RH, Cononical and SuSE boiling the GPL Frog?

[GreyGeek]

DJWare seems to think so. That's why he's dumping all of them.
The reason is that the GPL is dying, at only 22% of its former usage, and the corporations are taking control of the binaries.

[TWPonKubuntu]

This raises (in my mind anyway) the question of what will GPL become? Will it survive? I'd like to hear from Linus Torvalds on this point: the future of GPL.

What are our choices at this point in the process? I'm NOT bound to one flavor of Linux, so I am free to throw out the commercial proponents of non-GPL code.

How about the rest of you? Can you "vote with your feet" and move to another platform? Before you ask; NO, Windows/Microsoft is not an option for me.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Well, there are these three big Linux corporations: Canonical with Ubuntu (and several from the community), IBM/Red Hat with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (and e.g. Fedora from the community) and SUSE with SUSE Linux Enterprise (and e.g. openSUSE Leap and Tumbleweed from the community).

And then there are the two biggest independent community-driven Linux distributions Arch and Debian.

If anything goes badly wrong permanently with the three big commercial Linux players (in terms of GPL or otherwise) I suppose and hope that this will not have such a big impact on at least Arch and Debian - such that those two won't be usable in their present way for us anymore…
I just have to choose one of the two from my boot menu and I am good to go (Debian is my current primary system anyhow).

And although Fedora and openSUSE Tumbleweed are much closer to those corporations at least they are upstream…

PS: SUSE already has made a statement (aimed at Red Hat, of course) in the sense that their source code will stay freely available for the community (whatever that may be worth for openSUSE Leap considering the present changes) - and I have not heard from Canonical that they think otherwise…

[kc1di]

If the big three go closed source. I would most likely go with Debian myself. As that is what I'm used to. I have simply never cared for Arch though I've tried it many times. Distrowatch's Jessie Smith had a good write up this week on his Question & Answers column about the Redhat move. Open SUSE has already announce it's going to be ending it's leap program maybe after it's next release. I"m not sure what that will mean for them yet. But what ever comes out of it it will most likely not be bug for bug OpenSuSE enterprise version. I still like Kubuntu for my daily driver. But what will happen in the future with Ubuntu/Kubuntu we will have to wait and see. It for sure that some of the big three are looking for ways to skirt the GPL.

[Schwarzer Kater]

[…]
Open SUSE has already announce it's going to be ending it's leap program maybe after it's next release. I"m not sure what that will mean for them yet. But what ever comes out of it it will most likely not be bug for bug OpenSuSE enterprise version.
[…]

openSUSE Leap will at least get another (final?) upgrade from 15.5 to 15.6 next year (I like to run Leap with their KDE backports on older computers - it is a bit like KDE neon then).
openSUSE Tumbleweed will stay as it is (and upstream, of course).

If I understood this correctly the sucessor for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop could be SUSE Linux Enterprise Micro (?) - and the community versions based on this are openSUSE Aeon (GNOME) and openSUSE Kalpa (KDE Plasma) which were formerly known as openSUSE MicroOS Desktop…
They are similar to Fedora Silverblue and Kinoite.

At present I find this a bit confusing - but I am also not interested in "immutable" systems for my use cases at the moment…

[GreyGeek]

If push came to shove I'd walk my feet over to Debian, even though its versions are about two years behind Kubuntu, AND, it's installation program, DebianInstaller (Calamares wasn't offered to me ), was introduced in 2005 and, from my observations, seems like it stayed in 2005. It's GUI version mimics the console version but is easier to navigate. Its use is not intuitive so unless one has an excellent memory its best to follow documentation while using it. The Debian installation documentation for the amd64 is here.

I managed to install it using virt but the HD manual partition section is very obtuse. So much so, that knowledgeable users jump to a terminal and manually create the efi partition, the swap and the BTRFS partition, edit fstab to change @rootfs to @ and use mv to move @rootfs to @. IF & when I install it to my laptop that is the method I will use, as illustrated in the following video. Also there are about a dozen changes that need to be made right after the install.
The semi-graphical install

The dozen changes

[Schwarzer Kater]

How to install KDE Plasma in Debian 12 (an example for advanced users)

--> This post is for a Debian 12 (Bookworm) installation with ext4 as a desktop system with KDE Plasma in X11 and meant for advanced users.

I really love Debian, but honestly I think that the installation ISOs of Debian are (still) not good for KDE Plasma (this is of course my personal opinion).
By that I mean the pre-configured software selection "KDE Plasma" of the "DVD-1" and "netinst" ISOs and the "debian-live-XXX-kde" ISO, which I consider even worse.

They install lots of unnecessary packages (at least for me, like the KDE PIM suite and - depending on the ISO - strange and lots of localisation support files or several different terminal emulators …) and are missing out other important stuff (for me).
And some default system configurations are not that great for a desktop installation either (like still in nearly any Linux distribution …).

