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.