The replies here make me so mad at Kent Overstreet.

I love bcachefs and was using it on quite a few systems. When it was in the mainline kernel, interest was building. I feel like we could have been just a few months from experimental coming off and adoption skyrocketing.

Then Kent got it pulled from the kernel (so not interested in the “fighting for users” misdirection). Now, as evidenced by the comments here, most users will not touch it.

I needed it in the kernel so I have been migrating away too but it breaks my heart.

I am sure somebody will use it, maybe even more than the small number that have historically. And Kent will probably tell himself that is ok.

It sucks.

Now, I did not write a COW filesystem. So I guess I am getting what I am owed (nothing). That does not dull the sting much though.

Yes. Because 10% of men is enough to impregnate all the women.

As a guy though, I wish there was male birth control. I do not love that women get to decide if they are going to make me a father or not.

The appeal of Flatpak is not that I prefer it to my distro package manager.

The appeal is for the application author who finds the fragmentation in Linux a problem. It is a way for them to target “Linux” and not individual distros. It is a way for app authors to control the distribution and the support surface in a way that turning over control to package managers does not allow.

Which means the appeal for me is just that I can get apps as Flatpak that I cannot find in my distro repo.

On Arch, I hardly ever use Flatpak. On other distros, I use them more. I do use the pgAdmin Flatpak everywhere though because all the distro versions I have tried are garbage.

NetBSD does not support 386 anymore either and I think NetBSD requires an FPU. With its x87 emulator, it may be that Linux has been more hardware friendly in this case.

Here is a Linux for 486 that runs in 8 MB (current kernel, same userland as Alpine Linux): https://github.com/marmolak/gray486linux/commits/master/

There will still be LTS kernels supporting 486 in Linux until 2030 or later. The oldest kernel currently still getting updates at kernel.org is a version from 2019.

Outside the official kernel project, distros like Ubuntu and RHEL offer 10 years of support. So, they will be dropping security updates for these kernels for even longer.

Based on your write-up, one of the Arch based distros is likely your best bet. My strong recommendation would be EndeavourOS. It is awesome.

If you use EOS, install both the current stable kernel and the LTS one. Use current day-to-day. In the very rare instance that you have a kernel or driver issue, boot into LTS.

Fedora is a great distro. As a non-American, I would say that you do not need to be so focussed on either IBM or the “American” control over Fedora.

1 - Fedora has a great community and a strong commitment to Free Software. Independence from Red Hat’s commercial agenda is the very reason it exists.

2 - Even in a worst case scenario, you are not locked into Fedora and switching is low risk and easy. There is little downside to enjoying Fedora now even if something was to happen later (however unlikely).

3 - modern Linux distros are almost all built from the exact same base elements. Fedora is really no more exposed than anything else.

4 - Red Hat is a driving force behind half the technology at the heart of whatever distro you will end up on including SystemD, Wayland, Pipewire, Glibc, GCC, and the Linux Kernel itself. To repeat point number 3, you are no less exposed to the influence of IBM/Red Hat on Ubuntu or even Arch.

I mean, you could use something like Chimera Linux that avoids SystemD, GCC, and Glibc. But you would still be using Wayland, Pipewire, and of course the kernel. And Chimera does not sound what you are looking for.

I would recommend EOS but I would not avoid Fedora for the reasons you cite.

Good job eliminating Ubuntu.

This maintainer is pulling rank on those below him. He is causing people making good contributions to Linux to quit the project. Yet he cannot handle his own decisions being overridden and he is attempting to force his agenda by threatening to quit.

His says that he cannot abide by a mixed code base and that, if that is the way Linux goes, he will “spend his time doing something else”.

Well, the time for that argument was a while ago. It was already decided to make Linux a mixed code base. If this maintainer is saying that he cannot support this decision, he needs to go at some point. What makes him better than all the people he is causing to quit?

If Linus does let this stand, it is a total failure of leadership.

The Linux Project either needs to accept technically sound Rust contributions or it needs to acknowledge that it is abandoning its Rust experiment.

They are using pacman obviously :)

Any bets on how likely that this is even maintained six months from now?

As everybody else has said, Debian is working as intended. To respond to the actual post though, Debian is working exactly as it always has.

If you think Debian used to be good, you must really love it now. It is better than ever.

Unlike in the past, the primary drawback of Debian Stable ( old package versions ) has multiple viable solutions. Other have rightly pointed out things like the Mozilla APT package and Flatpaks. Great solutions.

My favourite solution is to install Arch via Distrobox. You can then get all the stability of Debian everywhere you need it and, anytime you need additional packages or newer packages, you can install them in the Arch distrobox. Firefox is a prime candidate. You are not going to get newer packages or a greater section than via he Arch repos / AUR ( queue Nix rebuttals ).

If they are asking, not discovering, perhaps EndeavourOS would be a better intro to Arch.

I am a little concerned to step in front of the hate machine here but this feels like a continued move away from app dev to more infrastructural stuff as previously announced by them. If so, I am all for it as not everybody is going to use Rhythmbox or LibreOffice but we can all use HDR and other core tech that Red Hat will develop instead. They are one of the few Linux companies that can fund these large, technical projects. Having them working on apps feels like a waste of their engineering potential.

This makes me much more upset than Red Hat asking people to rebase on CentOS Stream.

This is ridiculous.