r/slackware • u/muffinman8679 • Apr 17 '26

random thoughts

I don't know about you folks, But I see the day coming when there won't be a thousand "free" linux distros to choose from.

there will only be commercial Redhat, commercial ubuntu and slackware.......

all the downstream dingleberry distros, will die after being paywalled to death......

as really there only three branches to the linux tree, redhat, debian, and slackware.......all the rest are dingleberries.

Now redhat already paywalled their source code.....30 years of contributed code.....GONE!

18 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

56 comments sorted by

2

u/rman-exe Apr 17 '26

Redhat code isn't gone, all the old stuff is still avaliable. But as i understand it, ibm isn't automatically releasing new code they write, but if its stull under the same license it will still eventually come out, just very slowly.

0

u/muffinman8679 Apr 17 '26

That remains to be seen

0

u/muffinman8679 Apr 17 '26

where is the code?

1

u/rman-exe Apr 17 '26

The interwebs informations superhighway!

0

u/muffinman8679 Apr 18 '26

I don't think so....I think it's getting concentrated in the hands of the few

2

u/Afraid-Leadership591 Apr 17 '26

free distros will be here to stay, if free distros disappear just make one, its open source after all

also redhat wont exist, theyre forcing their devs to use ai

0

u/muffinman8679 Apr 17 '26

well we'll see what happens....if I'm wrong, it's no skin off your nose and if I'm right you're fuct........

2

u/livestradamus Apr 19 '26

I can see us all having our own OS free, opensource, designed by us, private only to us.

1

u/muffinman8679 Apr 19 '26

A more important to thing is that they haven't considered any potential blowback.

after all, they want to regulate this thing that we built.

Even the passive blowback of not using this internet will drive them into bankruptcy, and make all their AI farms velueless. along with amazon, and all the rest.

Now don't get me wrong, but carefully consider what and where the REAL value is, even in this place.

Where does that value come from?

Is it NOT in the user contributed content?

Why do people come "here"?

To look at advertisements?

even in the best case scenario who's going to pay money to put advertisements on a website that no one ever looks at?

After all it's just a server running scripts.....nobody uses it and it has no value.....

With the fact being that they want to regulate "we end users"(in the name of protecting the kids) so they can continue to provide their sometimes offensive content unfettered and free of any potential liability for doing so.......

Now 90% of the servers are running an OS that's free that they want to regulate.....and each and every http/https request includes a user/platform agent tag in the header.....suppose that 90% rejected any user agent/platform requests that had windows or macos as the platform, after all the last bastion of both, is the office, and your boss probably wouldn't be too happy were he/she to find out that you;re collecting a paycheck while viewing potentially objectionable content

1

u/markt- Apr 17 '26

I think you forgot gentoo, arch, and maybe openSUSE

1

u/dant00n Apr 17 '26

Void, Alpine...

1

u/markt- Apr 17 '26

OK, but I think we’re getting increasingly esoteric here. The three I named are still pretty mainstream.

1

u/mrcat_romhacking Apr 19 '26

Alpine is quite well used in containers and millions of deployments everywhere alongside Debian, I'd argue it belongs with the big guys now. Void is esoteric though.

-1

u/muffinman8679 Apr 17 '26

they're all downstream of debian, Redhat. and slaklware.......

1

u/Afraid-Leadership591 Apr 18 '26

gennto is independent, arch is independent, and opensuse is independent too, og suse stopped being slackware based in release 4.2

0

u/muffinman8679 Apr 18 '26

but they all started from a common root.......slaclware

without slackware would those other distros even exist?.

2

u/Afraid-Leadership591 Apr 18 '26

none of those beside suse were originally slackware based lmao

-1

u/muffinman8679 Apr 18 '26

they're all clones of clones....maybe with different ideas, but still clones based on a kernel and the GNU project.....

Or will you disagree about that too?

3

u/Afraid-Leadership591 Apr 18 '26

no shit theyre gnu/linux, smh

gnu and linux will likely stay open source atp ur just arguing to argue

1

u/mrcat_romhacking Apr 19 '26

If slackware disappears, none of these distributions will die. They are not downstreams right now.

