i mean is a distro not made by a corp stable as in does it last years or do they often fail and vanish?
so i dont install a distro and customize it and all this and fine i need to move my whole digital life to new distro again.
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2 daysDebian is 32 years old. Arch is 24 years old. Gentoo is 23 years old. Alpine is 20 years old.
Not sure why I assumed alpine was much newer (saw it primarily used with docker)
- 2 days
In fact all major “corp distros” are based on community distros, for instance Ubuntu on Debian. If Debian ceased to exist, Ubuntu would as well.
- 24 hours
Fedora is not “corp”, it’s a community project; Red Hat is the “corp” version based on it.
I don’t know about OpenSUSE that well, but it also seems to be a community-developed distro.
- 16 hours
They reordered it recently so as to close the Red Hat source. I couldn’t tell which way though, but it sucked.
- 2 days
or do they often fail and vanish?
No. Niche, hipster, “latest hotness” distros sometimes vanish. Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, Kali, Qubes, Mint are all examples of community maintained distros that have been around for a long time.
Since you’re looking for “stability” highly recommend Mint.
- 2 days
And with community maintained distros like Debian and Fedora, you kinda get the best of both worlds. You have a mostly community distro that doesn’t have corporate interests pushed on it, but have a corporation paying developers to work on it because it’s in their interest to.
- 2 days
You’ve got that backwards. Community distros are more likely to be stable than corporate ones.
- 2 days
Corporations can go out of business, have an incentive to enshittify, etc. Communities/non-profit foundations generally don’t.
The only way a community project can cease to be “stable” (in the “not going away” sense you’re using it) is if literally nobody competent cares enough to maintain it anymore, and if that’s the case, was anything of value really lost?
Like when they force you to upgrade from Windows 10 to Windows 11, but your computer isn’t powerful enough to run the latter.
cant you just bypass it with rufus? i ran windows 11 on 2gen intel with ssd before it was quiet fast even.
- 8 hours
Little known fact is that a lot of computers that ran/run Windows 10 is not supported by Windows 10 (check supported CPUs for Windows 10). The difference is that Windows 10 doesn’t actively block you from installing it.
I think what they’re trying to say is, if Windows was a community project those requirements likely wouldn’t exist to begin with.
I don’t run Windows at all. I’m probably not up to date on the latest developments, the last time I checked, there was a compatibility check for your hardware. Anyway, it seems strange to me that Windows would run fast on an old machine—are you sure about that?
Have you ever tried installing Linux Mint on that PC? I’m not asking to encourage you to try it, but just to get your opinion. I consider Mint one of the best operating systems for breathing new life into old PCs, and I wanted to know if (assuming you’ve tried Mint) you think Windows is roughly on par with it in terms of performance.
Slackware and Debian are the two oldest distros that exist (33 years). Debian is maintained by a group organized by a social contract.
Slackware is maintained by one dude in rural Minnessota.
Arch won’t be going anywhere either.- eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish2 days
Debian is maintained by a group organized by a social contract
it’s amazing to see it still go on strong despite the police killing its founder and leader.
- incompetent@programming.devEnglish1 day
police killing its founder and leader
I hadn’t heard about that. Do you have a link with more info?
He tweeted about being physically and sexually assaulted by police before he committed suicide.
- eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish1 day
i’m surprised that there are any articles out there considering that it was over 10 years ago and the cause of death is going to be determined on whether or not you trust the police
this article has enough breadcrumbs to lead you into requisite rabbit holes that’ll help you understand why there’s controversy around his death: https://thehackernews.com/2015/12/debian-ian-murdock-died.html
Slackware has been maintained by its inventor, Patrick Volkerding, since 1993.
He used to make his living by selling Slackware DVDs.
When that market collapsed, he partnered with an online shop to make money selling Slackware merchandise.
But they fucked him over and he didn’t see any money from them.
So he was forced to move from California back to his original home town in Minnessota to reduce his cost of living.
He still works on Slackware full time, but now he depends entirely on donations.- 5 hours
Aww I didn’t know that. I used Slackware for many years and had the DVD subscription. I got tired of worrying about dependencies and moved to Debian, but I still have a soft spot for Slackware.
I do remember one time Slashdot had an article about a new Slackware release, and he was like, “Do I get first post?” lol What a time that was.
To determine if a distro is well-established, i.e. that it will not cease existing overnight, you may consider looking at the following factors:
- How long does it exist? Like, if it’s old enough to drink, then that’s definitely a good indication.
- How strong is its community? If there are literally millions of users, many of which actively contribute, then that’s definitely a good thing.
- How active is its development? The Linux landscape is constantly evolving. Hence, adopting changes (or, at least, enabling them) is somewhat to be expected.
- Does it serve a distinct raison d’être? It simply has to offer a strong justification for its existence.
- Does it have any strong dependencies/contingencies? Here, a lack thereof is actually what’s good.
You seem to have the false notion that corporate distros are safe (or something). But, that’s not true. Look e.g. at the demise of Clear Linux OS.
TL;DR: If you want to be absolutely safe, then I’d recommend Arch, Debian or Gentoo. Note that the likes of Alpine, Fedora, Linux Mint, openSUSE, Ubuntu and Slackware aren’t too far behind, though. I’d personally deem it safe to use any one of 'm.
- 2 days
You’re missing the point of Linux. Generally, gnu/ Linux is a community based ecosystem across the board. Most of the software, most of the distros and most of the code you will use and encounter using any Linux distro will be community based. That’s what gives Linux its advantage. The community can vet and improve any piece of code to improve the system for everybody.
Pretty much all ‘major’ distributions (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, openSuse…) have 20+ years on their belt and none of those are not likely to go away any time soon. Some niche variants of those might vanish, but the main distributions will be there.
- 2 days
The smaller/newer distros have no evidence of staying around for years, so it’s hard to judge whether they’ll be around in another couple years. Distros like Bazzite are definitely interesting, but you can’t reliably predict whether it’ll get updates in 10 years. There are stable community-led distros that have been around for a long time, like Debian.
- 2 days
Depends really. Small community distros serve a purpose as they either provide some niche configurations or pre-installed software that major distros don’t, or they are made because they are trying to fork a major distros that is becoming too corporate with risk of becoming less open source. Now within community distros there are reputations. Debian is famously a community driven distro that hundreds of other distros are based on, and so is arch. They are pretty stable and will last more and more. Also, corporate distro doesn’t guarantee longevity or stability either, because there are several corporate projects that get abandoned and are picked up by communities.
- 2 days
I would say that a large community distro has most longevity of all variants. It doesn’t matter if some leave, others will join. It also doesn’t matter that the distro ain’t making profit, because it isn’t a company.
