Since Red Hat made their recent decision, there has been a lot more talk about people wanting to focus on communiy-based distros instead of corporate-backed distros.
I was trying to think of how many active, stable, user friendly base community distros I know about. When I say a “base” distro, I mean a distro that’s basically the base for its ecosystem. For instance, Debian would be a base distro because it’s the base of its ecosystem. A community distro based on Ubuntu wouldn’t fit what I’m talking about here because Ubuntu is a corporate distro.
So, there’s Debian.
Arch is a base community distro but it’s not user friendly to install, but there are more user friendly varieties of Arch available like Manjaro and a few others.
All of the other base distros I can think of are either corporate, or aren’t particularly user friendly to install. Care to add your thoughts to the list?
Major: Debian, Gentoo, NixOS, Arch and also FreeBSD (not GNU/Linux but still).
Other and esoteric: Void, Alpine, Solus, CRUX, Slackware, Mageia/OpenMandriva,
Corporate sponsored: Fedora, openSUSE
OpenSUSE
inb4 but thats a corporate distro, it is just sponsored by SUSE but is community maintained
I agree that there are not many distros that are both user friendly and not forks of something else, but I don’t see it as an issue, imo there is nothing wrong with forks.
The issue isn’t if something is a fork or not, the issue is if something is a fork of a corporate distro. For instance, there are forks of Arch that still meet the criteria because Arch is a base community distro, whereas OpenSuse is a fork of a corporate distro.
OpenSUSE is not a fork. It’s the base.
Fedora is also sponsored, and they just added telemetry
Did the telemetry vote already happen and succeed? Last I saw there was only an informal “feeling out” vote, but I haven’t been following closely since then.
