Red Hat's source code for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) was previously publicly accessible, even if you were not a customer. Now only customers may get access to the source code (which is allowed by the GPL since source code only has to be delivered to those who have received binaries generated from it). But there are Linux distributions who use Red Hat's publicly available sources to create RHEL "clones" (in quotation marks because they obviously don't pretend to be RHEL), except without providing the corporate support one would receive for being a RHEL customer. They do have community forums though.
The superficial issue is that those "clone"-distros would have to either purchase a RHEL license or apply to one of Red Hat's other programs to access the sources for their own distro. The actual issue is that Red Hat's terms for being a customer are that they'll kick you out if you use that code to redistribute your own versions of it (or, god forbid, even create a full distro from it).
Since CentOS proper was killed off years ago, many people who wanted a Red Hat compatible server distro but didn't want or need commercial support shifted their systems to the aforementioned other "clone"-distros, which are now in danger of disappearing because of that change.
Is Red Hat legally able to do it? Yes. Is it a dick move? Absolutely. Will it help spread the popularity of RHEL or other Red Hat distros? Absolutely not.
Not that this will ever happen, but I'd love it if the GPL were somehow retroactively amended to not allow what Red Hat is doing. I feel like not providing free access to anyone who wants to see or use the source code sorta defeats the purpose of an open source license.
It can't be retroactively amended, that's not how contract law works. The GPL isn't something you sign up for and you have to accept updates. It's a model license that people are free to use instead of writing their own. While a lot of people do license their software under "GPL version X or later", that is not mandatory and it would severely hurt GPL adoption if it were made mandatory in a future version.
Uh. The relationship between CentOS Stream and RHEL is a bit murkier to me. I'd be lying to you if I said I fully understood how that code flow works.
For openSUSE the flow is "openSUSE Tumbleweed" -> "SUSE Linux Enterprise" -> "openSUSE Leap"
Everytime SUSE creates a new version/service pack of SLE (SLE 15 SP4, to use an example) the sources for that version are provided to openSUSE, and a new version of Leap is released (openSUSE Leap 15.4)
I don't actually work on Leap much, nor am I a SUSE Employee, so there are probably some minutae in that process that I'm missing, but that's the basic workflow.
You did not mention the acquisition of Redhat by IBM in 2018. At the time, many observers were worried about what IBM would do with Redhat, and always wondered when IBM would go corporate crazy over a company with a model based on open source. So this decision crystalize the doubts that many people had at the time, that IBM would milk Redhat more, and this induce a kind of "Yep, of course they did go corporate crazy!" reaction.
Many people feel burned and don't want to invest more efforts in a company with this kind of methods (they did not even allow a grace period) and want to jump ship.
At best that's extremely debateable. The GPL explicitly precludes placing any other restrictions on receiving the code outside of the ones in the GPL. A paywall to receive code from them is allowed. Terminating access for someone exercising the rights explicitly granted to them by the GPL sure as hell sounds like an additional restriction to me. The entire contract you have to sign to receive the code the first time most definitely is.
Remember that when a disk is mentioned in fstab, if the disk is not present at boot time then your machine will return an error. If you replace/swap your steam disks remember to comment this line in /etc/fstab until you have finished your maintenance.
edit: Now steam is giving a disk write error. Permissions?
When I was setting the drives up I set them with the command line "sudo chmod ugo+wx "/where/the/drive/ismounted"".
Was this not correct? Steam itself can write files as it's already setup the folder heirarchy, but when it attempts to download any game it throws a disk write error. When I check the permissions of the folders it working in it looks like the screenshot in this post.
so /target belongs to you and you can do anything you want in it. Who knows, maybe steam checks that only you has the privilege to read/write in it? (to protect your credit card information, registration keys, licenses... or whatever of value that could be in these folders? That would be a possibility that you have to take into consideration when money is involved. Anyway this is a safe and clean procedure to operate with mount points.
In the future your process steam will be run as yourself, writing and reading as if it was yourself, in a folder where he has all the rights to do so. Since he can only write files and folders as yourself there should be no problem anymore. So you will be fine.
