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Comment by bipson | Hacker News Reader

I think most commenters on lwn are misunderstanding this gravely.

RHEL not supporting LibreOffice doesn't mean you can still install it, right? It just means RH won't offer support for it?

Also does not mean you must use Flatpak to use it, does it? Am I missing something?

If it does make sense business-wise, it's their call. I'm pretty sure they know their userbase and did the math.

I also prefer efforts put on Wayland improvements, much closer to the OS itself and relevant to several use cases.

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> If it does not make sense business-wise, it's their call. I'm pretty sure they know their userbase and did the math.

This assumes companies don't make mistakes. They do. A lot.

And if users aren't allowed to voice concern then they will make many more mistakes.

No, it doesn't.

Something "making sense" does not mean mistakes are not possible.

Assuming only idiots make mistakes is rather black-and-white.

> And if users aren't allowed to voice concern then they will make many more mistakes.

Generally, RHEL does exactly what RHEL customers want. They are extremely loyal to their user base.

The issues come when these changes set a trend and ripple to the rest of the community, and affect people who would never become a RH customer in the first place (e.g. anti-systemd fanatics)

So there was some kind of referendum of RedHat users that asked them what features of the Linux operating system they wanted systemd to absorb?

I'm not convinced that people who are not paying Redhat for RHEL Workstation support count as customers on this question.

But this is still an odd statement. Previous customers who very much relied on LibreOffice might move to some other platform or at least some other support service. Thus they would no longer be Redhat customers and Redhat would still be loyal to their customers.

I suspect the number of RHEL Workstation customers to be a relatively small part of Redhat's customer base. And those that depend on LO support to be even smaller. I don't expect this to affect RH's bottom line in any negative way.

> They are extremely loyal to their user base.

Are you sure it's not the other way around? :-(

Either way, there is significant back-and-forth conversation between Red Hat and their users. And because of that, when the RHEL 9 deprecation rolls around in 2034, a lot of those users are likely to be well-prepared for a switch to either Flatpak or the upstream LibreOffice rpm.

I have zero doubt that Red Hat has consulted the users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that matter, and that this will impact.

The commentary of users on LWN and HN may be interesting, but not likely to be representative of those paying for RHEL on desktop/workstation. (I’m talking about sizable accounts here, not small shops that might be paying a little.)

I am no longer at Red Hat but in my experience the product marketing managers, and product managers, and account folks had a pretty good finger on the pulse of their customers.

It does mean that it won’t be in RHEL‘s package repositories anymore, as far as I understand.

then its a badly written headline

Well I think it still is a correct headline.

In a linux distro, when it "support" a package means that you can contact its maintainers for help (bugs and etc) on the package.

So the headline means that RHEL won't help you to install LibreOffice. There are always other way to install it though.

Right but people generally do not install packages from just anywhere in corporate settings. I am sure there are a lot of places where either red hat packages the software or you don't get to use it.

Not to mention, sometimes it's a pain in the ass to install an unsupported app like a compiler or mail/ldap/web server.

And if something goes wrong and you're not using the supported version of the supported package, you don't get support. (Which is how it should be I think)

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