Re: [qubes-users] Perplexed, why do so many here seem to prefer Fedora instead of ?

2020-01-05 Thread Chris Laprise

On 1/5/20 12:09 PM, gorked wrote:
I thought Fedora was the free publicly available version of the test bed 
for Red Hat Linux?  That is Fedora being the version that will become 
Red Hat?


The way I remember Marek explaining it (and correct me if I'm wrong, 
Marek) is that choosing Fedora was mostly chance bc that's what he was 
used to at the time.


You are right that Fedora is a test bed for Red Hat, and it has some 
pretty serious downsides as a result. Foremost is that TPTB don't allow 
Fedora to cryptographically sign their top level repository manifests. 
This means that any MITM attacker can pick which packages don't receive 
updates, even though the overall update proceeds in an apparently normal 
manner.


Virtually all other distros that are half-way popular sign their repo 
metadata so that any MITM attempts can be prevented.


More downsides are that less quality testing occurs, packages of all 
types (and sizes) get 'dumped' into the update stream much more 
frequently, and the more flagrant mistakes with Red Hat's in-house tech 
like Systemd land right in users' laps (I've found that Debian's Systemd 
releases are less bug-ridden than Fedora's).




I though CentOS and Oracle Linux were free publicly available versions 
of the current stable versions of Red Hat?


Those are two distros came much later on, and they weren't under control 
of Red Hat (although RH did take over CentOS a few years back).




And that basically Red Hat is from only free software sources?  
Excepting some folks might add non-free Firmware drivers if they chose?


Seems like the stable version of Red Hat, renamed something else to make 
the Linux OS available for free, would be more secure.


The problem with both RHEL and CentOS is that they're the opposite of 
Fedora: Very staid, and non-security updates come slowly. That's a 
problem for Qubes since it spent 5+ years charting new territory in the 
hardware features + Linux/Xen compatibility matrix.


I actually think a better overall distro for Qubes is Debian, which is 
available as a Qubes template (but not for dom0). The reason is that its 
'serious' and well tested/supported, but also has layers that allow you 
to install and try newer more experimental versions of software. Due to 
it popularity, Debian also has more software to choose from in its 
repositories. (An example of this in action: 
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/e050ed1e-181a-45b4-89be-b8250c1924fc%40googlegroups.com 
).


--

Chris Laprise, tas...@posteo.net
https://github.com/tasket
https://twitter.com/ttaskett
PGP: BEE2 20C5 356E 764A 73EB  4AB3 1DC4 D106 F07F 1886

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[qubes-users] Perplexed, why do so many here seem to prefer Fedora instead of ?

2020-01-05 Thread gorked
I thought Fedora was the free publicly available version of the test bed 
for Red Hat Linux?  That is Fedora being the version that will become Red 
Hat?  

I though CentOS and Oracle Linux were free publicly available versions of 
the current stable versions of Red Hat?  

And that basically Red Hat is from only free software sources?  Excepting 
some folks might add non-free Firmware drivers if they chose?  

Seems like the stable version of Red Hat, renamed something else to make 
the Linux OS available for free, would be more secure.   

One of the big differences being that if one buys Red Hat, versus the free 
version, that one is paying for support, also some of the development 
costs.   

What gives?

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