I am going to go out on a limb and say that they like Debian but dislike systemd.

Most of the fundamental packages in your Linux distribution are primarily written by Red Hat. Do you use Glibc, GCC, gnu utils, systemd, GNOME, podman, pipewire, Wayland, Xorg, or Flatpak for starters?

Red Hat is hardly a free rider in the open source world.

It is also worth noting that Red Hat created the Fedora Project. They created it so they could have RHEL (corporate) and Fedora (community) instead of just Red Hat Linux which they had before.

It always makes me laugh when people worry about Red Hat “taking Fedora corporate”. Fedora was created explicitly to be the community offering and is a key part of the Red Hat strategy. I guess not everybody knows their Linux history.

Many of the Fedora leaders and maintainers are Red Hat employees.

As for US influence, that has always been a thing. US law dominates the thinking. What you really need to worry about is the Linux Foundation.

Arch should have this in a few days to a couple of weeks.

By “shares some of the same codebae”, I assume that you mean both COSMIC and Niri use the Smithay Wayland support library? Or that both Niri and GNOME use xdg-desktop-portal-gnome?

Interesting that you are using PaperWM but recommending Niri.

Have you tried COSMIC yet? Maybe PopOS is worth a shot.

Some packages are a bit old at the moment but they have a release coming in April / May that will bring them right up to date.

Perhaps LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) is worth a look as well.

Both options are similar in that they take a very stable distro base and layer on a quite up-to-date desktop.

They also feature clear direction and a predicable release schedule.

Mint or Fedora require no more command line than Windows does.

Probably not a universal answer as you are optimizing for different things.

I will say that EndeavourOS is essentially vanilla Arch once installed. If you really love configuring everything yourself, vanilla Arch is what you are looking for. If you like Arch but just want to fire up a system with sensible defaults, EndeavourOS adds a lot of value without corrupting the purity of the base system.

So, my vote is for EndeavourOS.

Cachy adds the most additional functionality but also changes the base system the most. If you have a T2 MacBook, this is the best option for sure.

I would avoid Manjaro.

Garuda has fans. A bit much for me.

I am not sure why the downvotes.

Redox includes a C library. You should be able to use whatever programming language you want. It does not have to be Rust.

Redox is still adding bits needed for easy porting of more software.

The window system is its own thing at the moment. But they are adding Wayland compatibility.

It will be interesting to see what Redox looks like by the end of 2026. You may get many of your wishes.

You summarized my position very well. Thank you.

I realize I oversimplified a complex set of moves and “shared source” is its own can of worms. My post was already too long.

But my core point is that the code (as Valkey) remained available and remains available under the same free software license that it has always been available under.

The only consequence of what Redis did was that they stopped giving away their “new” code to service providers like Amazon. Even Amazon can continue to use what was there before. And the community can continue to collaborate on the same code base that they were collaborating on before. The licence Redis chooses for its “new” code is largely irrelevant.

We talk about permissive licenses like they represent some massive risk. I just do not see it that way. And they have many advantages including often attracting more corporate participation (more free code for me).

I am a very happy user of Clang/LLVM. It is the product of collaboration between Google, Apple, Sony, Microsoft, academia, and other nerds. I am very happy we have licenses that encourage companies to create quality software for me to use.

I am sure Redis chose BSD to begin with in case they ever had to make a move like they did. If the only option was GPL, they may never have released it as Open Source to begin with. Again, I am glad they did.

I never liked KDE. I used it before there was GNOME but I used GNOME 2 for years and Cinnamon or XFCE after that.

I probably tried KDE4 once and KDE5 a couple times. Not for me. But I have used KDE a lot since Plasma 6. I have to agree with you. They are doing a great job. It is probably the best environment for Wayland.

I also use COSMIC a bit and Niri is my favourite environment. But I do seem to be using Plasma 6 a lot. It is sitting in front of me now.

First, there has been massive amounts of MIT code in important parts of the Linux ecosystem for decades. Xorg, Wayland, and Mesa for starters. The sky has not fallen. I am not exactly panicking.

But let’s address your specific example.

Let start by pointing out that Redis was BSD, not MIT. But let’s assume your cautionary tale applies.

A truly gigantic corporation, Amazon, was making all the money off Redis without giving anything back to the company that actually wrote the code (Redis). So, Redis tried to change the license to make that more difficult. The license they chose is the strictest free software license the FSF offers—the AGPL.

Pop quiz: what part of the above are we “the community” outraged about? The clearly predatory Amazon stuff? Or the defensive action by the company writing all the code? That’s right, we are mad at the company that gave us all the code for free and that still licenses it AGPL.