--> I always install Debian with KDE Plasma on x86-64 this way:

• install Debian without any desktop environment from the DVD-1 or the netinst ISOs (do not use the debian-live-XXX-kde ISO!)
• reboot
• add contrib and non-free in /etc/apt/sources.list (or already choose "non-free software" during "expert install" of DVD-1/netinst)
• install linux-headers-amd64 firmware-linux xserver-xorg-video-all (and nvidia-driver if you have an Nvidia GPU)
• reboot
• install kde-plasma-desktop plasma-nm
• comment out the primary network interface in /etc/network/interfaces
• reboot
• install some KDE Plasma stuff, programs and system components (that are fundamental to me) to get a decent KDE Plasma experience and a versatile desktop system, like at least (of course feel free to leave out or add whatever you want, but I would advise to install most of the "(KDE Plasma) system components etc."):
  
  KDE applications
  ark elisa filelight gwenview k3b k3b-extrathemes kcalc kcolorchooser kcharselect kde-spectacle kompare konversation krename krita ksystemlog kteatime ktorrent kwave marble okular plasma-welcome skanlite soundkonverter yakuake
  --> if you want to have the KDE PIM suite with its Akonadi server running in the background, additionally install the metapackage kdepim
  
  KDE Games
  kmahjongg kmines kpat ksudoko
  
  Non-KDE applications
  backintime-qt btrfs-progs clamtk filezilla flatpak gimp gimp-data-extras gimp-help-en htop inkscape keepassxc mpv ncdu neofetch nmap samba simplescreenrecorder thunderbird vim vlc
  
  LibreOffice
  libreoffice libreoffice-help-en-us libreoffice-kf5 libreoffice-plasma libreoffice-qt5 libreoffice-style-breeze hyphen-en-us hunspell-en-us mythes-en-us
  
  (KDE Plasma) system components etc.
  dolphin-plugins kdenetwork-filesharing kde-config-cron kde-config-flatpak kde-config-gtk-style-preview kde-config-systemd kio-admin kio-fuse kipi-plugins kwin-addons libkf5webkit5 plasma-calendar-addons plasma-firewall plasma-discover-backend-flatpak plasma-marble plasma-runners-addons plasma-wallpapers-addons plasma-widgets-addons plasma-workspace-wallpapers print-manager qtvirtualkeyboard-plugin
  
  appmenu-gtk2-module appmenu-gtk3-module clinfo libavcodec-extra gstreamer1.0-vaapi libayatana-appindicator1 libayatana-appindicator3-1 libdvd-pkg ttf-mscorefonts-installer vulkan-tools
  
  --> Be aware that in the above list there are some language-specific packages for English/US ("…-en" and "…-en-us"), like for GIMP, LibreOffice and Thunderbird - replace them with packages for your appropriate country code, e.g.
  gimp-help-de, thunderbird-l10n-de (instead of thunderbird), libreoffice-help-de, hyphen-de, hunspell-de-de-frami, mythes-de
  and add k3b-i18n, krita-l10n and libreoffice-l10n-de
  if you want to use this list for German.
  
  --> And search the internet / use apt info for the packages you don't know - you might not need or want them!

• reboot
• install Firefox from Mozilla.org: https://wiki.debian.org/Firefox#From_Mozilla_binaries or you can also use the install traditional Firefox script for that (it works flawlessly on Debian too)
• configure the system:
  add noatime and other stuff to fstab
  reduce swappiness to 10 for a desktop installation (with swap partition/file)
  tune e.g. vfs_cache_pressure according to RAM size and use case
  disable watchdog for a desktop installation
  disable hibernation ("suspend to disk", e.g. mask hibernate.target) for a desktop computer
  disable fast user switching in kdeglobals
  take KDE's Distributions/Packaging Recommendations into account
  adjust System Settings
  etc.
• install fonts and any additional (less important) programs and stuff that are needed or were missed above (the most important thing is that KTeaTime is installed, of course! )
• install peripheral equipment, e.g. printers
• reboot
• done

PS: Later on when one might need some more recent versions of packages/programs/kernels/drivers one can add the following to the /etc/apt/sources.list and explicitly install those from there (or already enable "backported software" during "expert install" of DVD-1/netinst).

# bookworm-backports, to get more recent packages
deb https://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports main non-free-firmware contrib non-free
#deb-src https://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports main non-free-firmware contrib non-free​

Or one installs these (programs) as Flatpaks.

[GreyGeek]

Bookmarked this post!

[GreyGeek]

Just to try things out I installed Debian 12 as a VM using qemu/kvm.
The Calamares installer is NOT user friendly. It's tricky to use and will take getting used to. A line on the installs screen gives no clue as to whether it is a label or active. One has to click on it to test it out. I made a 60GB cowq2 drive and chose the graphical install (first option). Under a VM install while manually formatting the HD the option to use GPT never appears and one is not offered /boot/efi with the boot flag set. What is offered is EXT4, "/boot", and with the boot flag off. It took several clicks and space bar uses before it switched to "on". Very touchy interface. During the process I selected KDE as the desktop and the install completed without problems. A reboot brought up the plasma desktop. Since I'm running Kubuntu 20.04 it is pretty much what I am running now.
Instead of "@" Debian creates @rootfs. I su'd to root, mounted /dev/dva3 to /mnt and "mv /mnt/@rootfs /mnt/@", and edited /etc/fstab to change @rootfs to @.
Then I rebooted.
Seemed like such a simple change. Debian complained that it couldn't find /root.
Easy fix. I deleted the installation.

