He wasn't just the Fedora packager of Totem. I am pretty sure he was the upstream Totem maintainer. I had no idea how he managed to maintain so many other packages as well! And apparently on 10% of his work time.
Also, it's before my time but Red Hat were once unpopular for "killing the desktop", by pivoting from Red Hat Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Of course, it turns out that since then they did substantial desktop work, hiring developers of GNOME etc., and sponsoring Fedora. It's a shame they're now cutting that desktop work for real this time.
I don't think it's a secret that funding desktop Linux work has been a challenge. I've said in many other forums that if you want to sustain desktop Linux work, companies and people who work on it need to rewarded and funded for their work.
But getting people to pay for professional desktop Linux work is really hard, even despite having easy entry points for it[1].
Without people responding to the work by paying for subscriptions for professional desktop Linux, it becomes a lot more difficult to justify continuing to do the work.
It's still possible to reverse the trend, hence my plea for people who use and value desktop Linux to consider paying for it.
If you weren't and aren't going to pay for Red Hat, you aren't going to pay for any other distro either.
This isn't meant to be confrontational. If you don't want to spend money on code provided by volunteers (or whatever your justification is), that's fine; it's your money and your life philosophy.
But at least be classy about how you conduct yourself; if you don't want to pay then just say so instead of coming up with endless excuses.
Presuming how someone else will spend their money and accusing them of engaging in special pleading when you don't like their answer is inherently confrontational, so please spare us the accusation of bad faith and just make your point directly the next time.
In my life I have had precisely 3 opportunities to realistically pay for a Linux distro:
- A boxed copy of Mandrake (found on the shelf at Sam's Club many years ago) that got me into it in the first place. I talked my mom into that one.
- Professionally, evaluating whether the support and customer service provided by Red Hat was worth using it over CentOS. My recommendation was no, and as it turns out since we did not run software that required it, we never encountered a problem that having their assistance would have solved.
- Semi-professionally, really wanting to throw some money to the Proxmox team for access to the enterprise repos and support ticketing on my home-lab-ish cluster, and not being able to afford it because they insist on annual billing.
So no, sometimes it's as simple as the combination of price/features/support not being competitive with the free alternatives.
Mandrake was very good at marketing, they did Linux alot if good. Note Proxmox is now €100 per year that is possible even on tight budgets. I wonder how good their support is, at €500 - €1000 per year for remote ssh help that can really be worth it!
Unfortunately their pricing is per socket, so that would be about €500 up front for me just for the ability to access a different repository and no support. (Not really useful)
If I wanted the ability to submit 3 support tickets per year with a one day turnaround time, that price triples. I could easily justify splitting that cost monthly, but not upfront all at once.
> If you weren't and aren't going to pay for Red Hat, you aren't going to pay for any other distro either.
I don't think that follows logically. People who won't pay for Red Hat, after Red Hat's deemphasis of desktop work, might still willingly pay for another desktop focused distribution.
>I don't think that follows logically. People who won't pay for Red Hat, after Red Hat's deemphasis of desktop work
Obviously, certain types of desktop work have been de-emphasized. However, there are a lot of other types of desktop work which Red Hat does, which are continuing or even increasing in resources.
* Pipewire
* Filling in the Wayland gaps, e.g. color management and HDR
* Contributions to Firefox e.g. VAAPI hardware acceleration
* Mesa / RADV driver contributions
* Improving the Nvidia driver situation in collaboration with Nvidia
It's perfectly fine to be upset about the work that's being stopped, but some people in this thread are acting like everything is shutting down, which is ridiculous. And it's not like this stuff that is being worked on is insignificant, either.
I'm curious why, as a contributor to both Red Hat and SUSE, you don't recommend SUSE Desktop[1] more often (ever?), considering that their pricing is competitive with Red Hat. Is there a technical reason, an especially positive experience with RHEL support or maybe something else entirely?
I have recommended SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop in contexts where people have talked about supporting desktop openSUSE financially. I have also previously mentioned SUSE as an option in other forums.
As an engineer-centric Linux distribution vendor, they are also well-equipped to do engineering work upstream (and have an upstream-first mentality, which I appreciate). Red Hat and SUSE engineers often work hand-in-hand upstream in many communities, including desktop ones like GNOME and KDE.
They're a perfectly fine option if you want to go that way.
But in this context, we're talking about Red Hat's ability to invest in desktop Linux. And that is directly mapped to RHEL Workstation sales and (to a lesser extent) adoption of Fedora Linux (as a halo driving RHEL server/cloud and OpenShift adoption).
