Debian

Can you please like write the points in a list and not with these weird // in between? Lemmy uses markdown

- this (that space between line and text is important)
- is 
- a list

* this
* too
* forwhateverreason

``` before and after something : codeblock

*italic*

**bold**

***both***

Sounds like Debian is your answer.

Just to clarity the relationship between Red Hat, IBM, and Fedora, Fedora is only sponsored by Red Hat. They make all their own decisions, and while they receive financial support from Red Hat and Red Hat owns the Fedora trademark, their decisions and development are independent of Red Hat (and by extension IBM), with the single exception that they cannot risk violating the law (i.e. copyright infringement), else it risks Red Hat legal trouble (and Fedora would risk losing their sponsorship as a result). Red Hat benefits from Fedora’s development by the community, given that Fedora is RHEL’s upstream, hence why it continues to sponsor Fedora. But it isn’t Red Hat that is in charge of Fedora’s development, it’s FESCo, which is entirely community elected, and does not stand for the interests of Red Hat, but rather for the interests of the community.

Eliminating Fedora from contention in that regard is essentially like eliminating Debian because you don’t like Canonical, who makes Ubuntu, a downstream of Debian.

Add on top of that the fact that IBM and Red Hat are major contributors to the Linux kernel, and you absolutely cannot avoid connections to them while using Linux. I mean, that’s quite frankly a ridiculous exclusion criteria in the context of Linux. If you’re looking to avoid an operating system OWNED by Red Hat or IBM, then Fedora should not be included in that list. Neither of them have any say or pull in the development of Fedora, which is a completely community-driven project (no, owning the trademark doesn’t change that fact; if Red Hat tried to take over, the Fedora community would simply fork the project, rebrand, and continue on their own). Besides, Red Hat has no interest in controlling Fedora, because it doesn’t benefit them. Their only interest is in enterprise applications, which is not a good use case for Fedora. The only operating systems Red Hat actually has any control over are RHEL, CentOS, and any derivatives of those operating systems like Rocky Linux, Oracle Linux, and such (though Red Hat’s control over derivatives was only the result of those projects being downstream, not actual ownership).

So with that in mind, I’d recommend the Fedora KDE spin if you want a normal, stable, snap-free, no DIY required distro with KDE, or if you want the immutable version, Fedora Kinoite is what you’d be looking for. And Fedora has the major advantage over Debian-based distros of actually receiving package and kernel updates regularly, so you can stay up to date and enjoy new features, all while maintaining stability.

Fedora Kinoite is absolutely the best immutable distro fitting your criteria. Anything else will have a much smaller community and less support as a result. rpm-ostree has great documentation, and all of the Fedora Atomic Spins have a huge userbase available in case you ever have questions.

Opensuse Tumbleweed is pretty stable, even though it’s a rolling release

I’ve been running Linux Mint Cinnamon for years. It’s the stablest, most dependable distro I’ve ever run. I’ve installed it, updated it and major-version-upgraded it many times on many machines and it never broke.

It’s basically Ubuntu with the features that make Ubuntu shite removed (basically Unity and snaps) and a no-nonsense, GTK-based Win95-like desktop environment tacked on.

-it should be more or less stable, comparable to Ubuntu with or without LTS

Ubuntu was based on Debian, which touts its stability

-it should not be related to IBM to any way (so no fedora/redhat)

Debian has no afiliation to IBM, they’re not even loosely part of each others’ “partners” programs

-it should not feature snaps (no Ubuntu or KDE neon)

Debian doesn’t use snaps (welcome to the greener side of the fence btw, fuck snaps)

-KDE plasma should be installable manually (best case even installed by default)

Debian uses KDE as one of it’s default install options when installing the OS, and it can be installed later with tasksel (or by just getting all the packages if you want to do it the hard way)

-no DIY Distros

Debian has a barebones headless option, but the installer defaults (which come with the whole DE and oyher convenienve packages) are pretty user-friendly

In summary, I have no fucking clue what OS you should use.

P.S. newlines on lemmy are either done by using two spaces at the end of a line
and then pressing enter
(make sure your phone doesn’t autocorrect/one of the spaces away like mine does) or by pressing

Enter twice (without the double spaces), so there’s a

blank line in between

Definitely Debian. Or Mint if you also like the cinnamon desktop (which is similar to KDE’s in terms of default look).

You can’t avoid IBM/RedHat - they contribute to the kernel and many, many other parts of Linux eg systemd. I have no idea what you mean by DIY distros, what a peculiar adjective in this context. Linux itself is DIY. Life is DIY.

That said, voidlinux is an independent distro without systemd or snaps based on runit for init and xbps for package management. It’s also a STABLE rolling release.

Opensuse. It comes in different flavors including tumbleweed (rolling but tested), slowroll (slower rolling), leap (stable), and micro / leap micro (immutable). It is not owned or funded by redhat although it does use rpm. Its installer is the best I have ever seen for managing software before installation and will let you select KDE.

Of course debian.

However pure debian needs some love before you can use it.

If you want to use steam. Enable 32 bit arch.

If you want to use flatpak. You need to install it and add the default repo.

To install kde plasma you need only a single apt command.

I personally run debian-testing/Trixie.

Get a Debian and break it a leg.

I think you should go with OpenSuse

Linux Mint is hands down the most stable linux distro out there and has been for years. zero tinkering needed. everything just runs no questions asked.

My only grief with Mint is the most recent update where they changed the software centee and now it’s slowed to a crawl. Why they would do this is anyones guess.

I’m recommending MX until such time that Mint sort their crap out - unfortunately I doubt they will, seeing as this change of software center was to resolve some other issues they (but not is end users) though they had.

MX is basically debian but with a lot of improvements. Sure it might have a bit of a learning curve for those primarily used to Ubuntu based systems, but it beats running any of the other Ubuntu distros by miles since they all struggle with the crap Ubuntu puts on top of Debian.

Manjaro is another great option if you don’t want to deal with debian based stuff, and KDE is the default DE with most stuff under reasonable control. You can also use all the Arch resources if you ever run into trouble so it’s a lot less of a headache than what I’ve experienced running OpenSUSE (i want to love OpenSUSE but I just can’t).

OpenSUSE Tumbleweed Most stable rolling, in my opinion.