this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2023
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Since Red Hat made their recent decision, there has been a lot more talk about people wanting to focus on communiy-based distros instead of corporate-backed distros.

I was trying to think of how many active, stable, user friendly base community distros I know about. When I say a "base" distro, I mean a distro that's basically the base for its ecosystem. For instance, Debian would be a base distro because it's the base of its ecosystem. A community distro based on Ubuntu wouldn't fit what I'm talking about here because Ubuntu is a corporate distro.

So, there's Debian.

Arch is a base community distro but it's not user friendly to install, but there are more user friendly varieties of Arch available like Manjaro and a few others.

All of the other base distros I can think of are either corporate, or aren't particularly user friendly to install. Care to add your thoughts to the list?

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[–] dethleffs@feddit.nl 2 points 1 year ago

void is awesome

[–] mudamuda@geddit.social 2 points 1 year ago

Major: Debian, Gentoo, NixOS, Arch and also FreeBSD (not GNU/Linux but still).

Other and esoteric: Void, Alpine, Solus, CRUX, Slackware, Mageia/OpenMandriva,

Corporate sponsored: Fedora, openSUSE

[–] Lamy@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] floppyslapper@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem with OpenSuse is it's based on a corporate product, not an original community base.

[–] Lamy@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Ok but not Slackware (the base of opensuse), gecko, puppy or other versions.

[–] nyan@lemmy.cafe 1 points 1 year ago

If you use a standard package-manager-based taxonomy, there are five base distributions: Slackware, Debian, Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS (I'm unclear on which of those is currently the lowest rung), Arch, and Gentoo. There are also a handful of singletons, like Puppy and Void, which evolved independently (or from long-dead predecessors) but have no family to speak of. I think the only one of those that isn't community-driven is Red Hat.

However, most base distributions are set up because their founder wants to try Something Completely Different, and that "something" is generally not user-friendliness. Even in Debian's case, the core distro philosophy is about software licenses; its user-friendliness is almost a historical accident. Descendant distributions with a premise of "[distro], but user friendly" are not uncommon, though.

[–] reggie@lemmy.fmhy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

OpenSUSE

inb4 but thats a corporate distro, it is just sponsored by SUSE but is community maintained

I agree that there are not many distros that are both user friendly and not forks of something else, but I don't see it as an issue, imo there is nothing wrong with forks.

[–] floppyslapper@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The issue isn't if something is a fork or not, the issue is if something is a fork of a corporate distro. For instance, there are forks of Arch that still meet the criteria because Arch is a base community distro, whereas OpenSuse is a fork of a corporate distro.

[–] staticlifetime@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

OpenSUSE is not a fork. It's the base.

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago

Fedora is also sponsored, and they just added telemetry

[–] yarn@sopuli.xyz 0 points 1 year ago