The better solution on that second command (chmod) would be
chmod -R u+rwX /target
-R : recursive, affects all files and subdirectiories
u: current user (who just took ownership of everything with the previous command)
+rwX: add read access, write access for all files and directories. Adds execute (list/traverse) access for directories only
That covers existing files/directories and anything new.
Of course, if the permissions are all screwed up now, one might have to run these with sudo!
More generally, the permissions on all new files/dirs are controlled by the umask command:
You can use mount -fav to let it verify the fstab automatically. If it goes through without errors, you can do mount -a to apply the fstab without rebooting.
it will become a condition for booting your machine.
Personally, this is what I want to avoid (particularly for slower drives, though I leave the HDD unmounted most of the time) because booting isn't as fast as it should be already (mobo firmware), and I did see some info about passwordless mounting but it doesn't seem to make post-boot startup commands work properly.
Though luckily nothing much actually needs this, if I forgot to mount the SSD and open Steam I just close it and do that (in the past sometimes I've had to re-start Steam twice for it to take effect).
Use Ubuntu until you have a first-hand reason why you should use something else.
It's not perfect, but it's still the 800 lb gorilla, and it's what things have the least chance of not working with. It has the most eyes on it and the most immediate solutions when you google a problem.
To add to this: Try to avoid adding software via the software center, instead prefer flatpak, appimage or plain .deb if there is no alternatives. (Application) software in the official repos is often outdated.
I also wanna stress the point that you should not only research different distros, but also whether you would prefer KDE or Gnome. There are other desktops, but for your first time, I'd go as mainstream as possible.
Have distro hopped over the years - most recently Manjaro to Fedora to Endeavour, but haven't found the one that's quite perfect for me.
That said, I'd make a few recommendations based on the person I'd be "marketing" to:
New to Linux, looking for polish: Mint
Mint is built off the well-known Ubuntu, polished a step further. It's in my experience the simplest to use and most generally polished of the Linux offerings. The community generally isn't as catered to power users, but if you care more about your time than about customization, I'd recommend Mint.
Looking for Stable/Modern, willing to jump thru a few hoops: Fedora
Fedora has come a long way over the years. It's far more stable, polished, and accessible than ever before. I'd hazard to call it my top recommendation, BUT, third-party software management and installation can be something of a nightmare. COPR is approximately equivalent to the AUR of Manjaro/Endeavour/Arch below, but at this time very obtuse and difficult to learn or work with. Some day you'll want a package that exists in COPR, and that day won't be fun for you.
Need apps you can't find anywhere else: Endeavour/Manjaro
Forget bleeding-edge packages and rolling release - the Arch User Repository (AUR) is hands-down the greatest feature on offer from Arch-based distros. The AUR is a repository of packages created by users that aren't supported by the main repos. If ever there's a time you need a piece of software and you can't find it anywhere else, the AUR's your best bet.
That said, I found/find both Manjaro and now Endeavour to be a little rough around the edges, and the consequence of rolling-release and bleeding-edge software is a system that isn't always working just right.
Looking to learn, straight into the frying pan: Arch
Same benefits and drawbacks of Endeavour/Manjaro above, but if you want to set up your system service-by-service, as lean as you want, Arch is there for you. A great experience if you just need an excuse to "try" putting an OS together piece by piece, even if you don't ultimately keep it in the long run.
Desktop Environments
The great DE debate. Nobody can tell you what's right and wrong here, but I have a few general breakdowns of the "big three". GNOME: If simplicity and elegance is your style. You sacrifice customization potential for cohesion and polish. KDE: Modern. Powerful. Usually polished out the gate. Can be a bit much if you're trying to tweak it tho. My personal choice. XFCE: Less modern, more friendly to lower-end systems.
Great write-up. Arch was my first experience with Linux on the desktop, and I learned so much. Would highly recommend it, even if you don’t want to stick with it.