People also seriously underestimate how much work Red Hat puts into virtually every sphere of the Linux space[1], including the desktop. Many engineers spend a lot of time working in projects that don't directly pay off for RHEL because it either benefits the larger community or feeds into something they do care about in RHEL. It continues to surprise me how remarkably altruistic Red Hat is for a company. But that can only go so far. People still need to live and eat.
To give an idea of something that wouldn't have been possible without Red Hat: NVIDIA opening up their drivers last year[2][3]. Red Hat has been furiously working to rework Nouveau to take advantage of the improvements in the NVIDIA situation, and tremendous progress has been made, to the point that Collabora has built a brand new Vulkan driver for Nouveau[4][5].
This kind of work is not possible without people that care who have a big enough voice to drive positive outcomes in the ecosystem. And that only happens through continued growth and success rewarding what they do.
You may not personally use RHEL or Fedora Linux, but you're definitely benefiting from the work they do. And that's by design. But if you rely on Linux, I implore you to consider paying for RHEL. Maybe RHEL is not perfect, but one of the biggest advantages of paying for RHEL is that your voice matters as a customer. Red Hat takes its customer relationships seriously (unlike a lot of other companies out there), and product development is centered around customer feedback. If there's a technology you see in Fedora that you want in RHEL, you can ask for it. Your money sustains open source and your feedback improves it. If there's a technology you're interested in that's not in Fedora or RHEL, you can open a line to see whether it can be integrated and delivered.
My personal philosophy around open source is that there are ultimately two ways to support it: with time+effort or money. I spend a lot of both for supporting all the open source I care about. I don't expect anyone to do what I do, but I do wish people to fund the open source they rely on if they aren't willing to invest in the upstream projects. Whether that's through buying OpenShift[6][7][8] if you are big into cloud app infrastructure, Ansible Automation Platform[9] if infrastructure automation is your style, or RHEL[10] if Linux is your bag.
Thank you for the detailed response. Yes, this thread is about Red Hat, so the reference seems appropriate :)
I don't envy what the Red Hat marketing people have to go through, although I do think it's slightly self-inflicted at times. They generally invest huge amounts in, as you put it, altruistic improvements to Linux, yet get criticised harshly by the community for falling back to a position that is still multiple times better for free and open source software than, say, Microsoft's or Amazon's position. It makes me feel strange to promote marketing at the expense of development, but I genuinely think that their PR is profoundly lacking: things like CentOS stream were pretty good generally for the FOSS ecosystem but came across more as a betrayal of FOSS than a bequest to FOSS.
From this blog post (as well as RHEL dropping LibreOffice, laying off the Fedora program manager, etc) it seems like the use case that Red Hat is anticipating for RHEL Workstation is corporations using purpose-specific computers to run one or two programs (graphics rendering, CAD, equipment control software, etc) rather than general desktop usage. While it's true that there's a lot of useful side effects of Red Hat's workstation support, it seems naive to suggest that a few people paying $180 a year for workstation licenses will cause Red Hat to change direction on their product strategy.
That is the direction Red Hat has been going for many years now. They position Workstation as the higher-end desktop meant to run key applications, mostly as a developer workstation. You are entitled to one or two VMs in Workstation and more than 8GB or 16GB of RAM.
They used to sell a slimmed down version called Red Hat Desktop, which was meant for single CPU machines with 8 or 16GB of RAM. It was sold as a data entry client OS.
> it seems like the use case that Red Hat is anticipating for RHEL Workstation is corporations using purpose-specific computers to run one or two programs (graphics rendering, CAD, equipment control software, etc) rather than general desktop usage
I think it's less "anticipating" and more "observing"
> Maybe RHEL is not perfect, but one of the biggest advantages of paying for RHEL is that your voice matters as a customer. Red Hat takes its customer relationships seriously (unlike a lot of other companies out there), and product development is centered around customer feedback.
If RHEL customers want this stuff, then RHEL will ship it and support it. If customers don't demonstrate any interest, this is what happens. When it comes to supporting a product, there's always a tug-of-war to solve the needs of the product's users. Things are prioritized based on what the customer base tells product management what they need and want, with input from engineering on what can be done.
My experience with Red Hat is that they take the *BIG* customer relationships seriously.
If you're a small shop, you may as well not exist. You can ask for price quotes, or product information, but as soon as they realize you're not Big Enterprise… you get ghosted.
