A longer answer is that there is nothing stopping you from freezing the kernel here or the most recent LTS release and running it for eternity, but without the contributions of Valve, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and IBM, it will just be a scuffed and increasingly insecure version of linux.
There doesn’t seem to be much momentum behind schisming the kernel from here, and without dedicated devs, any fork is just a website.
There is FreeBSD whose guts are robust enough that is was used as the base for the PS4 OS. However, MIT licensing means that short of a Sony Hack or bankruptcy that code is never seeing the light of day. It’s mostly functional for everything except gaming in a typical use case.
There is FreeBSD whose guts are robust enough that is was used as the base for the PS4 OS
I second this on using FreeBSD. With some tweaks, it can be used with Steam/Proton for gaming on PC. See this video for more info: https://youtu.be/vQpI7SU921A
The video maker is using a FreeBSD variant called NomadBSD which is a live USB that has automatic hardware detection - https://nomadbsd.org/
HyperbolaBSD and its kernel HyperBK (derivative of the BSD kernel) are expected to be in alpha soon-ish. This is heavily principled, everything remotely proprietary straight to the trash stuff, so the end result is you’re sacrificing access to a lot of common software.
A few years back I tried Hyperbola on the linux kernel for maybe a year. Essentially all of the issues I had were with not having access to software I wanted. If I’m sticking to software in the repositories I had no real problems with it.
What basically every issue boiled down to was: Common software X has some issue in its licensing (I never understood the technicalities of any of this stuff, so please don’t ask) that maintainers of common distros are fine ignoring because they consider the the licensing issues minor and lots of things require X as a dependency. Software Y is much earlier in development, but can functionally replace most of the features we want from software X, and has no problems in its licensing. We’ll use software Y and adapt the software in our repositories around that. But even if those adaptations are generally not big changes, as you get more and more software in the repos, the effort required from maintainers adds up. Because they’re limited on time and funding, the end result is a lot of repository pruning.
I would bet someone with a little technical knowledge could get a lot of software outside of the repos working without a lot of effort, but I am not that someone. Honestly, it was a good OS, I did okay with what software they had available until texlive was removed from the repos. I type up math notes, so that was a backbreaker for me.
I will say that their firefox derivative, IceWeaselUXP, was maybe the best experience I’ve had with a web browser, but I’ve read from a few people that getting it working on other distros is too much effort.
Is there a fork or alternative to linux?
The short answer is “no”.
A longer answer is that there is nothing stopping you from freezing the kernel here or the most recent LTS release and running it for eternity, but without the contributions of Valve, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and IBM, it will just be a scuffed and increasingly insecure version of linux.
There doesn’t seem to be much momentum behind schisming the kernel from here, and without dedicated devs, any fork is just a website.
There is FreeBSD whose guts are robust enough that is was used as the base for the PS4 OS. However, MIT licensing means that short of a Sony Hack or bankruptcy that code is never seeing the light of day. It’s mostly functional for everything except gaming in a typical use case.
I second this on using FreeBSD. With some tweaks, it can be used with Steam/Proton for gaming on PC. See this video for more info: https://youtu.be/vQpI7SU921A
The video maker is using a FreeBSD variant called NomadBSD which is a live USB that has automatic hardware detection - https://nomadbsd.org/
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
HyperbolaBSD and its kernel HyperBK (derivative of the BSD kernel) are expected to be in alpha soon-ish. This is heavily principled, everything remotely proprietary straight to the trash stuff, so the end result is you’re sacrificing access to a lot of common software.
https://www.hyperbola.info/
A few years back I tried Hyperbola on the linux kernel for maybe a year. Essentially all of the issues I had were with not having access to software I wanted. If I’m sticking to software in the repositories I had no real problems with it.
What basically every issue boiled down to was: Common software X has some issue in its licensing (I never understood the technicalities of any of this stuff, so please don’t ask) that maintainers of common distros are fine ignoring because they consider the the licensing issues minor and lots of things require X as a dependency. Software Y is much earlier in development, but can functionally replace most of the features we want from software X, and has no problems in its licensing. We’ll use software Y and adapt the software in our repositories around that. But even if those adaptations are generally not big changes, as you get more and more software in the repos, the effort required from maintainers adds up. Because they’re limited on time and funding, the end result is a lot of repository pruning.
I would bet someone with a little technical knowledge could get a lot of software outside of the repos working without a lot of effort, but I am not that someone. Honestly, it was a good OS, I did okay with what software they had available until texlive was removed from the repos. I type up math notes, so that was a backbreaker for me.
I will say that their firefox derivative, IceWeaselUXP, was maybe the best experience I’ve had with a web browser, but I’ve read from a few people that getting it working on other distros is too much effort.