There are a few obvious security implications with the rise of containerized packaging. One of the first is the move away from true centralized, least trust packaging. With traditional packages, you are trusting your distro maintainer (be it Debian, Canonical, RedHat, Arch, SUSE, etc.) To provide patched versions of software from their trusted repository mirrors to your computer. This does a few things like limiting the amount of places that you need to download software binaries from, as well as having other potential benefits like checksum validation on downloaded packages.
Most containerized package platforms including Docker, Snap, Flatpak tend to have a centralized set of repository mirrors, but anyone may compile and publish their own software to it. Flatpak is kind of the exception to this. Some distros (i.e. Fedora) publish their own sets of repos with flatpak packages. This is because Flatpak allows for more than one source repo for packages. I do believe Docker, Podman allow for the same as well. Snap infamously doesn't allow any repos other than Canonical's proprietary community repo.
Most of these containerized packages solutions also offer varying levels of sandboxing, which is a good set of security features that could benefit individual hosts from potentially vulnerable software. One could argue that flatpaking Firefox or other browsers and jailing them to limited capabilities and filesystem access is a good thing given the potential for malware propagation through such applications.
In particular though, most containerized solutions aren't generally hated by online user communities except Snap, which has both been among the most restrictive as well as furthest behind in features, performance parity, and general user experience. Snap was for the longest time significantly far behind Flatpak for user land applications and still wouldn't be my first choice for server applications compared to Podman or Docker due to just not being nearly as flexible as the other two.
The performance of the platforms can vary compared to native. For the desktop-oriented platforms (Snap, Flatpak) they generally perform insignificantly different from native packages, although Snap packages that are built compressed have had horrific IO performance for the loading of package files (leading to atrociously slow startup times of applications in the past). This is supposedly better now, though I have no intention of installing Snapd to find out.
As a note for culture, people particularly also dislike Snap because of how badly Ubuntu (Canonical's Linux distro) is depending on it, including having Snap automatically reinstall after removal and dropping many packages from apt only to throw redirects in to pull the snap package when requested from apt. This is why de-snapped derivatives of Ubuntu are also popular.
As for package sizes, they tend to be a bit bigger than native, as well as the added cost of a second set of libraries. Many users online don't get the 'why' when their first package from Flatpak is nearly a 3 GiB download, despite the following packages will hardly be any different in size from native packages. In a way, these packaging solutions do remove an advantage of the singular set of libraries. If you use netbooks, SBCs, IoT devices, or other similar minimal storage devices, you might feel this impact. However most systems will only have a marginal increase of storage utilization overall from a second set of libraries being installed.
I’ll add my 2 cents to your very well written comment.
My biggest gripe with flatpaks notably, is the more difficult integration into the system. I use about a dozen flatpaks, and for every single one I had to tinker with flatseal to give them the correct access permissions, that I had to research online. One specific flatpak coulnd’t even work with those additional permissions. Half of those flatlaks also will not follow my system theme and their GUI looks broken or out of place.
Given my limited usage of system themes to one that has flatpak packages (Materia) and tendency to go through the permissions of new flatpaks and tighten them anyway, those are good points to mention. For theming, it is definitely a trouble point depending on the platform and theme used. Especially when combining Qt5/Qt6 apps, Fltk, GTK2,3+, and GTK4 applications together, things may get even more messy than consistent theming on native applications. Having comprehensive theme packages for the theme you use almost completely resolves this problem. Though I doubt predefined customization isn't something that will be popular with some users given that ricing your Linux desktop to the extreme is a huge selling point of the Linux desktop for many.
I did forget about how especially with Flatpak and Snap how there is no actual guarantee that the default sandboxing permissions will actually be any good or even usable on many applications, which is an issue that partially comes from when community maintainers end up publishing packages for developers rather than developers or dedicated platform testers publish a given package (a common practice for many applications on the Flathub repository).
Half of those flatlaks also will not follow my system theme and their GUI looks broken or out of place.
This always struck me as weird: the entire point of flatpak is to be isolated and not integrate into your system, why would you expect it to integrate with your theme?
I know they try anyway, but it just seems like a conceptual problem to me. They want to solve packaging by pretending it doesn't exist.