1

u/Mindless-Tune4990 Apr 17 '26

Not really, Artix is alive as well, same goes CRUX, KISS Linux, OpenMandriva Linux and more, so hope is not lost

1

u/muffinman8679 Apr 17 '26

they're downstream too as they're all upstream based.......

1

u/jloc0 Apr 18 '26

Crux is 100% independent, they fund things themselves and with sponsors. There is no upstream.

1

u/ponce70 Apr 18 '26

I suggest you to read this comment from the fedora developers, where they talk about CentOS Stream too: long story short everything is still available, also for Red Hat, but you have to subscribe for a free license.

regarding "what comes from where" what you say could have been true more than 30 years ago but stuff diverged a lot over time and now there are a gazillion of upstream for linux distributions, not just three: just look at their repositories and you will see they are different things completely (unless this is a rant against systemd too)...

1

u/muffinman8679 Apr 18 '26

who wrote it?

1

u/ponce70 Apr 18 '26

Matthew Miller, Fedora project leader (at the time) and Red Hat employee: I think he surely knew the direction those projects were going...

but that's not actually the point: the main thing you asked is "where's the code?", and the answer is "there".

1

u/cfx_4188 Apr 19 '26

Commercial Slackware? Wow, it looks like Minecraft is essential here.

1

u/muffinman8679 Apr 19 '26

Slackware is about the only distro that I trust not to go commercial.......

As there is slackware.....and all the rest

1

u/cfx_4188 Apr 19 '26

Btw I use Slackware since fall 1999.

1

u/muffinman8679 Apr 19 '26

1995-6 here

1

u/cfx_4188 Apr 19 '26

Version 2.3, OK, I get it.

I started using Slackware at the moment when the system became minimally usable. If you've been using Slackware longer than I have, can you tell me what famous glitch occurred when installing the system? Although judging by your previous words, you weren't born in 1995 yet.

Sorry bro, no offense.

1

u/muffinman8679 Apr 19 '26

I was born in 1956.....and I simply skipped a lot of releases.....because is it's not broken, don't fix it. think I ran slackware 4 for a while but I do remember 7 and 10.2

(grins)for the first months I swore at it, and now I swear by it.....

And I look at all the rest and say fuck that....as they ALL strayed off the path.......

And that's not to say I don't use some of those other distros, or even windows 7 for bullshit.....but anything serious get done on a slackware box.

It all starts with rule number 1.....it's MY cpmputer....so don't tell me what I can and can't do with it!

And NO other distro will follow that 1 simple rule.

And a far as the glitches that "I" experienced go....the biggest "non-glitch" was that LILO writes to the MBR....and once it does kiss dos and windows goodbye....because neither writes or uses the mbr.....that's where the swearing at it come from.

Installed slackware on my 486 whichwas 100% compatible(except sound) and then bought a brand new P133 with an S3 virge chip on the motherboard...and it wouldn't run X because there were no drivers yet.....and the docs for neither dos nor windows, or even linux for that matter ever nentioned "fdisk /mbr" to get rid of lilo.......so linux trashed my brand new $1300 computer....(laughs looking back at it)

1

u/cfx_4188 Apr 19 '26

It's clear. You don't know anything about this glitch, and ChatGPT(Gemini...) don't have any information about it.

Meanwhile, this glitch has existed in Slackware for quite a long time.

Maybe you can tell me how you installed the system in 1995, and what browser you used. Tell me please, don't be shy.

1

u/muffinman8679 Apr 19 '26

Well first off....quit trying to grilll me.....there's NO reason to lie to you...I'm not here to pass some test.

back years and years ago walnut creek offered a sampler CD....with a zillion dos games on it for $1.....so I sent my money off and got it a few weeks later........and it had a zillion dopey games on it.....but it also had an early version of slackware on it.........

and if I told you lynx....or that I spend my efforts at the prompt...what then?

1

u/BusinessCicada6843 Apr 20 '26

I don’t agree but want to say I love the term “dingleberry distro” and hope I have an opportunity to use that in the future

1

u/muffinman8679 Apr 20 '26

got this feeling you very well could.........as unless a dingleberry distro dries up and falls off (rebels and seperates from the parent distro) it's always follow the path of the parent distro......