Well there are some pretty good desktop options that aren't gnome. Maybe without ibm/red-hats finger on the scale well see some other, better, options get more attention.
Linux on the desktop was a viable thing circa 1998, with the publishing of Ximian Desktop. Office even worked great with Crossover. There was a lot of momentum. You could have taken any beige box, put RedHat, Ximian, and Crossover on it, and everything would "just work." Then Microsoft threw some of their loose change at Nat and Miguel, Ximian lost steam, and the Linux world wandered the wastes until Ubuntu sort of picked up where they left off.
Off all the underhanded things Microsoft did: paying the trade press to slag off on Linux, underwriting the SCO trial, rewriting large chunks of Office just to screw up Wine, and funding huge "supercomputer" projects to make it seem like Windows could compete as anything other than a file server, seducing Nat and Miguel was the hardest blow to widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop.
It's not a function of when the year of Linux on the desktop will happen. It happened in 1998, and Microsoft killed it, not RedHat. Don't get me wrong; I have nothing but love for Nat and Miguel. Everyone has a price, and I'm glad they got to do what interested them. But, yeah, I miss those days.
I maintain that the distraction of their obviously impressive abilities towards Mono was a blow to desktop Linux that curtailed its rising popularity. IMO, Mono -- without support WinForms -- has been nothing more than a curiosity for the Linux world until the advent of .NET proper, and I say that as someone who has used it more than once to compile bespoke Windows programs for both Mac and Linux.
It's a little sad how Mono is dead, ironically killed by Microsoft not in a malicious way, but just because they open sourced their own superior product. Even Xamarin is finally on its way out, replaced by .NET MAUI.
Mono did have an important impact, but it was mostly with games, especially Unity.
The impression I got over the years is that perhaps de Icaza was actually less interested in the Linux desktop and more interested in language technology, starting with CORBA, and then when Microsoft released C#/.NET, he shifted to that and started Mono.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you probably really can't blame Microsoft.
>It's a shame they're now cutting that desktop work for real this time.
I kind of think you're making the same mistake? Yes, Red Hat is cutting back even further on certain types of desktop development, but they still do quite a lot.
Just look at the recent HDR work, or Pipewire, contributions to Mesa and RADV, needling / collaborating with Nvidia to un-screw their driver situation, contributing pretty much all of the hardware accelerated video support for Firefox on Linux, etc. I haven't seen any plans to cut back on that sort of stuff, which is arguably much more impactful than e.g. packaging LibreOffice.
Just like people feel entitled to use for free, stuff that only exists because, Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Nintendo, ARM, Intel, AMD, NVidia,.... put engineering time to make it happen in some form or function.
Then they come to online forums, 70's style, showing the finger to the man, while taking the fruits of that work.
Yes, they don't do it out of interest for the community, rather as a path to shepherd devs into their ecosystems.
Yet, angry forks of their products usually die a slow death, as bills have to be paid and doing long nights isn't for everyone.
Because like it or not, many FOSS products only exist thanks to big corps money.
Even GNU/Linux itself, only really took off, as big corps decided it was a cheaper way to develop UNIX like OSes, than their own, and not tainted by BSD lawsuit.
So what? I have been through some big company mergers -- the absorbed (or should I say assimilated) company managers would immediately start enforcing the larger company's stereotype policies, out of self-censorship... because they guessed, often correctly, that the writing was on the wall. E.g. managers would start firing to make their units appear to be more profitable, or remove work-from-home policies, etc. way before the merger was completed, in an effort to avoid being the first units to get the axe by the new parent.
I was actually surprised Oracle didn't outright kill MySQL, OpenOffice, and a bunch of other FOSS projects they/we inherited. They/we even pivoted internally to using Jabber for IMs (with Pidgin!!), because one of those projects was some sort of integrated calendaring/Jabber suite and it was mandated as standard. I could even use Thunderbird rather than Outlook, and any Linux I wanted.
Obviously all the major projects were eventually mismanaged.
yeah the IM was not that great. Sending images in IM was not working correctly. Had to create rooms for group messages etc. Zimbra email had only 5 to 10 GB storage.
