Red Hat stops all upstream and downstream work on desktop Bluetooth, multimedia applications (namely totem, rhythmbox and sound-juicer) and libfprint/fprintd (hadess.net)
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I really hope journalists stop called IBM Red Hat. Red Hat is dead.
“Red Hat” (IBM)
What do you get when you merge a company with IBM?
IBM.
You get what you fuckin deserve!
Annoying commercials about “the cloud” and some robot they built 30 years ago.
But Watson!!!
Hope that backfire on IBM.
Yes, it will but so slowly and further down the road, nobody at IBM will see the connection. When Fedora (or desktop Linux in general) will be slightly less appealing to people who in 10 years will become the decision makers at IT departments, it’ll weaken the position of Linux and in turn the commercial support providers.
Guess, everyone who does not yet own a Steam Deck needs to get one because Valve seems to be the biggest commercial proponent of consumer GNU/Linux.
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Debian is a community system. If we nees to support a corporation with our money, it is in SUSE that we must place our hope. Our hope that Linux in the Enterprise will be ruled by a moral corporation.
If we nees to support a corporation with our money, it is in SUSE that we must place our hope.
SUSE fired almost all upstream contributors a decade or so ago. They used to employ 10-20 KDE developers, about the same number of GNOME developers, a bunch of OpenOffice developers (their Go-OO variant of OpenOffice served as base for LibreOffice), and maintained Mono. As much as I personally like openSUSE TW (IMO it’s the best rolling release distribution), SUSE as a corporate entity is worse than Red Hat under IBM. If you think Red Hat under IBM is bad, look up what SUSE having been a Novell subsidiary and then getting sold two additional times did to them. Red Hat would need cancel upstream contributions for so much more to come down to the level of SUSE. A company looking for enterprise Linux support is still best served with Red Hat. Pretty much the entire competition was freeloading off Red Hat’s work. After shutting down their entire desktop department, SUSE was left with a few packagers and two or so people who developed GNOME extensions.
As I wrote in another comment: The company most interested in helping out upstream projects with desktop focus is Valve, not only via their own developers but also by contracting Collabora and Blue Systems. Given how Valve’s update cycle of SteamOS is, those contributions will mostly still land first in “regular” Linux distributions such as openSUSE TW or Fedora, though. It’s a lucky coincidence that Valve developed and released Steam Deck but they are also mostly just interested in the plumbing and Plasma Desktop itself, not applications (unless it’s about apps SteamOS developers use and they need to scratch their own itches though bug fixes). So Bluetooth an power management: sure. Music players: no.
SUSE is independent again and back to focusing on Linux. It was the American corporation Novell that did all the cuts. Now that it’s back to being independent German they are putting new focus on Linux desktop.
SUSE is independent again
MicroFocus selling SUSE to an investment firm is hardly making SUSE independent.
Now that it’s back to being independent German they are putting new focus on Linux desktop.
Great. Mind linking to announcements about hiring desktop developers? Browsing through jobs.suse.com I found two job ads about container-related software engineers in Taiwan. That’s neither desktop nor German.
You’re two years behind:
https://www.suse.com/news/SUSE-SA-sets-final-offer-price-for-IPO/
https://kde.org/community/donations/ - Suse is a patron.
Can you explain why “community system” is bad? Genuinely curious, since the word community sounds like it’s not controlled by corpo interests
Community systems are not bad, that’s most of Linux, but there needs to be an ethical, FOSS-friendly enterprise system to get corpos invested in Linux and FOSS. Besides, corporate systems usually have massive dev teams and upstream/open-source a lot of their work. As much as I shit on Canonical and Red Hat, they’ve done immense amounts of beneficial work for Linux and FOSS.
That makes sense, thank you. My question above was specifically about Debian, since I’ve heard the point of it being community based used negatively in other places/threads too.
I didn’t mean it in a negative light. The issue is that companies prefer to trust other companies, which is why it’s good to have a moral company to point to.
My question above was specifically about Debian, since I’ve heard the point of it being community based used negatively in other places/threads too.
Fun fact: For a few years HP was very invested in Debian because they saw that as the most likely successor to their old HP-UX Unix on mainframe servers.
