New responsibilities
hadess.net
hadess.net
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.
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...
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/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-so...
[4]: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/intr...
[5]: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/nvk-...
[6]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens...
[7]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens...
[8]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens...
[9]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/ansible
[10]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enter...
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
> Silent|Storm said...
> Q: What do you get when a company merges with IBM?
> A: IBM.
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.
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.
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.
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.
( https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/110873190911225266 )
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.
"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'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
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.