They switched to using office 365 for mail and slack for IM's 5 years ago. The user experience with office 365 and slack was far better.
this is IBM firing its guns straight at liberty minded software
here come the rent seekers: soon enough we will have to pay per character we type. this may seem exaggerated and I really really do hope it stays a gross exaggeration and never actually actually happens.
nonetheless, the trends are here and this is part of them; and we all knew it was a merely matter of time before IBM started to destroy what redhat once was and turned it into more IBM
after a while of starving this project, some 'visionary business founder' is gonna come up with some sort of subscription service to use this software.
this is equally applicable to you: to believe you're right regardless of correctness for the sake of feeling well.
but I'm not interested in mere feeling well, I want to BE well. I find it difficult to find other's with whom to engage in productive dialogue so to actually be able to get closer to correctness.
the absolute majority of time I post this opinion, or any close to it, I get downvoted and the discussion I'm looking for gets shut down. Taboos are part of the toolkit.
Do you know IBM has any responsibility in this choice? If you do, the productive thing to do would be to cite your sources. If you don't, it would be to state which assumptions led you to blame IBM's leadership rather than Red Hat's. But you did neither.
I assume he's a really talented developer, and IBM/Redhat assigned him to a more pressing task. It sucks for desktop Linux, but I can't really blame IBM/Redhat for assigning him to more pressing issues.
Honestly sad for desktop bluetooth, but good riddance for all the multimedia stuff (Rhytmbox, Totem and Sound Juicer). The fact that somebody in Red Hat paid the guy to maintain them, when the GNOME is still missing/delaying fundamental features, looks like either pure charity or bad management. Or maybe both.
That also fits into "bad management" part. Besides, in this case I'd be happier to have no "default" media player in Gnome than knowing it is maintained by some oversubscribed guy who deserves some rest.
Gnome always had this problem of spreading thin instead of focusing. Lots of little tiny irrelevant apps just to have something to stamp a Gnome branding on. But even people who are really hardcore about using a Gnome desktop don't use those apps.
I've never met a single person who uses Gnome Web (Epiphany) instead of Chrome/Firefox/Brave/Vivaldi/whatever. Or Totem (instead of mplayer, mpv and its various frontends, or VLC). Or Boxes instead of virt-manager. Or gedit (instead of the trillion text editors that exist on Linux. The thing the platform lacks the least? Text editors.). Oh wait, it's not gedit anymore, they wrote a new one from scratch called "Text Editor".
I use Gnome Web to test websites with the WebKit engine from Linux. I'd be curious if there any other good WebKit browser options: I wasn't able to find anything else that I could easily install. (Nyxt apparently supports WebKit, but installing it is a pain, and I actually don't understand how to use their browser.)
I will say that I wish they had stuck with the Epiphany name. It was much easier to search for, either in web search engines or in order to launch it in Gnome with whatever their Spotlight clone is called.
Well, that seems grim. It's unlikely that IBM have chosen one developer to reassign to more obviously revenue generating activity, so this should probably be taken as warning that red hat's open source contribution is winding down.
I have a nasty suspicion that their engineers were a significant component to GNU software working.
RHEL was profitable before, despite frivolously making software work without immediate reward. Perhaps the best outcome of this is to accept that RHEL is dead and there is an opening in the market for a new company doing what red hat used to. Probably based on Debian instead.
Counterpoint: as a person who used Fedora and then Ubuntu daily for the last four years, and is watching closely for the new features in every release, this feels _fantastic_, but only if Red Hat delivers on the features they're pivoting to (HDR, proper high-resolution support, Wayland).
Revenue-generating activity, as you named it, are the things I wait for and don't get in every next release, while RH spends (well, used to spend) resources and money for repackaging Libre Office, rewriting gedit from scratch, writing custom video player and so on. I don't need all that, I need triple buffering for smooth 60 fps interface, proper screen sharing in Wayland, working fractional scaling, but every other release there is only another GNOME redesign, another GNOME application, another features here and there. Pivoting to improving system fundamentals instead is a _good_ thing.
gnome-bluetooth is only a GUI, the backend is BlueZ stack. Even if GUI part stops working the second it becomes unmaintained (which is not the case), the backend will continue to work, and you can choose any other frontend you like - see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/bluetooth .
Even ChromeOS, which I previously argued was actually closer to desktop Linux than Android is, keeps trying to replace it with Android's horrible BT stack.
See for yourself, it's public - https://github.com/bluez/bluez/graphs/contributors. Top contributions are from Johan Hedberg, Marcel Holtmann, and Luiz Augusto von Dentz if we're dropping names, or from Intel if we're speaking about corporations.
