This is sad, Fedora has been my favourite distribution for a little while. Red Hat have been a good community player and it is a big loss for them to be gobbled up by IBM. What is the best alternative to Fedora and CentOS?

The obvious alternative would be Ubuntu. The LTS releases are alternatives to RHEL/CentOS. The others are Fedora alternatives.

However, Red Hat is _far_ more than RHEL. They actually build a ton of OSS that's used in RHEL and elsewhere. Ubuntu does little more than repackage Debian. That's not a criticism. They package well, and they know how to polish. But there's no replacement for Red Hat as a company.

It's so weird because as a long time fedora user I absolutely detest Ubuntu. Can't stand how bloated it's become.

Try vanilla Debian. I really don't get the fascination with Ubuntu - modern Debian does all the same things, and in many cases it does it better (saner defaults, less opinionated).

And if one really needs a "one click out of the box" desktop distro, then Mint.

My guess is that people tend to favour the OS they ‘grew up’ with.

Ubuntu made big inroads on the desktop in the early 2000’s, and now those people are running their own infrastructure.

you say opionated like it's a bad thing. Opinionated is exactly why I use Fedora.

It can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how closely it matches your opinion.

Conversely, non-opinionated might not be good, but it's guaranteed to be not bad.

I agree with the first, but on the second, I'd rather switch to a different system that more closely matches my opinion.

I've been doing this crap way too long to want to configure everything myself.

Mint is based on Ubuntu. There is a version of Mint based on Debian but that is experimental.

LMDE has been around for several years now. IMO, it's "experimental" in the same way many Google services are "beta". Which is to say, in practice, it works just fine.

That's why we have Debian!

Obviously Debian always will be there...

OpenSuse, they've shown an ability to deal with corporate buyouts and survive. They also continue to support the open source community.

NixOS due to its excellent community and quality.

Debian is solidly community based. Ubuntu depends on Debian in order to add its own value on top.

I only used tried-and-tested distros like Yggdrasil.

I'm sticking with Fedora - too early to tell.

Too early to say what will happens with Fedora and other RH products.

DragonFly BSD

But Red Hat/Fedora has been a huge contributor to very basic Linux ecosystem things which everyone benefits from, like the freedesktop standard stuff and more.

I wonder how this change will pan out across the entire Linux-sphere. I’m wondering and I’m trying not to be pessimistic.