Well in order to access the CentOS stream repo you need to have a subscription.

That’s false. The sources are right here, open to the world and open for contribution. What was shut down was the automation to export RHEL source RPMs to the legacy location. The source RPM exports were pretty much useless for contributors and maintainers of RHEL and CentOS. However, they were critical for RHEL rebuilds, which is why people are upset.

Now they seem content to profit from it and give nothing back.

This statement is completely false. Red Hat contributes a ton to open source, to thousands of upstream projects, probably more than any other individual company. Software from Red Hat acquisitions has been transitioned from closed to open source. New open source software is often created by Red Hat engineers. Everything Red Hat does is open source and contributed back upstream whenever possible.

To be clear, me saying this is not an endorsement of the RHEL source export changes announced yesterday. I think that sucks. But it doesn’t undo everything else Red Hat does.

Workstations:

I’ve been using Fedora since 2014, so coming up on a decade. Runner up would be Arch for about three years from 2011-2014. Before that it was a blur of distro hopping.

Servers:

Been using a combination of RHEL and CentOS since 2011, so about twelve years. And yes, I’m still using CentOS even though it’s no longer a rebuild of RHEL. I actually think it’s better now, because bugs can actually be fixed instead of being closed as “reproducible on RHEL”.

No worries, there is a bit of nuance to it that can be easy mix up. People often make the mistake of thinking Fedora == Red Hat. Red Hat folks are certainly involved, but Fedora does have a healthy amount of independence too. The best example of this is the fact that Fedora uses btrfs as the default filesystem, while it’s disabled entirely in RHEL.

For this to be accurate you need to change it to “why don’t you rewrite it in rust”? Rust fans say this so often they made it an acronym (RIIR).

Fedora is no longer compiling rpm versions of libreoffice.

Yes, we are. The latest build was two days ago.

Fedora is a community distro. Any software that follows the packaging guidelines can be packaged by whoever is willing to maintain it. Fedora doesn’t block people from maintaining RPMs just because a flatpak is a available, like Canonical does with snaps in Ubuntu.

Previously, the RHEL LibreOffice maintainers also maintained it in Fedora. This is common for the subset of Fedora packages (~10%) that are also in RHEL. RHEL deprecated LO, meaning it’s still in current RHEL versions but won’t be in a future major version. Because of that the RHEL maintainers orphaned the Fedora package and its dependencies. Pretty much immediately, Fedora community members adopted the packages to keep them around. This isn’t the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last.

Meta uses CentOS but they aren’t leeches. They contribute a ton to CentOS, EPEL, and further upstream in Fedora and in individual software projects.

Howdy, I’m the maintainer of the gnome-shell-extension-pop-shell Fedora package, which is likely how you installed it on Fedora since it’s not available from extensions.gnome.org. I’m glad you’re finding it useful.

The pop-shell upstream is still being maintained by System76 engineers. Development work has slowed down since they started working on COSMIC DE, but they’re still fixing bugs and reviewing/merging contributions. When COSMIC DE was announced I asked them how long they would keep maintaining their GNOME extensions, and they said at least until the end of life of the PopOS versions the extensions are shipped in. So pop-shell has still got some life left in it, even for a few years after COSMIC DE becomes their default in a new release.