I’ve happily been a Fedora user for many years now, but RHEL’s recent choice to put their source code behind a paywall has me pondering ethical considerations of my distro choice.

It’s my understanding that this doesn’t have a direct impact on Fedora, and I feel confident that it will continue to be a great distro for the foreseeable future, but I want the commercial/enterprise/corporate influence on the distro I run to be as minimal as possible. For it to be as free as possible.

With that in mind, what distros would everyone recommend?

I only have recent-ish experience with Fedora, Debian, Arch, and Ubuntu. I don’t really know much about any others.

Ideally, I’d like it to fit within these boxes as well:

• Reasonable release cycle time. Debian as an example tends to be too stale by it’s nature. Edit for clarification: doesn’t have to be bleeding edge, just don’t want to fight with outdated dependencies if I’m compiling something from source. I feel distros generally ride this line well, but I’ve run into a handful of times in the past with Debian.
• Doesn’t try too hard to be user friendly. Obsfucating system internals, forcing a specific DE on you, that kind of thing.
• Not overly time consuming to maintain. Arch would be an example of that in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, Arch is awesome. But maintaining a rolling release and a bunch of AUR’s gets tiresome.
• Doesn’t try to force you to use a flatpaks, snaps, etc.

Seeing it all written out, that’s pretty picky. And maybe this unicorn distro doesn’t exist. But on the other hand, maybe it does.

A final thought. I know Debian has a testing branch. Anyone have any experience using that as a daily driver? Is it viable?