Yes, it's very disappointing, although not surprising. I'm especially sad that Rhythmbox is going to be unmaintained. I use it almost every day (and am currently using it right now).
In general I prefer GNOME and its utilities over KDE equivalents and use it extensively. However, much of the GNOME ecosystem is directly or indirectly supported by Red Hat, which has been a good steward historically. Now under IBM, this belt tightening seems to put that entire ecosystem at peril.
Perhaps KDE will prove to be a more resilient choice?
This is fine, really. If a community doesn't maintain it, it's not valuable to the community. The best projects are the ones where someone has a personal interest in seeing it succeed.
I've been using Linux for 25 years and I'm old now. I just want shit to work. If I have to pay for it and it's closed source, that's fine with me, as long as it does what I need. The open source philosophy is great and should continue, but also I am just tired of how often Linux is difficult, mysterious, and buggy, and would rather just pay someone to make it work so I can get on with life. (Mac sucks balls and Windows is a security nightmare and not great for development, so I'm still on Linux)
Why do you feel this way? This is an uncommon opinion in my experience.
I can definitely understand folks that want to stay on Linux for various reasons, but if your attitude is "I'm now too old to deal with this shit, I just want it to work" and then still want to stay on Linux, it feels to me like you're just a glutton for punishment.
Right? “Desktop Linux” is macOS. It’s a working Unix but with all the desktop software I need. I develop software that runs on Linux but I’ve tried that on a Linux desktop and what a pain the ass.
As someone who has been a Linux or Windows user all my life, every little interaction with the desktop environment is off in a way I'm not used to and it's uncomfortable and productivity-sapping. I don't think I'd go that far as saying "sucks balls" though.
But apart from some stick-in-the-ass upower devs who think their tool should randomly shut down laptops without any choice to disable (I patched it out) I just live within my limitations. Wish my nvidia mobile graphics worked.
> every little interaction with the desktop environment is off in a way I'm not used to and it's uncomfortable and productivity-sapping.
Now that explanation totally makes sense to me. We spend so much time in our OS environments (often with a ton of personalized customizations) that switching to something with different interaction paradigms is a pain I can totally understand not wanting to bear. As another example, I'm a Mac user but have been on Android for about a decade now, and whenever I use an iPhone I go nuts because I don't know the special magic swipes or taps or tap-and-holds to do what I want it to. But that's just because I'm not used to an iPhone.
Then I also really liked your comment "I just live within my limitations". That is, Linux users I know like it and use it for different reasons, but they all know it has particular nits and shortcomings (usually around drivers) that they accept as the price for using it.
But what I can't really wrap my head around is having the approach "I want a *nix desktop, that I'm willing to pay for, and I don't care if it's closed source, but I just want it to work." That thing exists, it's called MacOS, and if those reasons were important enough I'd just bite the bullet for the one-time switchover costs and get a Mac.
"We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building out what’s needed for color-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by Workstation users. This is work that will improve the workstation experience for Fedora as well as RHEL users, and which, we hope, will be positively received by the entire Linux community."
how can anyone say that Linux is ready for the desktop when one a
single person maintaining these projects can simply be reassigned by their employer, leaving those projects abandoned?
I see this everywhere, in varying degrees. I'm sure people will come up to fix bugs in these Gnome projects, I just wonder how it got to this point when the community still seems like they are generally pointing in the same 180° arc when you say "where is the Linux desktop?"
at work we have crucial, production systems whose teams have disbanded and moved onto other things. this is so unthinkable to me; if it's important, and the business halts if it fails, keep people on it FFS.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 146 ms ] threadAlso, it's before my time but Red Hat were once unpopular for "killing the desktop", by pivoting from Red Hat Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Of course, it turns out that since then they did substantial desktop work, hiring developers of GNOME etc., and sponsoring Fedora. It's a shame they're now cutting that desktop work for real this time.
But getting people to pay for professional desktop Linux work is really hard, even despite having easy entry points for it[1].
Without people responding to the work by paying for subscriptions for professional desktop Linux, it becomes a lot more difficult to justify continuing to do the work.
It's still possible to reverse the trend, hence my plea for people who use and value desktop Linux to consider paying for it.
[1]: https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-wor...
This isn't meant to be confrontational. If you don't want to spend money on code provided by volunteers (or whatever your justification is), that's fine; it's your money and your life philosophy.
But at least be classy about how you conduct yourself; if you don't want to pay then just say so instead of coming up with endless excuses.
