Comment by _abox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _abox | Hacker News Reader

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Good question. I had several reasons.

- I had used it until 7.0 in the past and missed the simplicity of having one single platform (rather than Linux with its kernel and the many distributions all doing things differently).

- The excellent handbook

- Almost devoid of corporate influence. Linux is being steered into the warm and fuzzy corporate domain. Many big players try to get their IP adopted by the Linux mainstream. Canonical with Snaps for example, Redhat with Gnome, etc. The big tech players are the biggest kernel contributors now. It moves from choices good for customers to the ones that are good for big tech.

- Non-opinionated platform. Some distros are also becoming quite opinionated like Mac. I did try to play the Apple game for a while (like I said it was my daily driver since 10.2) but they kept annoying me more and more by deprecating things I used. I want choices again.

- Stable platform but with rolling app packages. For example if KDE comes out with a new version I will see it usually a day or 2 later.

- Couldn't find a Linux distro I really liked. I like minimalism but without Arch's elitism. Debian would have been the closest but I have bad experiences with major upgrades. What I would have preferred would be something like Alpine for the desktop. I looked at Adelie Linux which is exactly that but it was too premature.

- The ports tree is really amazing. You're always able to change default package settings and recompile them

- Jails are more powerful than linux containers, though they lack a framework a la docker. This is why I still use Linux on servers.

So this was mainly it :) Unfortuantely running KDE did require installing some linuxisms like Dbus but overall it's not too bad.

I am curious about your third point. Why do you consider project choices that are good for "big tech" to be a reason to turn away from Linux?

I would have assumed that many contributions by corporations are in the end a net benefit for both corporations and customers or at least not detrimental to customers.

Do you consider some corporate contributions to Linux to be harmful towards consumers? Or is it more a decision of principle?

I don't really believe in win-win anymore when it comes to mixing FOSS with Corporate. The need for monetisation always wins in the end for big corporations. Whether they openly admit it or not.

For example: A lot of patches contributed by Microsoft are to make things run better on Azure and are irrelevant to most consumers. They view desktop Linux mainly as something that should exist under Windows (in my work there was a lot of pressure to move our development laptops to WSL2). They use their market position to push their views (think of the way they hassle third party browsers on Windows).

Canonical is trying to make the snap store something they and only they control (it is not possible to run your own even now). RedHat with IBM took over CentOS just to remove it from the market as a free way to run RHEL.

It's my belief that in the end they will always want something back, some kind of strings attached. The GPL is not sufficient to prevent that because it's purely about code, not about the business model behind it. Be it intellectual property, use of their services, data collection, whatever. And they will do whatever they can to gain a foothold over the competition, which is also involved in Linux.

Even if a current operator is benign, they can always be taken over by a less scrupulous party, as happened many times in IT history. I don't want my OS be used as a pawn in that game. This is what I like about FreeBSD, the MIT license while being more open gives corporate interests less guarantees their contributed work won't be used by competitors and because of that they tend to ignore it. With the exception of Netflix which hasn't really done harm to the ecosystem because FreeBSD itself doesn't really factor into their products other than as a server platform. Even so, FreeBSD is not free from corporate influence nor are many of the apps I use. But it is more so than Linux.

But yes it is more a personal principle than an explicit objection to some of the contributions made. I used to be a supporter of "big tech" influence a decade ago but too many things have happened. That was still in the days we believed Google really wouldn't be evil :) Now they rely on tracking and push clearly user-hostile tech like FLoC through standards bodies. As a result I've admittedly become more anti-corporate than the current situation warrants. But action = reaction. They have a lot to make up for.

Apple was the best in this regard IMO because their business model was all about hardware, so they could afford to give software away for free. But they too are becoming more closed, with increased reliance on app store and iCloud revenue. They gave us stuff like OpenCL but lately everything they've come out with is closed (think Metal).

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