I’ve seen Fedora being widely recommended among the Linux distros. Sadly, there are many problems that come with Fedora. A lot of this information might be a bit hard to find so I wanted to put everything I found in one place.

  1. Fedora is (kind of) owned by Red Hat (IBM).

Red Hat sponsors Fedora. They own and pay for the infrastructure used for all the Fedora-related things. They own the Fedora trademark and logo. Big decisions are made by the FESCo. While the committee itself is elected by Fedora community, they’re pretty much just exclusively Red Hat employees (for F41 elections all 5 of elected candidates work at Red Hat). I’m not going to talk about what-ifs much here, but if there would ever be a divide between what RH wants and what community wants, you can see it being an issue.

  1. US laws and Fedora

Fedora has to follow the US law. In practice, we have seen what that means a while ago, when they had to remove support from some multimedia codecs due to the US patent laws. Since then, basic functionalities like video playback in a web browser/video player have been broken, so for example you can’t play Twitch videos “by default” in Fedora, since the codecs are missing (youtube works as they use av1). To circumvent it, you either have to use third party repos or flatpak.

  1. Fedora Export Control Policy and it’s consequences

https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/export/ Yet another US law that Fedora has to adhere to. Basically, if you live in a country that the USA treats as an enemy, you should not use Fedora. This is yet another one that was actually applied in real life and resulted in basically kicking out a longtime contributor because he had the misfortune of being born in the wrong country. You can read all about in on that person’s blogpost:

https://ahmadhaghighi.com/blog/2021/us-restricted-free-software/

  • rtxn@lemmy.world
    6·
    21 hours ago

    If points 2 and 3 are deal breakers for you, you might as well stop using Linux altogether. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Compliance-Requirements

    From Torvalds himself:

    […] all of the Linux infrastructure and a lot of its maintainers are in the US and we can’t ignore the requirements of US law. We are hoping that this action alone will be sufficient to satisfy the US Treasury department in charge of sanctions and we won’t also have to remove any existing patches.

    • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
      41·
      20 hours ago

      It does bother me that the linux foundation is based in America. The recent geopolitical meddling against Russian contributors shows why it’s an issue. The RISC-V foundation moved to Switzerland specifically to avoid that.

      Is there any European alternatives to GNU/Linux though?

      • Lumiluz@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        10 hours ago

        Redox, and that rust project I think.

        I’m sleepy though so take it with a grain of salt