In my life I have had precisely 3 opportunities to realistically pay for a Linux distro:
- A boxed copy of Mandrake (found on the shelf at Sam's Club many years ago) that got me into it in the first place. I talked my mom into that one.
- Professionally, evaluating whether the support and customer service provided by Red Hat was worth using it over CentOS. My recommendation was no, and as it turns out since we did not run software that required it, we never encountered a problem that having their assistance would have solved.
- Semi-professionally, really wanting to throw some money to the Proxmox team for access to the enterprise repos and support ticketing on my home-lab-ish cluster, and not being able to afford it because they insist on annual billing.
So no, sometimes it's as simple as the combination of price/features/support not being competitive with the free alternatives.
If I wanted the ability to submit 3 support tickets per year with a one day turnaround time, that price triples. I could easily justify splitting that cost monthly, but not upfront all at once.
Heh, at first I parsed that as IPC socket.
Now I'm amusing myself thinking about which companies would try to charge for that.
I don't think that follows logically. People who won't pay for Red Hat, after Red Hat's deemphasis of desktop work, might still willingly pay for another desktop focused distribution.
Obviously, certain types of desktop work have been de-emphasized. However, there are a lot of other types of desktop work which Red Hat does, which are continuing or even increasing in resources.
* Pipewire
* Filling in the Wayland gaps, e.g. color management and HDR
* Contributions to Firefox e.g. VAAPI hardware acceleration
* Mesa / RADV driver contributions
* Improving the Nvidia driver situation in collaboration with Nvidia
It's perfectly fine to be upset about the work that's being stopped, but some people in this thread are acting like everything is shutting down, which is ridiculous. And it's not like this stuff that is being worked on is insignificant, either.
And moves like this are seldom done in isolation.
The bluetooth settings panel GUI in gnome, not bluetooth support in general.
I guess the difficulty is Linux is really popular, but it's for hosting containers and cloud services etc. That doesn't lead to an improved Desktop.
[1]: https://www.suse.com/shop/desktop/
As an engineer-centric Linux distribution vendor, they are also well-equipped to do engineering work upstream (and have an upstream-first mentality, which I appreciate). Red Hat and SUSE engineers often work hand-in-hand upstream in many communities, including desktop ones like GNOME and KDE.
They're a perfectly fine option if you want to go that way.
But in this context, we're talking about Red Hat's ability to invest in desktop Linux. And that is directly mapped to RHEL Workstation sales and (to a lesser extent) adoption of Fedora Linux (as a halo driving RHEL server/cloud and OpenShift adoption).
People also seriously underestimate how much work Red Hat puts into virtually every sphere of the Linux space[1], including the desktop. Many engineers spend a lot of time working in projects that don't directly pay off for RHEL because it either benefits the larger community or feeds into something they do care about in RHEL. It continues to surprise me how remarkably altruistic Red Hat is for a company. But that can only go so far. People still need to live and eat.
To give an idea of something that wouldn't have been possible without Red Hat: NVIDIA opening up their drivers last year[2][3]. Red Hat has been furiously working to rework Nouveau to take advantage of the improvements in the NVIDIA situation, and tremendous progress has been made, to the point that Collabora has built a brand new Vulkan driver for Nouveau[4][5].
This kind of work is not possible without people that care who have a big enough voice to drive positive outcomes in the ecosystem. And that only happens through continued growth and success rewarding what they do.
You may not personally use RHEL or Fedora Linux, but you're definitely benefiting from the work they do. And that's by design. But if you rely on Linux, I implore you to consider paying for RHEL. Maybe RHEL is not perfect, but one of the biggest advantages of paying for RHEL is that your voice matters as a customer. Red Hat takes its customer relationships seriously (unlike a lot of other companies out there), and product development is centered around customer feedback. If there's a technology you see in Fedora that you want in RHEL, you can ask for it. Your money sustains open source and your feedback improves it. If there's a technology you're interested in that's not in Fedora or RHEL, you can open a line to see whether it can be integrated and delivered.
My personal philosophy around open source is that there are ultimately two ways to support it: with time+effort or money. I spend a lot of both for supporting all the open source I care about. I don't expect anyone to do what I do, but I do wish people to fund the open source they rely on if they aren't willing to invest in the upstream projects. Whether that's through buying OpenShift[6][7][8] if you are big into cloud app infrastructure, Ansible Automation Platform[9] if infrastructure automation is your style, or RHEL[10] if Linux is your bag.
[1]: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/c... (non-exhaustive, but still...)