Assuming RedHat is the same as my company, Sales and Marketing includes Sales Engineer and Client Implementation. And based on their Jobs page, that is the case. https://www.redhat.com/en/jobs/departments.
Good point. But it does point to the fact that company is business of "selling" and/or "making money" not active development of their product, ie they are milking their IP, not moving it forward aggressively.
It also explains anti-competitive behavior. They are having to put up walls now because gravy is is good and they are looking to protect it.
Of course harassment is never okay, but I'd say when it comes to GNOME, this is not surprising. GNOME developers have been so hostile towards both users and other developers for a long time. I'm not saying every single person associated with the project does this, but it is pretty common (e.g. here and here ). Of course the GNOME devs don't have to accomodate everyone, but it is a common theme with the project to remove features despite user backlash and also to close bugs as WONTFIX often without good explanations as to why, even when there are pull requests for fixing the problem.
I am simply avoiding the project, since there are enough good alternatives.
@Zeppo Yeah I might try the Dual Boot system to begin with to save me time working out VMs but I think the long goal would be running a windows VM on Linux tbh.
If you must dual boot, have totally separate hard drives, and the choosing between Linux and Windows should be done in the UEFI boot menu, not GRUB menu. Windows can render Linux unbootable otherwise, requiring a rather complicated rescue. Windows would ideally not have any chance to see the Linux hard drive while booted.
An external SATA SSD in a USB enclosure is cheap these days.
Yeah, Windows likes to overwrite the MBR with no warning as if that’s perfectly fine. I’ve always wondered what combination of carelessness, incompetence, interface streamlining and competitive malice is responsible for that. It’s also ridiculous how in 2023 there’s still no native way to read Linux filesystems from Windows.
@Zeppo That does sound ridiculous especially as I wouldn't mind running linux through Windows, I know it wouldn't work as well but I know I would do a lot of my less complex tasks through there such as browsing the internet as I could game on Windows or Linux as I don't really mind if I'm VMing one
@Zeppo The goal would be to use Linux as my base OS in the future. As I look through the many comments from everyone I am now re-evaluating some of the things I feel I 'Need' in my set up such as my Sync Cloud Storage, Instead I hope to move over to External Hard Drives.
Knowing Adobe is a huge part of my setup does hurt the idea of moving to Linux at the moment but I will have to find if there is a workaround other than VMs in the future. People mentioned GPU Passthrough on the VM which would help a lot, It's just not only learning how to run a VM but how to do the pass-through on it.
But yes I do wish to move to Linux in the future but maybe baby testing the Distos I think I might like on a VM might be the best way to step into this rather than going into the deep end straight away.
Sure, installing Linux in a VM would be the fastest and easiest way to test it out and start becoming familiar! You could try a few distros/desktop environments and see what you like without having to deal with reformatting or real hardware.
I do the external usb ssd for my windows drive and recommend it endlessly. I use the windows drive for music production and the maybe 2 games in my several hundred game library that don't work in linux. 100 bucks for a 1tb samsung external ssd, and wintousb to make it functional.
@technologicalcaveman Thank you never have heard of a WinToUSB but will really need to look into it as it sounds like a great way to be able to run Linux.
It's a good tool, pretty easy to set up too. I personally recommend not connecting to internet when setting up windows 10 so that you're not forced into either signing in or signing up for a windows account. I did that and about a year later on the same install, it's all good still.
You'll hear it in every company: Sales produces revenue. Everything else is a cost center. If a business could have only Sales and nothing else, they would.
Right? Like it or not, we live in a society dominated by money. A very small number of Linux distributions have found a way to sustainably produce an excellent product. That's a good thing. The alternatives are either burnout or insecurity.
The old saying "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" is an old saying that meant something at some point; whether it still does is another matter. Read the link above to get the full picture. (As someone that used to do support work for HP, a lot of the sales-centric, don't-spend-money-on-the-tech-folks mindset resonated with me.)
People (myself included) aren't happy with Red Hat's proclamation. As an individual, I can't do much other than to watch how this plays out and give my team and management the heads-up, and monitor.
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