IF and when I install Debian to this computer I'll use the option that all the videos that install btrfs as the filesystem show. Doing a ctl+alt+F2 and doing everything manually. Doing it that why I can create @ and edit fstab to show it.

[Schwarzer Kater]

If push came to shove I'd walk my feet over to Debian, even though its versions are about two years behind Kubuntu, […]

I have to add here that out of fairness one should not compare Debian to the (K)ubuntu interim releases but to the LTS releases.
Nowadays in one year (the odd years) Debian has more recent packages than (K)ubuntu LTS - and vice versa in the next year (the even years).

[GreyGeek]

Good point. I should have added the reference to LTS, which is what I run and why Debian 12 plasma desktop seems identical to Kubuntu 20.04.2 LTS. After a year on Neon and its "leading edge", I decided to return to the calmer Kubuntu LTS.

The "5.19 kernel Ubuntu 22.04.2" is supported until April of 2027, which is 3 more years.
Debian 12 "Bookworm" has 3 years of support.

In 3 years, at 85 yo, I may not remember how to run either distro. So, while I still can, I've decided to switch to Debian. I just finished burning the Live KDE iso and will probably install it to my Samsung 890 Pro SSD sometime later this week or early next week.

[GreyGeek]

I just discovered this video reviewing Debian "Bookworm". It is very frank and honest, and expresses an experience similar to what I had.
I'm still planning on switching to Debian 12

[Schwarzer Kater]

GreyGeek

The "5.19 kernel Ubuntu 22.04.2" is supported until April of 2027, which is 3 more years.
Debian 12 "Bookworm" has 3 years of support.

In 3 years, at 85 yo, I may not remember how to run either distro. […]

There also is the Debian LTS team (and has been for a decade): https://wiki.debian.org/LTS
So you have 5 years of security maintenance for every Debian release (excluding the Debian Backports) - and there are companies that expand that to 10 or more years (but this is for money then, AFAIK, like in *Ubuntu).

But this will not be long enough, because we all expect that you will explain Linux to us for at least another 25 years, of course!
So prepare to install Kubuntu 24.04, Debian 13, Kubuntu 26.04, Debian 14, …

[GreyGeek]

I like your optimism!

My dad lived to 94 so if I match him I've got 12 more years. However, at 82 he was still living in the cabin he built and hiked the mountains almost daily! In 1991 I went to my sister's house in Arvada, CO, to visit her, my dad and my stepmother and stepbrother. I was setting in the living room on the couch when he arrived. He walked in and sat next to me and we had about a 15 minute conversation before he excused himself and went into the kitchen to talk to my sister and stepmother. Later my sister told me that he asked her who I was and how I knew so much about him. Three years later the dementia was so bad my stepmother couldn't take care of him any more so she moved him to a rest home. She sold the cabin, which he had built in 1965, and moved to an apartment in Denver. He died in 1998.

He was quite the wood craftsman and built that cabin in the mountains by himself in 1965 for a total cost of about $15K. My daughter works in Denver and noticed a for sale listing of the cabin earlier this year. The listed price was $415K.

[Beerislife]

If Neon goes away I've got my eye on Endeavour OS. Since I now have a spare PC, I can test drive the Plasma version. When I get time!

[kc1di]

I have to add here that out of fairness one should not compare Debian to the (K)ubuntu interim releases but to the LTS releases.
Nowadays in one year (the odd years) Debian has more recent packages than (K)ubuntu LTS - and vice versa in the next year (the even years).

I don't know if they have fixed the live .iso yet, but when Debian 12 was released the live .iso image when installed to hardware did not produce a good and usuable /etc/apt/sources list. You will be better off using the .net .iso to install with. I and others had issued a bug report about it. In the debian system. Other than that it works well. This flaw produces the inability to update/upgrade the system after install. I believe it may have also been a problem with the full download .iso but now sure.

[Schwarzer Kater]

At least this also depends on whether you choose "use a mirror" or not during installation. If you don't, there will only be the installation medium in your /etc/apt/sources.list .

The Debian 12 "DVD-1" and "netinst" ISOs are the better installation ISOs nonetheless compared to the "debian-live-XXX-kde" ISO, at least for KDE Plasma - if you use the KDE PIM suite / Akonadi anyhow I would also recommend installing from "DVD-1" or "netinst".
Otherwise see post # 7.

In fact I quite like the partitioning tool on it (IIRC it is a front-end to partman): it is reasonably versatile, very reliable and has done what it says under any circumstances for years - the only better partitioning tool on an installation medium is the openSUSE one IMHO (I don't like the RHEL/Fedora one and the *Ubuntu and Calamares ones are both crappy and buggy).

[Schwarzer Kater]

On topic again!

DJ Ware has published a second part: Boiling the Right Frog - The Return of the Clones

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_2cMniKPqQ