Goodbye Ubuntu

2023-07-14

Recently Red Hat announced it was locking down the RHEL sources behind a Red Hat subscription. Red Hat has been open source since its inception. This restriction is an insult to those that write software for Linux and to the users of Linux. This move jeopardizes the entire enterprise Linux ecosystem. There is scary language in Red Hat's agreement about the unauthorized use of the source code, which affects many downstream distros. While some of the downstream distros have found workarounds for now, I would not want to base my future projects on distros that could disappear at any moment. This is sad for me because I use RHEL heavily in my career, and it was the distro I often chose for side projects. But corporate greed is something that turns me off, especially in relation to the open source world. Red Hat even doubled down and called users of their source code moochers, ignoring their long promise of keeping their code open source and free for all.

So why am I saying goodbye to Ubuntu? I am finished with corporate owned Linux distros, and I do not trust Ubuntu not to follow suit with Red Hat. Many over the years, myself included, have been annoyed by, for lack of a better term, the advertisements inserted into Ubuntu. I forget the last one that greeted me each time I started an SSH session on my server, but it was recent. While I have found ways to turn these off, it screams corporations injecting their greed into my operating system. If I had to guess, Canonical will be sold to a large corporation, maybe Microsoft. When that happens, you can expect them to continue to follow the RHEL playbook or something similar.

So that brings me to my current move. I migrated my static blog to a Debian 12 build, which was so easy. Honestly, when identifying the dependencies I needed to move my blog, the move to Debian 12 seemed smoother than when I moved to Ubuntu. The installation of the needed parts and pieces was definitely a little different.

Ubuntu has long been my desktop of choice for Linux, but that has to change as well. For the record, for a few years, I really enjoyed Fedora, but for now, I am done with the RHEL environment in my personal life. So Debian will likely be my desktop of choice as well, provided it meets my needs, and I think it will. It is sad, really, but many of us knew this was coming, particularly when IBM purchased RHEL.