this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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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!

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[–] Raphael@lemmy.world 34 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

You are correct, distributions like Kubuntu are not TRULY community-driven as they are still subject to Canonical's influence. Anyone saying otherwise is merely being pedantic.

However it's not Canonical who's running Kubuntu, it's the community, they have the power to revert Canonical's bad decisions, sadly by giving themselves an increasingly higher workload. Most distributions will simply give up at some point, for example VanillaOS' next release will be based on Debian as it was getting too tough to remove snap and all the bad things Canonical adds.

Kubuntu uses snaps which are largely disrespected by the community, that's the end result of being under Canonical's influence. They can't rebase on Debian without effectively killing their raison d'etre and they don't want to remove Snap, perhaps because it would be difficult but most likely because they're deep under Canonical's influence, they look up to Canonical to some extent.

This is, in fact, the very meaning of "influence". It's even worse, in fact, much, much worse for Fedora, they have been culturally enslaved by Red Hat, sorry for the strong word.

[–] pglpm@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago

Thank you for the clarification! – And for the extra info about snaps, which was something else I was wondering about too (I use Kubuntu at the moment)!

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