[2]: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc...
[3]: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05...
I don't envy what the Red Hat marketing people have to go through, although I do think it's slightly self-inflicted at times. They generally invest huge amounts in, as you put it, altruistic improvements to Linux, yet get criticised harshly by the community for falling back to a position that is still multiple times better for free and open source software than, say, Microsoft's or Amazon's position. It makes me feel strange to promote marketing at the expense of development, but I genuinely think that their PR is profoundly lacking: things like CentOS stream were pretty good generally for the FOSS ecosystem but came across more as a betrayal of FOSS than a bequest to FOSS.
They used to sell a slimmed down version called Red Hat Desktop, which was meant for single CPU machines with 8 or 16GB of RAM. It was sold as a data entry client OS.
I think it's less "anticipating" and more "observing"
> Maybe RHEL is not perfect, but one of the biggest advantages of paying for RHEL is that your voice matters as a customer. Red Hat takes its customer relationships seriously (unlike a lot of other companies out there), and product development is centered around customer feedback.
If RHEL customers want this stuff, then RHEL will ship it and support it. If customers don't demonstrate any interest, this is what happens. When it comes to supporting a product, there's always a tug-of-war to solve the needs of the product's users. Things are prioritized based on what the customer base tells product management what they need and want, with input from engineering on what can be done.
If you're a small shop, you may as well not exist. You can ask for price quotes, or product information, but as soon as they realize you're not Big Enterprise… you get ghosted.
BTW - this is as a paying customer.
Off all the underhanded things Microsoft did: paying the trade press to slag off on Linux, underwriting the SCO trial, rewriting large chunks of Office just to screw up Wine, and funding huge "supercomputer" projects to make it seem like Windows could compete as anything other than a file server, seducing Nat and Miguel was the hardest blow to widespread adoption of Linux on the desktop.
It's not a function of when the year of Linux on the desktop will happen. It happened in 1998, and Microsoft killed it, not RedHat. Don't get me wrong; I have nothing but love for Nat and Miguel. Everyone has a price, and I'm glad they got to do what interested them. But, yeah, I miss those days.
A quick reference is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ximian
Mono did have an important impact, but it was mostly with games, especially Unity.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that you probably really can't blame Microsoft.
I kind of think you're making the same mistake? Yes, Red Hat is cutting back even further on certain types of desktop development, but they still do quite a lot.
Just look at the recent HDR work, or Pipewire, contributions to Mesa and RADV, needling / collaborating with Nvidia to un-screw their driver situation, contributing pretty much all of the hardware accelerated video support for Firefox on Linux, etc. I haven't seen any plans to cut back on that sort of stuff, which is arguably much more impactful than e.g. packaging LibreOffice.
Disclosure: I work for Red Hat.
If they use the telemetry in Fedora to autonomously focus efforts, then the picture will be more complete.
I just hope to be very wrong about all these events.
> Silent|Storm said...
> Q: What do you get when a company merges with IBM?
> A: IBM.
Then they come to online forums, 70's style, showing the finger to the man, while taking the fruits of that work.
Yes, they don't do it out of interest for the community, rather as a path to shepherd devs into their ecosystems.
Yet, angry forks of their products usually die a slow death, as bills have to be paid and doing long nights isn't for everyone.
Because like it or not, many FOSS products only exist thanks to big corps money.
Even GNU/Linux itself, only really took off, as big corps decided it was a cheaper way to develop UNIX like OSes, than their own, and not tainted by BSD lawsuit.
If IBM tells Red Hat to not do something, Red Hat will not.
That's the difference between being enslaved and being an independent entity.
Obviously all the major projects were eventually mismanaged.
They switched to using office 365 for mail and slack for IM's 5 years ago. The user experience with office 365 and slack was far better.
here come the rent seekers: soon enough we will have to pay per character we type. this may seem exaggerated and I really really do hope it stays a gross exaggeration and never actually actually happens.
nonetheless, the trends are here and this is part of them; and we all knew it was a merely matter of time before IBM started to destroy what redhat once was and turned it into more IBM
after a while of starving this project, some 'visionary business founder' is gonna come up with some sort of subscription service to use this software.
but I'm not interested in mere feeling well, I want to BE well. I find it difficult to find other's with whom to engage in productive dialogue so to actually be able to get closer to correctness.
the absolute majority of time I post this opinion, or any close to it, I get downvoted and the discussion I'm looking for gets shut down. Taboos are part of the toolkit.
