For Fedora users it changes nothing at all. Fedora is upstream from Enterprise Linux. There's no practical reason you'd want to switch to a different distribution, just maybe a personal one if you strongly dislike what Red Hat is doing to the RHEL clones.
The GPL requires you to distribute the GPL source code along side artefacts generated from it.
Red Hat used to share everything with everyone, they never needed to do that. To meet the requirements they need to share the code sources with licensed customers. This is what they have switched to doing.
This is my problem with the GPL, it feels like a cult of personality built around Stallman. With people assuming its somehow a magical license.
Businesses largely treat GPL as libraries they don't modify (or legal gets frowny face) so they don't have to share their code.
The "less free" licenses are generally ok to use and modify (the WTFPL caused fun with legal in one job). If you modify an open source project its normally easy to build a business case/convince a client to upstream the changes.
All the Red Hat changes demonstrate is another step towards an Oracle/Microsoft licensing model. Which is a good reason to not use RHEL or Fedora.
The legal loophole RedHat found I'm guessing is something that might trigger GPLv4 to stop this behaviour (effectively punishing someone for exercising their GPL rights).
You're right that most use of OSS doesn't involve modification so it doesn't really matter, but packaging changes are still useful.
I know Stallman was the strongest advocate of the GPL but personally I like the principle of reciprocity which it enshrines. For all of their contributions it's important to realise that companies like RedHat are very much building on the work of OSS developers.
Linux Mint is perfect! Avoid Ubuntu, which has a very shady history... Despite Mint being based on Ubuntu/Debian, it doesn't have any spying software. Like Ubuntu used to send all the search queries to Ubuntu when you were searching locally on your system for a file or an image.
What sort of tools are you going to use? I make ambient synth music and will often record and edit in Audacity. I use all analog hardware though, so it's different if you're using software. Only music focused distro I've ever heard of is the gentoo one, but I know there's gotta be others.
I never heard of gentoo studio. Im looking into it now and it looks like a decent possible alternative.
I want to run a DAW like Reaper, with multiple midi tracks playing through vst instruments. I had no problem doing that on windows 7 with my 4th gen i7 processor and 16GB of RAM, so my 8th gen processor should be able to handle it. But it's a "power saving" processor that actually benchmarks very close to my old 4th gen, so I do want to keep the OS and desktop environment light.
Edit:
I see gentoo studio isnt listed on distrowatch, but you can get it theough his site.
I learned about gentoo studio through the gentoo wiki. For music production where I use software I typically boot into my separate windows ssd, just because I've had so many head aches when trying to work with linux software and hardware that isn't fully supported. I'd love to do everything in linux, but some daws just don't work. Especially when I've got so much stuff set up already in mpc or guitar rig.
Easiest solution for windows with one pc, in my opinion, is get an external ssd and do windowstousb. I use that, and it works like it's native. Set me back about 100$ for a 1tb ssd. I've played games on it, made music, and other things. Works really well, so I'd suggest that before making a whole separate pc for windows alone.
Might win me back over if the weird green lines and glitching I always see with chrome on intel GPUs under linux goes away. I've also spent a lot of time trying to debug the issue but nothing ever seems to fix it and of course none of the Linux driver devs that might be able to fix it care to work on the problem imo.
Guess I have felt lucky to have hardware decoding at all on chrome - considering the it has taken Firefox this long to support intel GPUs. I imagine it has something to do with how massive their codebase is compared to everyone elses.
Considering how good Firefox is, and how much of a monopoly that Chrome-based browsers have over the web, I'd run Firefox just to support freedom of choice.
I'm still in two minds about this. We have a lot of infrastructure build on RHEL rebuilds and there's no way we're buying enough RHEL licenses to cover it.
I can look at Devian based alternatives but switching is going to be a time consuming process. If Alma and Rocky get this figured out then I'm still tempted to stick where I am. These distributions have been very stable, and I don't need support for them. Even if RedHat don't like this I'm fine with doing it on the basis that they have an obligation to release the source (at least for GPL code).
Tbh you are best off start new projects on Debian, and slowly move your old stuff over. It's linux - the main difference will all be in the package manager and versioning.
It's a bit more than that unfortunately. Changes in conf file location, selinux Vs apparmour etc. There are a lot of little things which can catch you out if you're building something relatively complex.
I ran Windowmaker as my primary WM for many years back in the day. now I run KDE, but as a holdover I want the primary taskbar vertical rather than horizontal. GSDE is somewhat interesting for that reason but I doubt I'll actually install it for quite some time yet, I've got comfy with KDE
Zorin OS Pro might be a good one here. At least you would have a tested suite.
Create with the same apps the pros use. Zorin OS Pro includes an advanced video editor, Photoshop-compatible image editor, illustration software, audio workstation, animation software, and the same 3D graphics & effects software used by Hollywood studios, just to name a few. With tools this powerful, your imagination is the only limit.
Instances exist for more than just to access singular communities. You can access our stuff here, and we will go to y'all as well. This is no small community either. We choose to be on kbin for a reason.
I'm going to suggest one I'm not seeing here; OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I cut my teeth on Tumbleweed for years, and it has the pros of a rolling release while YaST provides the tools needed to have a stable base that rivals that of Ubuntu. Gaming is extremely easy to get set up, and you can choose pretty much any major desktop, although I recommend XFCE.
I'll probably need a few more lines in Python, but I can do everything i want and don't have to deal with the cryptic syntax. I once had to use awk because some extra pigheaded sysadmin refused to install Python on an AIX machine. Glad i don't work there any more.
Python isn't really a fantastic drop-in replacement for them, IMHO, though there is some overlap.
There are a bunch of Unix tools that let one concisely put a lot of logic into a single command line. They lower the bar to throwing a lot of logic into that single line.
Python's whitespace-sensitive and requires newlines. I guess theoretically you could use a HEREDOC or something, but realistically, if you use Python, you're going to go author a throwaway script and then execute it, which raises the bar to just including it in your command lines.
I think that Perl is probably closer to a middle ground between "application-oriented programming languages" and "single command line use". I think that it'd be reasonable to simply use perl -pie as an alternative to awk especially, though having sed's conciseness is still nice.
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