this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
81 points (95.5% liked)

Linux

48149 readers
752 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

A lot of debate today about "community" vs "corporate"-driven distributions. I (think I) understand the basic difference between the two, but what confuses me is when I read, for example:

...distro X is a community-driven distribution based on Ubuntu...

Now, from what I understand, Ubuntu is corporate-driven (Canonical). So in which sense is distro X above "community-driven", if it's based on Ubuntu? And more concretely: what would happen to distribution X if Canonical suddeny made Ubuntu closed-source? (Edit: from the nice explanations below, this example with Ubuntu is not fully realistic – but I hope you get my point.)

Possibly my question doesn't make full sense because I don't understand the whole topic. Apologies in that case – I'm here to learn. Cheers!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Would you be able to keep going on your snap tanget? I'm mainly a windows dude and only dabble in Linux, so I'm curious as to the strong feelings there.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Motivations by the company have been explained far better than I could by the other replies, but from both mine and other people's experience, some software when installed via snaps seems to perform badly compared to any other method of installation (notably chrome and firefox i think). Also snap isn't really bringing anything special to the table whereas flatpak has a more interesting containerised approach from what I'm aware.

In any case with the way ubuntu's going I'm really not over the moon with anything canonical (and i don't think I'm alone)