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Comment by macksd | Hacker News Reader

>> Why pick Ubuntu instead of (basically) upstream?

"Upstream" for Ubuntu is more like Debian, which is the basis for MANY distros (much like Red Hat - founded around the same time as Debian - and the .rpm ecosystem is a significant core component of many systems including current versions of SuSE, etc.). Ubuntu has traditionally been a slightly more newbie-friendly / commercial-friendly version of Debian. I don't think many of the changes you're describing were really trying to defy Fedora, especially not the choice to use .deb over .rpm.

That said, I did use Fedora for a while when Ubuntu started messing with Gnome a lot and I found it very refreshing, easy and reliable. It's a great distro, but the relationship between the two is absolutely not "upstream" and "downstream".

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What they mean is not 'upstream' with respect to distro tooling, but Fedora's closer relationship to the upstream components of the stack desktop stack (GNOME, PipeWire, SystemD, etc.), which are often entirely or in part maintained by Fedora contributors or Red Hat employees, etc.

The 'defiance' they're talking about are the projects that Canonical has developed, often in secret, which are or were essentially alternatives/competitors to the components of the Linux free desktop stack which have been developed in the open, often at Red Hat and developed on Fedora.

The cases that come to mind are:

  - Unity vs. GNOME 3
  - Upstart vs. Systemd
  - Mir vs. Wayland
  - Snap vs. Flatpak

The Canonical entries all appear as sort of NIH latecomers, whereas their competitors have generally been developed in an upstream-first, 'release early' kind of way. In each case, the tech opposite Canonical's has been shipped on Fedora, before eventually becoming the default in Ubuntu anyway. (Snap has yet to go.)

> Upstart vs. Systemd

Upstart is older than systemd. The famous blog post which originally announced systemd (https://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html) explicitly mentioned upstart as an already existing alternative, and dedicates several paragraphs to describing the differences between both.

That's a useful thing to remember! Thanks for pointing it out.

Anyway that's the broad picture of the supposed rivalry which might motivate the perceived 'defiance' of Canonical, and the sense that parts of Ubuntu's stack are 'downstream' from Red Hat or Fedora.

Idk if the characterization really makes sense, but that's what the earlier commenter was talking about, not a proper upstream in terms of distro tooling or repositories.

>Upstart is older than systemd.

So are Unity and Snap compared to GNOME3 and Flatpak.

Unity may have gotten out the door first, but GNOME3 was announced in 2008. Unity was revealed out of the blue in 2010.

Flatpak was born as xdg-app, conceived in 2013 with substantive work beginning in 2014.

In both cases, Canonical was doing their own thing, collaborating with no one, while ignoring projects which do all their development in the open and had been upstream of their desktop stack for years.

Did Canonical 'beat' the community projects within (supposedly) their own community 'to market'? Sure. Does it still reveal relatively little interest in collaborating with the wider free software and Linux desktop community compared to 'upstream-first' organizations? Yes! Does throwing code over the wall after community efforts have been underway in public for years still make you look like a latecomer? Hell yes!

Maybe there are good reasons for that— maybe GNOME is hard to work with, maybe it's somehow better to present years worth of code to the world out of the blue instead of writing proposals. Bu5 it still fits the same picture of Canonical's uneasy relationship to formerly-and later, again-upstream projects like GNOME.

Oh I see, that makes sense. Speaking of the upstream / downstream imagery, I suppose a fish ladder would actually make a pretty good analogy here...

lol I'm not saying it's language I would use myself, or that it's fair to characterize projects like GNOME or Flatpak as 'belonging' to Fedora.

Personally, I liked Unity. Mir has turned out to have enduring value outside of the desktop space and also implements Wayland. I don't fully buy into the view I described.

I just think there was an intelligible argument behind that other commenter's strange language, and tried to point it out.

(Another possible reading is that Fedora is 'closer to upstream' because they don't do as much downstream theming of the desktop. I'm not sure if that was also part of what they were getting at.)

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