But even beyond that, what was lost again? Because the implication is that BSD (or MIT) somehow allows companies to “take” free software from us. This is false.

What happened with Redis is that the original code remained 100% available. And it remained part of a 100% free software project. It remains 100% BSD licensed to this day. You can use it, you can study it, you can improve it, you can share it, and you can even sell it commercially! It offers you at least FIVE freedoms.

https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey

Not a single line of code was lost from the project. Yes, the project had to change its name (Redis owns the name Redis). Yes, Redis stopped contributing to the project. Is that not their right?

It is that last bit that seems to drive us mad. We yell about corporations taking our code. But all the examples of bad behaviour we give boil down to them choosing to give us less of theirs.

If “the community” is the one writing the code, nobody can take it from us. And even if big evil companies are writing the code, the only code that they can deny us is code they write in the future.

I find it hard to be either outraged or even particularly afraid of that.

Anyway, I do not want to talk you out of your license preferences. I have no beef with that. But I do wish there was less FUD slinging at projects that choose to license their hard work as MIT.

I do not know how that article covered so much background on GNU hURD and the quest for a micro-kernel UNIX without mentioning Redox OS.

https://www.redox-os.org/

Redox is also micro-kernel based POSIX compatible operating system (UNIX compatible). So quite like the GNU project and HURD in that sense.

Redox is younger, 10 years old instead of 30, and more “modern” (eg. written in Rust). It can be seen as a GNU competitor as it does not rely on the GNU C library or utilities.

I would agree with you. That said, bad experiences with things like PPA’s are one the reasons people reach for immutable distros.

I think as soon as you start adding PPA’s to your system, you should consider a distro with a larger repository. But that is just my opinion.

I think the main reason is experience on a distro with a crappy package manager that can easily result in a damaged or even unbootable system. Some of the most popular and even reportedly “stable” distros fall into this category.

You can think of an immutable distro as a system that treats the entire core OS as a single package. As long as you have that installed, it will boot.

Flatpak wins because we need one “Linux-wide” solution—one universal package format—and it was the first.

Distrobox can make any package format work on any distro if that is what you want.

My favourite package manager is APK v3 but the distros that use it do not have big repositories. So I end up using an APK host with Pacman / Yay running in a Distrobox.

Ya. I feel like professional VFX has largely migrated off Windows already.

Photoshop is perhaps the canonical example of software that does not run on Linux and is actually needed by “professionals”.

Photoshop does not run well enough on Wine that I would expect a pro to run it this way. And, if you are a print professional, there really are no Open Source tools that do what you need yet.

But outside of print, I think it is more about familiarity than capability even with regards to Adobe alternatives. And there are alternatives UI options for things like GIMP if the Adobe metaphor works better for you.

Inkscape seems to be attracting some actual professional use. Scribus seems close to getting there too. The furthest behind is GiMP.

That said, I am impressed with the development pace of GIMP now that version 3 has finally shipped. And it seems that proper CMYK support is on their near-term roadmap. I could see them shipping something functional next year. I would say similar things about non-destructive editing.

It will be interesting to see if attitudes change towards GIMP after these issues are addressed. The UI also takes a lot of heat. Now that there is a consistent cadence of releases (it seems), perhaps that will see steady evolution as well.

This is a funny take given that for most of Linux history, the majority of Linux desktop user have been “working professionals”, largely IT workers and developers to be fair.

At this point, you cannot really make a blanket statement about who Linux is appropriate for. It is down to individual use cases and preferences.

I have been using Linux for decades and, while I have also used Windows and macOS, other operating systems are frustrating to use due to the many limitations. And I have been several kinds of “working professional” over that time at many different levels of seniority. But I recognize that this is because all my workflows and expectations evolved on Linux.

The “working professionals” you imagine likely have the same issue. It is not that Linux could not work, or even that it is not a better place to start. It is document compatibility and familiarity.

At this point, Linux “being ready” comes down almost completely to a tolerance for learning and change. Nobody says you have to change of course. But working differently does not mean that something else does not work.

There are of course still some software gaps. CAD is not great on Linux (getting there). Print graphics professionals (people with CMYK workflows) will hit real roadblocks. Some debugging tools available on Windows are worth the productivity for certain workflows. Pro audio too I guess though this not my area. And “office document” users may encounter display inconsistencies when sharing documents depending on which features they rely on. Perhaps the latter is what you mean.

As for gaming, it depends on what titles you favour. Some Windows games play better on Linux. Some worse. And of course some not at all.

When choosing software for a company, I consider something that cannot work on the Linux desktop or through the cloud disqualifying. I can think of few cases where that has been the wrong decision.