There is literally zero practical reason to switch, so no one can answer that question without getting into your head and weighing the inconvenience of switching a distro against the ideological fervor and satisfaction you gain from showing those evil capitalists at Red Hat that you won’t tolerate their actions by… switching off an almost entirely unrelated distro.

Personally I won’t be switching away from Fedora for the foreseeable future, and think that you and half the people in this thread are being more than a little silly.

edit: Also, “now that”? This move is completely in line with Red Hat’s behaviour for the past like 20 years. It will also quite literally affect nothing else but the existence of RHEL clones like Alma and Rocky, because virtually all the code and work that goes into RHEL is still upstreamed, and RHEL sources will still continue, in practice, to be publicly available, just with some delay.

You should use Debian.

Or Ubuntu if you need long term support, private or corporate, for example. Free 10-year support for up to 5 machines is no joke in my book. They no longer send search results to Amazon. 🥲 If they start again, you can always migrate back to Debian without huge difficulty.

If you can switch, switch.

If you can’t switch, wait until Fedora is forked to a new project, which is inevitable at this point given how dependent Fedora is on Red Hat for governance (source: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/council/), and it seems that Red Hat no longer wants Fedora (source: recent pivoting away from the community, and laying off the Fedora project lead in May and terminating the position).

I expect within a few years, you will be able to just change repositories and a signing key, and load whatever community-based Freedora replaces it.

I would avoid openSUSE which just wants to be another Red Hat (Aeon is just a shitty Silverblue and the project lead hates KDE) and SuSE in general has been hostile towards free software in the past and will likely do so again if they had to choose.

Arch, Debian, EndeavourOS, Solus, NixOS are community driven and unlikely to have some kind of corporate/hostile takeover.

I don’t think that Fedora will be affected by the changes RedHat has made with RHEL in the near future. It’s still a Community Distro. So there is no need to switch right now.

I’m using Silverblue currently, but i’m thinking about hopping to VanillaOS when they switch to Debian as a Base.

just use a community-lead or non-profit foundation lead distro: NixOS (better than silverblue/kinoite in all aspects they try to sell), Arch, or Debian.

For professional usage, you generally go Ubuntu, or some RHEL derivative.

Depends on how your your perspective on this is: I don’t think this will affect the distro at all, development and maintenance will probably continue as is and you as the user will not feel any difference…

But if you don’t want to use any of their projects anymore, you should switch, yes. But don’t think you somehow “hurt or harm” them by “boycotting” fedora. Since you don’t pay anything for fedora, you do not provide them any revenue by using it, therefore you are not taking any possible source of income away by NOT using it anymore.

You switching to another distro will change only what you use and nothing in the big picture. So it’s 100% up to you with literally zero external factors to consider… atleast imho

I feel like this is what it finally took to push me to Arch. I absolutely love Fedora too. I don’t mind Redhat as an entity making money for their employees. What I do mind is insulting their users and having another megacorp like IBM make these actual decisions.

Insert astronaut “always has been” meme. This was totally predictable once they started embrace/extend/extinguish by forcing through systemd.

Yes, you should try Debian, Arch or NixOS.

I’d never use a distribution that depends on some type of for-profit company in first place.

It’s honestly hard to say. Pretty much only pure vanilla Debian hasn’t done something I disliked. Okay well except the whole “systemd will not be a thing” ordeal before they changed their minds on that. I think you should wait and see, because RHEL is the original RPM based distro they all stem off of. Companies are just doing everything they can to stay afloat, which results in shitty feeling decisions like this.

If you’re strongly tied to KDE and immutability, then I would say no. There’s not really an equivalent distro that provides stable immutability with a solid KDE/Plasma experience.

If you’re tied to immutability, but not KDE, then I recommend openSUSE Aeon. It’s Gnome, but with a few extensions, feels great as a KDE replacement. openSUSE Kalpa (KDE) exists, but is in a very rough alpha state and was mostly unusable for my purposes.

If you’re tied to KDE and not immutability, then I recommend really any other distro. Can’t go wrong with Arch, Nix, or even Debian if you don’t mind slightly outdated packages (and that might be false now, I believe it just had a big release?).

I just finished watching Jay’s opinion on this very topic before I read your post. He makes some compelling points: https://vid.puffyan.us/watch?v=fqfyM7zE6KM

Having worked for many very large corporations in my day, I observe that no “company” can have any more integrity than the leadership in that company and the larger the company, the more leadership there is (boards of directors, shareholders, c-suite execs, etc). The more leadership, the less integrity because there isn’t a single rudder guiding the ship. So, I believe nothing said by any large company because the person saying it is nothing more than the voice for that company at that particular minute and it’s anyone’s guess the machinations going on behind the curtain, which can and will change depending upon profitability and political goals from quarter-to-quarter. It can be no other way in large organizations (including companies, governments, tribes, etc). With smaller companies/projects, the product or service is much more likely to stick with a principal or goal because there’s fewer chefs in the kitchen and the person speaking for the team is more likely to exercise integrity because they can. When I say integrity, my definition in this context is “aligning actions with words.” So my take is there is a risk with hitching your wagon to any distro because larger orgs have more resources but are less likely to exercise transparency but smaller projects may have the transparency but not the resources.

I’ve been using Pop! for a few years and it’s a small company (System76) with obvious goals to grow, which is certainly something to be cautious of because nearly every company loses their original principals when they begin striving for growth over convictions. I’ve been running Fedora in several VM’s and I’m not planning to change that until IBM decides to pee in that project’s bathwater too.

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I am sticking around for the time being. While it is a community project, Red Hat is still the legal entity representing it and is a sponsor of the Fedora Project. I am confident that Fedora will continue to exist (or if RedHat ruins it, the community would fork it), consequently I feel that this is more a question of morals / ethics or desire to distance oneself from Red Hat products. With switching you would likely be giving up either KDE or immutability, until OpenSUSE’s Kalpa matures more. Regardless, I’m not sure how much benefit Red Hat gets from you being a Fedora user. Unless you contribute to the project itself or are using Fedora as a means to gain more knowledge for using RHEL products in enterprise.

Some relevant articles for people interested; Fedora Project Wikipedia governance section, Fedora Project Wiki regarding the proposed “Foundation” and the mailing list discussing the “Foundation”.

I’d wait and see, personally. Maybe make a test install of Debian stable and play around with it.