I’ve seen Fedora being widely recommended among the Linux distros. Sadly, there are many problems that come with Fedora. A lot of this information might be a bit hard to find so I wanted to put everything I found in one place.
- Fedora is (kind of) owned by Red Hat (IBM).
Red Hat sponsors Fedora. They own and pay for the infrastructure used for all the Fedora-related things. They own the Fedora trademark and logo. Big decisions are made by the FESCo. While the committee itself is elected by Fedora community, they’re pretty much just exclusively Red Hat employees (for F41 elections all 5 of elected candidates work at Red Hat). I’m not going to talk about what-ifs much here, but if there would ever be a divide between what RH wants and what community wants, you can see it being an issue.
- US laws and Fedora
Fedora has to follow the US law. In practice, we have seen what that means a while ago, when they had to remove support from some multimedia codecs due to the US patent laws. Since then, basic functionalities like video playback in a web browser/video player have been broken, so for example you can’t play Twitch videos “by default” in Fedora, since the codecs are missing (youtube works as they use av1). To circumvent it, you either have to use third party repos or flatpak.
- Fedora Export Control Policy and it’s consequences
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/export/ Yet another US law that Fedora has to adhere to. Basically, if you live in a country that the USA treats as an enemy, you should not use Fedora. This is yet another one that was actually applied in real life and resulted in basically kicking out a longtime contributor because he had the misfortune of being born in the wrong country. You can read all about in on that person’s blogpost:
https://ahmadhaghighi.com/blog/2021/us-restricted-free-software/
IBM are still ass and antiuser. See the whole CentOS/Rocky split. I’ve also got personal beef with them regarding buying up and enshittifying small data centers.
Didn’t that happen before IBM merged with RedHat?
[Edit] My mistake, it was about a year after the IBM merger.
It doesn’t matter though because Red Hat is an independent subsidiary. They make their own decisions, good or bad.
I don’t think they would have crippled CentOS without financial incentive and pressure from IBM. I don’t think they’re as independent as you think they are, even if it looks that way on paper.
I think they’ve been financially pressured to do these kinds of things since they went public, aka since the beginning.
Shareholders demand infinite growth, and at a certain point the suits look at something like CentOS and think “we’re paying to help people not need a RHEL sub”.
While I completely agree with this, I’m sure RedHat is perfectly capable of ruining things without IBM forcing them to, it was more than I was trying to remember the order of events and I thought I remembered that RedHat managed to get that change in before blamed could be fobbed off on IBM.