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Comment by ndiddy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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"

Right. As I said upthread:

> 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.

BTW - this is as a paying customer.

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.

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