Shit you have time to compile everything from source. What is this a air gapped laptop?

I would not trust the community of volunteers that maintain Gentoo in their free time for anything mission critical. I would use Ubuntu or Red Hat, which are backed by companies.

I've got bad news for you - most of Ubuntu is repackaged Debian which is from a community of volunteers that maintains the packages. Besides that Ubuntu used to be sloppy in backporting important patches and doing some NIH here and there... not sure about Redhat but they source heavily from Fedora which is also community-based.

I’m not sure I can agree with this concern. All Linux distros work by repackaging upstream code, the majority of which is written by volunteers. For Debian, they’re repackaging directly from upstream. Ubuntu repackages from Debian.

The value of going through a company is that you can choose to write a check to Canonical or RedHat and say “I’m hitting this issue with the software you repackaged, here is money, fix the problem”. There’s no similarly direct pay-to-win for Fedora or Debian. You can shop around for a consultancy or engineer and pay them to try to debug the issue, but they’re always going to be coming in as a 3rd party, which has an impact on the levers they can pull to resolve an issue.

> You can shop around for a consultancy or engineer and pay them to try to debug the issue, but they’re always going to be coming in as a 3rd party

Except for software that was written in-house or the packaging itself, RH or Canonical would also always be coming in as a third party.

... whereas your consultant might be the original author of the upstream code.

Most Linux software is written by Red Hat. GNOME, Wayland, and systemd are all Red Hat projects. They are even a major contributor to the kernel itself.

> Most Linux software is written by Red Hat.. even a major contributor to the kernel itself.

Oh! I didn't realize Red Hat had hired RMS. :-/

Setting aside the controversial nature of those three specific projects (and the fact that this statement is demonstrably false), this statement demeans the contributions of thousands of coders, even from before Linux existed.

(let alone before Red Hat was a gleam on Bob Young's head.)

There are consultancies that do that for Debian, the major ones have multiple engineers contributing to Debian and even more to upstream projects.

https://www.debian.org/consultants/

It's not a concern but just an observation that things in universe in Ubuntu get rarely if at all backports. It's okay. I agree about having a company especially regarding timely security updates.

Red Hat sponsors Fedora big time. I was part of the packagers team for Ruby. Next to us were sitting Perl guys (you would never believe how many Perl packages are still there...!) and somewhere else folks doing Python packaging.

Source: Formal Red Hat packager working on Fedora.

It doesn’t matter that Ubuntu packages originally came from Debian. At the end of the day, Canonical employees are being paid to make sure they are up to date. I trust that over a bunch of volunteers who do it out of the goodness of their heart.

You just described just about every OS that isn't Microsoft of Apple. Good luck with that attitude.

That just shows a lack of knowledge of the quantinty of commercial OSes available out there.

Were are the volunteers for Sony and Nintendo console OSes, Android, ChromeOS, Fuchsia, IBM i, IBM z/OS, INTEGRITY, QNX,Unisys ClearPath, Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, vxWorks.....?

Both PS Vita and Nintendo Switch have miles long credits listing all the licenses (mostly BSD) and authors of the many OSS software bits they use.

Indeed and almost zero contributions to upstream.

Those listings are required by the license.

Also they aren't Linux or BSD derivatives, rather their own OSes.

Yep, exactly - IIRC Sony did some code drops to FreeBSD long ago improving SMP performance but that was preatty much it.