Well that and they got rid of their QA and test engineers so nothing is caught before it's sent out... you just can't rely on free beta testers for everything.

> You just can't rely on free beta testers for everything.

Linux distros seem to manage pretty well...?

Or is this "it's only bad if Microsoft do it"?

We pay RH rather a lot of money for the excellent testing and integration they do. (And alt-tab works, if you want it to.)

Or if you're trying to limit this to individual use, I'll grant you equivalence once Microsoft stops charging their beta testers and offers them the source.

Fedora and CentOS Stream is RHEL's upstream so it can be said as "beta test" from RHEL's perspective. (gamma?)

They all do upstream integration tests because nobody sane likes being caught by surprise.

Even I do it and I work for a company orders of magnitude smaller

That’s an interesting point. Which for-profit Linux distro is using you as an unpaid beta tester for their closed-source code?

Fair point. But 90% of Linux submissions are corporate, last I checked. Corporations (usually) do a lot of internal testing before submitting, and then maintainers have to review submissions. This is long before the public ("beta testers") has to deal with any bugs.

And that's only the kernel. Distributions and their package maintainers have their own quality controls, as do cross-distribution upstream developers. Public bug trackers (beta testers) are a complement to these. The division of labour in quality control of Linux systems is fine, diverse, and of variable effectiveness before beta testers come into the picture.

If I'm paying for it, which I do hell no. O also use Linux but I don't ost for it, and it's hobbyist / power user os and I can actually fix things there unlike windows.