgrading to something that is truly communally owned but also has good compatibility with software, especially scientific software. Any good recs please?
Thanks!
I think Debian has the best principles out of any distro. Debian follows a list of principles called Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). You can read the principles and see if you like it.
The thing that I like the most about Debian is that the proprietary packages and FOSS packages are on different repositories. You can install Debian with no proprietary software and leave the proprietary repository disabled to have a completely FOSS system.
The Free / Non-Free demarcation is fairly well explored territory (and Debian is pretty solid on this front, despite falling short of FSF approval). Another thing that’s worth consideration and doesn’t get as much discussion is the organizational structure of a distribution.
Organizationally, there are roughly two types of Linux distributions. There are distributions which are created as a product or by-product of some company, who’s goal is ultimately to make money (through support contracts or hardware sales typically). These are your Ubuntus, Red Hats, Fedoras, Pop_OSs, SteamOSes, etc. Then there are distributions which are maintained directly by a public collective who’s sole purpose and raison d’être is the maintenance of the distribution. These are your Debians, Gentoos, ArchLinuxes, Guixs, etc.
As far as these collective organizations go, they vary a great deal in robustness. You could call a Github repository with a pair of maintainers and a dozen or so people reading the issue tracker an “organization.” On the other end of this spectrum, there are distributions like Debian and Gentoo which have incredibly robust organizations with constitutions, bylaws, committees, elections, referenda, etc. Then there are a lot of distros developed on an ad-hoc basis somewhere in-between these two examples.
Having a charter and elections doesn’t automatically make an institution good by any means, but governance structures like these have a big impact on the direction these distributions take, and what they are willing to compromise on. The ones which are organized publicly by members of the community rather than by the whims of some software company have done a good job keeping to their principles, and these distributions are among those of the greatest longevity.
Any distro is a socialist distro if a socialist uses it.
Under communism there is only one computer and each family has to share a TTY.
The users should own the means of computing. So choose Debian. The Debian Social Contract states:
We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities.
Any commercial distros do not do this. I don’t know if Arch or Gentoo have a written down charter or whatever, but they seem a lot less principled than Debian usually.
Arch seems fine, same with Debian if you don’t want to tinker as much.
Any experience with Fedora? I ask because apparently it’s the one Torvalds uses and because there are a few science-based Fedora variants.
I use the atomic/immutable community variants of Fedora. Bazzite if you’re a gamer, Bluefin or Aurora if not. Immutable is a whole other workflow, mainly in how you install packages (using flatpaks/brew or distrobox), but the system itself is essentially 0 maintenance because updates are automated and the OS rebuilt on reboot (while keeping your programs and user files). So its more stable than Arch nd you don’t have packages that are 2 years out of date like on Debian. The only downside is updates take a lot of bandwidth if thats a problem for you. But they’re the only distros I recommend to anybody now outside of Debian for servers.
The makers of Fedora, Red Hat, were acquired by IBM. So whilst there may be nothing wrong with the distro, they are part of your typical evil corpo. And I say this as a Fedora user
I can’t contradict the fact that Fedora is owned by IBM and used as an upstream for their Red Hat software, it is slightly concerning but not inherently problematic. I’ll at least say I personally have yet to experience any negatives for that fact, and I’ll also add that it does like Debian, and defaults to a “free” software repository, you have to manually enable the non-free ones.
It probably isn’t the “most socialist”, but it’s open source, absolutely prioritises open source fundamentally, and consequently it’s controllable by the people the second a corp fucks it over (like most Linux distros). I don’t think it’s turned in service of evil (yet).
Do you consider Ubuntu evil, and why? I know it’s owned by a private company (ugh) but searching around apparently it’s still open source
I mentioned Torvalds using Fedora not because I idolize him but as the dude who invented the damn thing he’s probably not using a piece of shit distro that doesn’t work well for anything. The DPRK, China, Cuba, and Venezuela for example each have their own Linux distros (Red Star OS, Kylin, Nova, Canaima) so when you say “these software movements would ever be possible in environments like North Korea [sic] or China” that’s demonstrably not correct. Thank you for the Trisquel recommendation though.
Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation have their way none of this flies because software must never be profitable,
That’s literally not what he says: (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html#selling)
“Free software” does not mean “noncommercial.” On the contrary, a free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. This policy is of fundamental importance—without this, free software could not achieve its aims.
We want to invite everyone to use the GNU system, including businesses and their workers. That requires allowing commercial use. We hope that free replacement programs will supplant comparable proprietary programs, but they can’t do that if businesses are forbidden to use them. We want commercial products that contain software to include the GNU system, and that would constitute commercial distribution for a price. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. Paid, professional support for free software fills an important need.
Thus, to exclude commercial use, commercial development or commercial distribution would hobble the free software community and obstruct its path to success. We must conclude that a program licensed with such restrictions does not qualify as free software.
Stop lying. You don’t understand what socialism means and you clearly don’t care to learn anything about AES countries judging from this and your other comment. Get your reactionary views away from this site before you misinform more people about free software. You wandered into the wrong part of lemmy with your bs.
