I want to start feeling out future distros for me once the age attestation makes its way into systemd. I am currently using Fedora on two computers, one I use for gaming (all AMD) and one I use for getting work done (thinkpad x13). I am pretty bummed about this because I feel quite settled in with Fedora, but with all the talk of age attestation happening I will be withdrawing my consent from using distros that intend to comply with these laws.
I have targeted three distros, Artix, Void Linux, and endeavorOS. The first two do not use systemd at all and the third has stated they will not implement age attestation methods.
I am thinking endeavorOS might be a good move, I appreciate an out of the box solution. I can and have installed Arch manually several times, but I prefer to spend my time using my computer, not necessarily going into the “rice” rabbit hole. I will probably use a desktop environment like KDE, GNOME, or XFCE.
I guess the point of this post is: anyone who has experience with systemd-free distros like Void or Artix, what are your thoughts using as a general purpose operating system? how is the learning curve coming from systemd? Can someone who is technologically competent but not particularly interested in deep customization (I am a sysadmin, but I just like my shit to work) thrive in this type of environment? I use Fedora because it’s a good mix of being generally unassuming but having sensible defaults and being extraordinarily well supported.
Your thoughts are greatly appreciated. Feel free to give me any thoughts you may have on the subject of age attestation or even suggest distros I might not be aware of.
I think it’s too early to be making decisions based on this alone.
Fair point, but I think at this point it’s extremely likely Fedora will comply, and my issue with this is ideological, not practical. I will not use a distribution that complies with this law because I believe it is morally compromised.
I will not use a distribution that complies with this law because I believe it is morally compromised.
RH owning Fedora and funding it by making the American army more efficient at killing civilians - perfectly fine
Fedora will probably comply with the equivalent of a teen setting their age to 130 to watch porn - morally compromised
I’d be more worried about literally upstream bug testing for the DoD…
Care to backup your claim? I’m not familiar with that bit.
As far as I’m aware, fedora is a public project and not a org that is “owned” by anyone. You’ve got to do a great bit of mental gymnastics to arrive at your conclusion just to try and make me feel stupid. Why?
Also don’t act like there aren’t serious implications of imposing age checks in supposedly free libre software. Libre software should be a fundamental human right. You can believe in that and also that military interventionism is also bad.
You can conflate my point of view all you want, but let’s dial back the cutesy sarcasm. Thanks.
Red Hat is owned by IBM, which is one of the largest contractors for compute infrastructure and software for the US military. They’ve particularly taken an interest in ‘AI’ systems as automated target acquisition is now seen as a viable tactic following its use by Israel in Gaza.
Like bobo (rudely) said, Red Hat is what keeps the lights on for Fedora, even if its ownership is independent of RHEL. One cannot exist without the other.
On top of the many large multi-billion contracts to the DoD (like $151B for missile tech a few months ago), you can also search direct contracts to individual agencies at fdps.gov (i.e. direct contracts exclusive to the US Army, >$100,000 - you can see that Red Hat actually maintains some of their combat systems).
IBM and Red Hat also have played a significant role in the genocide in Gaza.
Thanks for taking the time to share that with me. I am no Zionist. However, I do pose the question, because of Red Hat’s stewardship of Fedora, do you believe that makes Fedora morally compromised? Because Red Hat develops systemd, does that mean all Linux distros that use it are thusly compromised as well? ARPANET, the technology that the modern internet stems from, was developed directly by the US Deprtment of Defense. Can a leftist then morally use the internet? I don’t mean this as a sarcastic strawman but as a genuine question in good faith. I myself don’t have an answer, probably a bit yes and a bit no. I will point out the distinction that while Fedora doesn’t have control of what Red Hat does or does not to, it does have direct control over whether or not to implement these age verification laws in question.
What about a distro like Universal Blue, which is directly downstream of Fedora but not affiliated with it organizationally? Where do we draw the line between consent and simple happenstance? Everything is connected to a Nazi, a Zionist or colonialism if you dig deep enough, we live in capitalist hell-world, it’s the foundation of our very society. Consent is implied an in many cases, unavoidable.
That being said you have given me quite a bit to think about and if anything have solidified my decision to move away from Fedora. I hope you don’t interpret my response as adversarial in any way like others who have responded to my post. Cheers
I’ve recently spent a lot of time doing bare metal installs of a large number of non-systemd operating systems.
GhostBSD - Its BSD, so its stable and avoids the problems of Linux but supports less hardware especially 3D GPU’s.
FreeBSD - as above but more effort to install & configure initially because its server oriented but makes a fine workstation nevertheless.
Alpine - Highly performant Linux oriented to container hosting but can be made into a workstation with effort. Forget using nvidia except in nouveau driver.
Void - highly performant. more packages than Alpine. can be made into a workstation with effort. Forget using anything but newest nvidia GPU’s and even then strange unsolvable glitches.
Artix - look this is Arch with a non-systemd init (your choice of 3). Being Arch it inherits the repo’s of bleeding edge packages but also inherits the heavy maintenance burden of Arch (if you know, you know). I’m just too bloody busy to baby sit an Arch install with all its nonsense.
Endeavour et al - wait for other OS’s to implement work arounds to systemd’s cancerous kowtowing to corporate America imposed surveillance laws.
Devuan - a drop in replacement for Debian. Inherits Debian’s stability and ease of maintenance but with proven mature implementation of OpenRC init system.
The is the one I use for a calm happy life. To save time you can get a distro called ‘Vendefoul Wolf Linux’ which is Spanish in origin. Its a spin of Devuan but with a choice of GUI desktops and a GUI Calamares installer (the Devuan text mode TUI installer is fine, but whatever).
My daily driver is Vendefoul Wolf (Spanish for ‘vengenance’) LxQT desktop. Light, fast simple, stable. tip: download the ‘weekly’ iso’s not the old 2025 ones.
I’ve been using Linux 20+ years as my main os. Most of that time I’ve been an arch user. I moved to void Linux 2 weeks ago. I’m very much a start from scratch and build to my liking sort of person, so I just extracted the rootfs base system to a fresh partition, configured everything through a chroot, and booted the new system. Took me 2 days to get to a point I was happy with. I really like void Linux. It boots faster, the init system is much simpler and I feel I understand it better than systemd already. The package manager is really good, and easy to use. I have no complaints.
For yourself, void Linux offers an xfce ready made live version, so everything is already configured and you can test it out in a live setup first with no permanent install. I didn’t test the installer as did a manual install, however it is not a gui installer.
