consider PCLinuxOS for a mageia (mandriva, conectiva and mandrake, both branches from RedHat pre-Enterprise Linux) descendant.

if they didn’t kick the cow and spoil that milk like they’ve kicked every cow before it

I miss Cringely’s take on this.

. I would not be surprised if this was just a Red Hat thing.

It’s a tough one. We blame RedHat for a lot of its half-baked internal fridge art - systemd, network manager; and even, some days, yum in an apt-4-rpm world.

But this new one is QUITE the departure. It’s not ‘red hat’ stupid but a little further on the spectrum.

I was actually about to do that (move to Debian).

Maybe stay within the Enterprise Linux camp for a bit. Not to start a flame war, but when an OS company was deciding between EL and Debians, the RPM format was the deciding factor.

But why would they want to kill their acquistion like that though?

I can only recommend you look at the last decade of IBM’s history in that respect.

While Jeff’s support for ELs has been imperfect - I marveled at the supply-chain issues gleefully baked into the drupal vagrant stuff - I came here to really say:

IBM’s not really the poster-child for preserving the sanctity of source code in the past (cough cough Monterey cough), and I’m surprised they’re even suggesting everyone respect their own demands around that.