I would not trust the community of volunteers that maintain Gentoo in their free time for anything mission critical. I would use Ubuntu or Red Hat, which are backed by companies.
I've got bad news for you - most of Ubuntu is repackaged Debian which is from a community of volunteers that maintains the packages. Besides that Ubuntu used to be sloppy in backporting important patches and doing some NIH here and there... not sure about Redhat but they source heavily from Fedora which is also community-based.
I’m not sure I can agree with this concern. All Linux distros work by repackaging upstream code, the majority of which is written by volunteers. For Debian, they’re repackaging directly from upstream. Ubuntu repackages from Debian.
The value of going through a company is that you can choose to write a check to Canonical or RedHat and say “I’m hitting this issue with the software you repackaged, here is money, fix the problem”. There’s no similarly direct pay-to-win for Fedora or Debian. You can shop around for a consultancy or engineer and pay them to try to debug the issue, but they’re always going to be coming in as a 3rd party, which has an impact on the levers they can pull to resolve an issue.
Most Linux software is written by Red Hat. GNOME, Wayland, and systemd are all Red Hat projects. They are even a major contributor to the kernel itself.
> Most Linux software is written by Red Hat.. even a major contributor to the kernel itself.
Oh! I didn't realize Red Hat had hired RMS. :-/
Setting aside the controversial nature of those three specific projects (and the fact that this statement is demonstrably false), this statement demeans the contributions of thousands of coders, even from before Linux existed.
(let alone before Red Hat was a gleam on Bob Young's head.)
It's not a concern but just an observation that things in universe in Ubuntu get rarely if at all backports. It's okay. I agree about having a company especially regarding timely security updates.
Red Hat sponsors Fedora big time. I was part of the packagers team for Ruby. Next to us were sitting Perl guys (you would never believe how many Perl packages are still there...!) and somewhere else folks doing Python packaging.
Source: Formal Red Hat packager working on Fedora.
It doesn’t matter that Ubuntu packages originally came from Debian. At the end of the day, Canonical employees are being paid to make sure they are up to date. I trust that over a bunch of volunteers who do it out of the goodness of their heart.
That just shows a lack of knowledge of the quantinty of commercial OSes available out there.
Were are the volunteers for Sony and Nintendo console OSes, Android, ChromeOS, Fuchsia, IBM i, IBM z/OS, INTEGRITY, QNX,Unisys ClearPath, Solaris, HP-UX, Aix, vxWorks.....?
