I am at this very moment switching from Fedora 29 ( I was on the early Beta) to Ubuntu because of the acquisition by IBM. It just doesn't sit right with me.
Just made the last backup before plugging in the USB with Ubuntu 18.10.
This feels like the equivalent of switching from cow's milk to almond milk for ethical reasons. There's not an improvement, you're just making a different set of compromises.
Basically they exited from all the markets I cared about in recent years and became a non-entity, meh.
This. This is what is behind the so-called negativity. IBM has been an exemplary open source citizen; but it's very fragmented with conflicting internal fiefdoms which means no one can count on them continuing to be supportive.
People are reacting to the scale of the merger, the stakes involved for the community at large (GCC, etc) and what happens with most large mergers and they're very anxious.
And not without very good reason...
I have no reason to like IBM. My vantage point from elsewhere in IT Ops is that they are as license-batty and money-grubbing as Oracle, coasting on the market share they've had for decades on the mainframe. This proves they've been beaten by commodity cloud, and they're buying it out.
Oracle destroyed Sun, Solaris, Java, and MySQL is only still relevant because it was such a popular open source project (vs. the other ones) that it had momentum. Even then, Postgres got a lot more attention, and MariaDB was spawned from MySQL's creators as a fork.
If I don't really have a dog in the running with Fedora/CentOS/Red Hat, why would I dig into it now, unless my job required it? Ubuntu is just as good.
I don't wish ill to Fedora, and recognize that a lot of good has come from RHAT/Fedora ecosystem. I personally just choose to stick with an ecosystem I know, particularly now that Fedora is in danger.
The hardware support out of the box was much better, that packages were more up to date and the whole system was more stable.
Canonical has made some mistakes that the community has rightly called them out for, and sometimes they make decisions that we don't agree with, but in the end they open source everything important.
Compared to the old Red Hat they're far from perfect, but compared to IBM, Microsoft, Google, Amazon or Oracle or any other closed source software company they are fricking angels.
That's not entirely fair. Canonical has almost zero kernel contributions, while IBM is the #4 top corporate contributor.
And Canonical keeps some "important" things proprietary, like the server code behind Snaps.
Kernel contributions are a really bad metric, they're like 1% of a distribution and get lots of attention. IBM isn't an Nvidia, but they're not a Red Hat or Canonical either.
You should look at manjero.
I'm skeptical about the IBM purchase, but like with a lot of big changes I'm just keeping my radar up before I jump ship.