From his message, I have the feeling that it is not just that he will not have official time to work on them but that he is not allowed to.
I guess another possibility is that he wants to keep some work/life balance, so he doesn't want do write software outside of work.
I've never met a single person who uses Gnome Web (Epiphany) instead of Chrome/Firefox/Brave/Vivaldi/whatever. Or Totem (instead of mplayer, mpv and its various frontends, or VLC). Or Boxes instead of virt-manager. Or gedit (instead of the trillion text editors that exist on Linux. The thing the platform lacks the least? Text editors.). Oh wait, it's not gedit anymore, they wrote a new one from scratch called "Text Editor".
I will say that I wish they had stuck with the Epiphany name. It was much easier to search for, either in web search engines or in order to launch it in Gnome with whatever their Spotlight clone is called.
/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/webkitgtk*/MiniBrowser
I have a nasty suspicion that their engineers were a significant component to GNU software working.
RHEL was profitable before, despite frivolously making software work without immediate reward. Perhaps the best outcome of this is to accept that RHEL is dead and there is an opening in the market for a new company doing what red hat used to. Probably based on Debian instead.
Revenue-generating activity, as you named it, are the things I wait for and don't get in every next release, while RH spends (well, used to spend) resources and money for repackaging Libre Office, rewriting gedit from scratch, writing custom video player and so on. I don't need all that, I need triple buffering for smooth 60 fps interface, proper screen sharing in Wayland, working fractional scaling, but every other release there is only another GNOME redesign, another GNOME application, another features here and there. Pivoting to improving system fundamentals instead is a _good_ thing.
Even ChromeOS, which I previously argued was actually closer to desktop Linux than Android is, keeps trying to replace it with Android's horrible BT stack.
In general I prefer GNOME and its utilities over KDE equivalents and use it extensively. However, much of the GNOME ecosystem is directly or indirectly supported by Red Hat, which has been a good steward historically. Now under IBM, this belt tightening seems to put that entire ecosystem at peril.
Perhaps KDE will prove to be a more resilient choice?
I've been using Linux for 25 years and I'm old now. I just want shit to work. If I have to pay for it and it's closed source, that's fine with me, as long as it does what I need. The open source philosophy is great and should continue, but also I am just tired of how often Linux is difficult, mysterious, and buggy, and would rather just pay someone to make it work so I can get on with life. (Mac sucks balls and Windows is a security nightmare and not great for development, so I'm still on Linux)
Why do you feel this way? This is an uncommon opinion in my experience.
I can definitely understand folks that want to stay on Linux for various reasons, but if your attitude is "I'm now too old to deal with this shit, I just want it to work" and then still want to stay on Linux, it feels to me like you're just a glutton for punishment.
But apart from some stick-in-the-ass upower devs who think their tool should randomly shut down laptops without any choice to disable (I patched it out) I just live within my limitations. Wish my nvidia mobile graphics worked.
Now that explanation totally makes sense to me. We spend so much time in our OS environments (often with a ton of personalized customizations) that switching to something with different interaction paradigms is a pain I can totally understand not wanting to bear. As another example, I'm a Mac user but have been on Android for about a decade now, and whenever I use an iPhone I go nuts because I don't know the special magic swipes or taps or tap-and-holds to do what I want it to. But that's just because I'm not used to an iPhone.
Then I also really liked your comment "I just live within my limitations". That is, Linux users I know like it and use it for different reasons, but they all know it has particular nits and shortcomings (usually around drivers) that they accept as the price for using it.
But what I can't really wrap my head around is having the approach "I want a *nix desktop, that I'm willing to pay for, and I don't care if it's closed source, but I just want it to work." That thing exists, it's called MacOS, and if those reasons were important enough I'd just bite the bullet for the one-time switchover costs and get a Mac.
I note that there are lots of Linux consulting companies out there.
"We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building out what’s needed for color-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by Workstation users. This is work that will improve the workstation experience for Fedora as well as RHEL users, and which, we hope, will be positively received by the entire Linux community."
I see this everywhere, in varying degrees. I'm sure people will come up to fix bugs in these Gnome projects, I just wonder how it got to this point when the community still seems like they are generally pointing in the same 180° arc when you say "where is the Linux desktop?"
at work we have crucial, production systems whose teams have disbanded and moved onto other things. this is so unthinkable to me; if it's important, and the business halts if it fails, keep people on it FFS.
( https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/110873190911225266 )