Actually out of the loop for this one. What’s the deal with making that on by default, was there any justification?
They haven’t made anything. It’s just a proposal right now. Instead of constructively sharing feedback about the default state, people are spouting hyperbole like “Red Hat is Windows”.
But for real though, they had to know that having telemetry be on by default wasn’t going to look good for the open source community.
Can we all just pretend Red Hat and its derivatives/relatives no longer exist? It’s clear that the leadership behind these projects don’t care about open source anymore. There are plenty of options for Linux operating systems that actually care about user freedom, privacy, and openness. Anything with Red Hat backing it no longer gets to claim they support any of these.
Install Debian, install Arch. If you must, install Ubuntu (though they’re not much better these days). Anything but Red Hat.
Don’t forget SUSE :D
Everyone always forgets SUSE :(
RHEL is the core IT/SysAdmin crowd. Anyone looking to get into this career space gets a copy of The Linux Bible and runs Fedora to get started. A lot of the Linux core functionality comes from, and is maintained by RH. This is not just a desktop choice for users. If you really want to get to a kernel hacking type of understanding of Linux RHEL documentation is a great baseline where there is info that does not exist in any other source except reading the source code.
Alright, let’s say I’m a Windows user who wants to dual-boot Linux and was planning on Fedora because I’ve heard it’s pretty good for someone transferring over from that OS, but this telemetry bullshit has turned me away.
What would you say is next best?
Honestly, Ubuntu would be a good place to start learning. Then once you’re feeling brave, Debian. Then once you’re really feeling cocky, Arch will happily take you down a few pegs.
Lets say I wanted a distro with more bleeding edge packages but not something DIY like Arch, what would you recommend?
Nowadays I use EndeavourOS. It’s Arch bit “just works” Graphical installer, you choose a DE, it automatically installs audio, media codecs etc. But under the hood it’s still Arch so you get daily updates and AUR
Honestly I don’t care about the proposal. If it’s just a checkbox to untick on install then it’s not much different from what apps like vlc do.
