A lot of debate today about “community” vs “corporate”-driven distributions. I (think I) understand the basic difference between the two, but what confuses me is when I read, for example:

…distro X is a community-driven distribution based on Ubuntu…

Now, from what I understand, Ubuntu is corporate-driven (Canonical). So in which sense is distro X above “community-driven”, if it’s based on Ubuntu? And more concretely: what would happen to distribution X if Canonical suddeny made Ubuntu closed-source? (Edit: from the nice explanations below, this example with Ubuntu is not fully realistic – but I hope you get my point.)

Possibly my question doesn’t make full sense because I don’t understand the whole topic. Apologies in that case – I’m here to learn. Cheers!

  • stravanasu@lemmy.caOPEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Thank you for the explanations! Which are the “most upstream” community-based ones? From what I gather, Arch, Debian, OpenSUSE?

    • kool_newt@beehaw.orgEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Not sure if any Suse would fit in there. I’d say more Arch, Debian, Slackware (is that a thing anymore?), Gentoo, Linux From Scratch if you count that as a distro.

      • NaN@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        3·
        1 year ago

        openSUSE is an odd mix because they have a very good relationship with SUSE and Tumbleweed and Leap have different hierarchies. As a result, openSUSE is both upstream, apart from, alongside, and a derivative of the corporate distro.

        openSUSE Factory is where development happens that eventually becomes openSUSE and SUSE Enterprise Linux (snapshots of Factory make up Tumbleweed). SUSE stabilizes a core system for their corporate customers and shares those binaries (as of 15.3) and source with openSUSE for Leap. openSUSE maintains a larger number of backports packages that are shared with SUSE as as community supported software repo.

    • afb@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Off the top of my head, it’d be Debian, Arch, Void, and Gentoo. There are others that are debatable.

        • hardcoreufo@lemmy.world
          3·
          1 year ago

          I’m happy solus is coming back. I don’t think there are any downstream distro and when solus 5 hits it will be downstream of serpent OS.

        • afb@lemmy.ml
          2·
          1 year ago

          Perhaps fair, but since they’re planning to move downstream of Serpent OS, they’re not gonna be an independant distro for much longer and probably shouldn’t count in the broader context of this thread.

          I also didn’t count a bunch of distros with atypical functionality (like NixOS, Alpine, Slackware, etc), just because they tend to have very particular usecases and maybe aren’t well-suited as general recommendations if someone’s looking for a typical Linux experience, but YMMV.