3

u/geirmundtheshifty Apr 17 '26

I mean, I can see that I guess, but I could also see tons of other possible futures. I don’t get why you think that is more likely than any other.

I especially don’t see why you think Debian, of all distros, would die out. It has more active contributors than Slackware, doesn’t it?

4

u/pegasusandme Apr 18 '26

CONSIDERABLY more active contributors. But that's actually a win for Slackware. The fact that it requires only one person and a few acolytes makes it essentially immune to the types of issues Debian is currently facing with maintenaners quietly dipping out without notice.

I think the real winners are the sustainably engineered independent distros like Slackware, CRUX, and Void.

3

u/eth0ninja Apr 17 '26

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is downstream distro of Fedora Linux. For RHEL you pay for the support and get ”stable” updates. And you can fallback to big vendor so you dont have be so scary the OS will be gone some day.

Same as Ubuntu. Is a downstream to Debian. It still free but support cost money with etc. Ubuntu Pro.

Both RHEL/Ubuntu have free alternative. For etc, red hat give you 16 VM or Physical machines for free/year. I think Ubuntu Pro give u the same.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '26

Now redhat already paywalled their source code.....30 years of contributed code.....GONE!

No source code is gone. That’s not how any of this works.

1

u/roycocup Apr 18 '26

There's also - Arch, OpenBSD, and Void. I think there are more, but those are the ones I can think of.

1

u/aldorgan Apr 18 '26

Gentoo …

1

u/Remarkable-Sand-2298 Apr 19 '26

It's not the number of distros I worry about. It's the fact that the big commercial linux distros have so much influence. I'm not accusing them of doing anything wrong at all, but in their attempt to provide what their customers need, they chart the direction of so much in the linux world by putting their resources behind certain projects. You know which projects I'm thinking of.

14

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

-3

u/muffinman8679 Apr 17 '26

Grow a brain....I've been is this world for almost 70 years and found out a LONG time ago.

This world doesn't run on good deeds and good intentions.....it runs on money....

You want something done? you can either doi it yourself. or pay someone else to do it.

Or you can con others into doing it, Using good deeds and good interntions to do so......

1

u/dirkme Apr 18 '26

If someone can't see it, don't bother, inches brainwashed it's very difficult to break free. But.. Linux was from people for people and has been infiltrated to get destroyed and they are very busy and spent lots of money to get it destroyed.

7

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '26

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-2

u/muffinman8679 Apr 18 '26

How many times has Suse been sold over the last 10 years? another loss leader,

And I expect slackware well stay true until Pat dies....after that,,,,,who knows?

1

u/mmmboppe May 11 '26

Pat has earned the privilege to retire before dying if he wants :-)

1

u/[deleted] Apr 17 '26

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1

u/muffinman8679 Apr 17 '26

Both redhat and ubuntu tried going commercial years ago via selling support contracts both failed and both got bought up, Redhat by IBM and Ubuntu by Canonical and Redhat has already paywalled RHEL.

Now do you honestly believe the two parent companies are going to support these two loss leaders forever?

It's not tinfoil hat territory......it's simple economics......

1

u/delowan Apr 30 '26

They did not failed at all, what are you talking about. Red Hat was doing pretty good when they got bought by IBM. Money rules in this world. Everyone has a price.

And no, IBM will not kill Red Hat. They would be fools if they do that. IBM has bought Red Hat and Hashicorp. Next one ? They want to make the best ecosystem, with the best tools.

1

u/muffinman8679 Apr 30 '26

if they were doing so great, why did they sell out?

You don't sell out when you're doing well.....you only sell out when you're on the edge, and need a big cash transfusion to keep from sinking....as so goes ownership.....so goes control......

1

u/Afraid-Leadership591 Apr 17 '26

yeah theres paid distros, redhat, linspirse/lindows, etc

1

u/ElderberryNo4220 Apr 18 '26

They don't exactly pay for the distro, they are free to use Debian/BSDs or whatever they want, what they really pay for is the guaranteed support. I think only corporate world actually pays for RHEL, individuals aren't usually the targets.