A lot of debate today about “community” vs “corporate”-driven distributions. I (think I) understand the basic difference between the two, but what confuses me is when I read, for example:
…distro X is a community-driven distribution based on Ubuntu…
Now, from what I understand, Ubuntu is corporate-driven (Canonical). So in which sense is distro X above “community-driven”, if it’s based on Ubuntu? And more concretely: what would happen to distribution X if Canonical suddeny made Ubuntu closed-source? (Edit: from the nice explanations below, this example with Ubuntu is not fully realistic – but I hope you get my point.)
Possibly my question doesn’t make full sense because I don’t understand the whole topic. Apologies in that case – I’m here to learn. Cheers!
what would happen to distribution X if Canonical suddeny made Ubuntu closed-source?
I believe Linux Mint has done some planning for if Ubuntu does something like that - probably to rebase off Debian in that case
The key is in the name. Whoever distributes the software to you determines whether it’s commercial or community. Where they get it from is irrelevant because they’re the ones distributing it to you.
Ubuntu can’t be made closed-source because of the licensing of the software they use from upstream. Red Hat is still not closed source, for instance. Everyone who gets it gets access to the source code. But if Ubuntu went away or whatever then downstream distributions would be in a spot of trouble. They could rebase on Debian (which is what Ubuntu is based upon), but how hard that would be varies wildly depending on distro. Linux Mint already have a Debian edition, for instance. No problem there. Pop OS would certainly be able to make it work as well; they’re a very professional operation. But take, for example, Endeavour OS. It’s Arch with a graphical installer and some nice defaults. Without Arch Linux (which is almost certainly not going anywhere and is a community distro) they’d have some real problems. There’s no upstream to Arch to rebase on. They’d have to so fundamentally change everything to accomodate a whole new base and packaging system that they’d basically be making a whole new distro.
Thank you for the explanations! Which are the “most upstream” community-based ones? From what I gather, Arch, Debian, OpenSUSE?
Off the top of my head, it’d be Debian, Arch, Void, and Gentoo. There are others that are debatable.
Don’t forget Solus!
Perhaps fair, but since they’re planning to move downstream of Serpent OS, they’re not gonna be an independant distro for much longer and probably shouldn’t count in the broader context of this thread.
I also didn’t count a bunch of distros with atypical functionality (like NixOS, Alpine, Slackware, etc), just because they tend to have very particular usecases and maybe aren’t well-suited as general recommendations if someone’s looking for a typical Linux experience, but YMMV.
Not sure if any Suse would fit in there. I’d say more Arch, Debian, Slackware (is that a thing anymore?), Gentoo, Linux From Scratch if you count that as a distro.
openSUSE is an odd mix because they have a very good relationship with SUSE and Tumbleweed and Leap have different hierarchies. As a result, openSUSE is both upstream, apart from, alongside, and a derivative of the corporate distro.
openSUSE Factory is where development happens that eventually becomes openSUSE and SUSE Enterprise Linux (snapshots of Factory make up Tumbleweed). SUSE stabilizes a core system for their corporate customers and shares those binaries (as of 15.3) and source with openSUSE for Leap. openSUSE maintains a larger number of backports packages that are shared with SUSE as as community supported software repo.
Oh wow, interesting
Indeed! @NaN if you have any links or references where I can read more about this interesting relationship, feel free to share.(Cool username by the way.)
From what I understand and to continue your example of Ubuntu-based distros:
As you say, Ubuntu itself is corporate-driven, so there are things in there that exist pretty much solely to benefit Canonical (e.g the telemetry they recently introduced if i recall correctly)
Most of the time when basing distros off of others, I think it’s to keep a lot of features - either to save dev time or because they only want to tweak a small portion of the distro and not write a new one from scratch.
Because devs can modify the entire codebase, they can remove features that are corporate-driven (telemetry and such) and effectively create something fully (or mostly) compatible yet without such features.
Another major example imo is the removal of snaps, which most people (myself included) strongly dislike - as far as I’m aware removing them in Ubuntu itself is quite a difficult process as it’s baked into the distro itself. I imagine a lot of people want something like Ubuntu as it is quite friendly and has one of the lower bars of entry for Linux, but object to corporate things like telemetry and the overall monstrosity that is snaps.
Apologies, i went down a bit of a tangent, but I hope that roughly answers your question!
Would you be able to keep going on your snap tanget? I’m mainly a windows dude and only dabble in Linux, so I’m curious as to the strong feelings there.
Motivations by the company have been explained far better than I could by the other replies, but from both mine and other people’s experience, some software when installed via snaps seems to perform badly compared to any other method of installation (notably chrome and firefox i think). Also snap isn’t really bringing anything special to the table whereas flatpak has a more interesting containerised approach from what I’m aware.
In any case with the way ubuntu’s going I’m really not over the moon with anything canonical (and i don’t think I’m alone)
