What's a Linux distro that doesn't suck ass these days? Red Hat's stuffing AI garbage 'everywhere' so says the CEO and Fedora is downstream, so I'm going to need a new daily driver.

@RegalBeagle

If Linux is public domain then why can you not continue to use the old versions of Linux before the changes you do not like?

@shortstories @RegalBeagle @Justicar

Excellent point Shortie, you absolutely can do that.

QubesOS is my daily driver, a bare-metal hypervisor built on Xen, and uses whatever mix of Fedora & Debian you want.

Being a type 1 hypervisor, it means you can also run Kali, Suse, Ubuntu, Arch or whatever you prefer, all concurrently. Even Windows if you're masochistic enough.

On the other hand, don't forget the nix BSD's. I used to run a FreeBSD laptop and it was pretty great. OpenBSD is also good.

@shortstories @RegalBeagle @Justicar

As much as I hate what's been happening to linux these days, I would still recommend Debian to others as the best of the worst.

Yes it's woke and Linus has all but confirmed he's a US intelligence partner, but Debian is still the most stable long term & has the best derivatives including lesser known ones like Tails, Whonix, Kicksecure, & Devuan if you don't like systemd.

Combine with BRTFS and you have a stable, usable, reasonably secure & private OS.

@UncleIroh @Justicar Thanks for all the great info; I'll get researching. I've used Fedora for almost a decade, but I don't like the direction AI is going.

@shortstories, That is something to consider. I don't have any services exposed to the internet, so running a legacy OS for my work may be okay. I need to look into the security risks of running EOL OSs. May be easier to mitigate those vs 'upgrading'.

@RegalBeagle @Justicar @shortstories I agree with @UncleIroh on Linux distro choices, Debian is not good but as far as I can tell is the least worst. But continues enshittification, for example /var/tmp and I think /tmp will be default regularly reaped in the next version trixie after the current bookworm.

I love OpenBSD for "appliances" like firewalls but at this point it's hard to take seriously for anything with active, important data because of it's ancient file system. (If you need a Linux appliance, Alpine might still be good.)

FreeBSD may have gotten mortally wounded by its long woke flirtation, I certainly take it as a very bad sign that it's throwing away its version of ZFS in favor of the Linux one (not that the latter is bad, I'm using it to type this message, just it tells us something about FreeBSD maintenance and development).

@ThatWouldBeTelling @Justicar @RegalBeagle @shortstories

Agreed, the OpenBSD network stack is pretty solid.

I haven't kept up with FreeBSD for a long time but I'm not surprised to hear that it's maintainers are on board with woke bullshit, it's infected everything.

Frankly, I can't wait to see what non-Western kernel and OS developers come up with as alternatives.

Just as economic war has forced the rise of BRICS, our information war will inevitably create non-Western alternatives. Good.

@UncleIroh @Justicar @RegalBeagle @shortstories "I haven't kept up with FreeBSD for a long time but I'm not surprised to hear that it's maintainers are on board with woke bullshit, it's infected everything."

FreeBSD is also something I've not really followed for a long time but it comes up in the "woke in tech/FOSS" I do follow. Got really bad apparently centered around the lolcow "FreeBSDGirl," even changed their CoC to one of the very worse based on the Geek Feminism one, but then had crippling defections.

In a project with just too few people to afford that as I think I implied with their letting their fork of ZFS rot. But they took some big steps back, told FreeBSDGirl to drop the name or face a trademark lawsuit, the CoC different and pretty much has to be somewhat better, etc.

"Frankly, I can't wait to see what non-Western kernel and OS developers come up with as alternatives."

Does not seem to be something non-Westerners (not counting Jews) are any good at, at all. Is mostly an American thing at that. We'd already have more examples of "non-Western" FOSS or even interesting proprietary software if that wasn't the case, especially non-Japanese ones.

@ThatWouldBeTelling @Justicar @shortstories @UncleIroh Leaning towards ParrotOS or Qubes with Qubes in the lead.

I think the Ruskies have a decent chance of creating something useful. They were our biggest cyber adversary when I was in the service and they haven't replaced STEM with useless fluff like the west has. Necessity is the mother of invention and if RF battlefield innovation is anything to go by, I'm optimistic.