Basically yes. Beautifully and accurately explained.
It’s not bad but companies like someone to talk to/blame when something goes wrong.
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I’ve seen that about Ubuntu a few times. Can someone provide me with a TLDR or a good summary article of what’s happened to them? Also is it their server stuff too or just desktop? (I use Ubuntu on my home server and have for years)
Canonical seem allergic against helping out upstream projects. They rather make their own software, licensed in a specific way that they have exclusive rights to sell proprietary versions. Usually those in-house projects fail and Canonical starts freeloading Red Hat-developed software. That’s why they moved from Unity to Gnome. It’s just easier and cheaper to port bug fixes from the competitor’s product. Canonical was actually caught filing bug reports at Red Hat: https://airlied.livejournal.com/72817.html (they tested if a bug also affected Fedora, then they asked Red Hat to fix the bug upstream. I guess they use fake names now but otherwise continue the practice)
They’re giving Ubuntu pro ads in the package manager, forcing you to use snap to install Firefox (by installing the snap when you use apt), and probably other stuff
All these corporations looking to kill off their own relevance. They all in the same death cult or something?
Never forget, in a capitalist system, every firm will always eventually try to get as many people as possible, to pay as much as possible, for as little as possible.
Enshitification
They all in the same death cult or something?
Yeah, capitalism it seems like.
I guess asking for sustainable business practices is too much to ask for from the system. “Sufficient” money is never good enough. Gotta try to get all the money, even if it means burning down everything one holds dear.
Hell, the system is literally willing to burn down the whole world in pursuit of more. The more you think about it, the more senseless it all becomes.
It’s called enshittification - Cory Doctorow invented the term.
All these corporations looking to kill off their own relevance. They all in the same death cult or something?
IBM uses mostly Windows in house, so they are not interested in desktop Linux and apparently then nobody else would be either.
this is bad
Thanks for linking the actual article!
Honestly, they just keep lowering the value paying them brings. Execs barely want to pay them in the first place, why would I as the engineer or IT solutioner care about putting money towards support if they keep abandoning projects…
For non-gnome-users none of that matters. Only thing I ever touched from that was upower, but not even using that.
Farewell, Red Hat. Thanks for all your good work throughout the years. Sucks you sold out to IBM
These kind of changes are absolutely infuriating, and what’s even worse, is that there’s nothing we can do about it
and what’s even worse, is that there’s nothing we can do about it
Look I know it’s much easier said than done, but you can choose to walk away from IBM and Red Hat over this. If these changes start to lose money, they’ll respond. Otherwise they’ll see how much abuse their customers are willing to put up with and start doubling down.
Do you mean that Fedora users should question if they want to keep using this distro? Because I do use Fedora, and I understand I’m “beta-testing” an enterprise product, but yeah, for me this changes my “relationship” with Red Hat. Or what do you mean?
I just don’t want folks thinking they’re trapped, because that’s when a vendor will really start putting the screws to you.
Don’t use Fedora or it’s ilk for starters.
Don’t use Fedora or it’s ilk for starters.
Fedora doesn’t make Red Hat any money anyway. That’s like saying to not use Debian because that could help Canonical’s Snap vehicle Ubuntu. For now Fedora is mostly unaffected by Red Hat’s weird moves. As a long time openSUSE user myself, I’m somewhat experienced in using a community distribution sponsored by a company that got worse and worse over the years and I definitively would not want to buy SUSE Linux Enterprise ever. Weirdly enough, openSUSE even got better as a consequence of some of SUSE’s moves. Fewer employed upstream contributors led to the very automated QA and release processes of Tumbleweed, the rolling release distribution. If you have read about problems within openSUSE because of SUSE, it’s about Leap, the LTS variant practically nobody uses because TW is just so stable and good. If Red Hat or SUSE ever go totally mad and torpedoed Fedora / openSUSE, both projects have enough safeguards in place to move the projects into independence with little interruption.
Fedora is how people get familiar, and stay familiar, with RedHat ways. Without it, when a company moves to Linux servers, there won’t be as many Linux people pushing for RedHat. They will probably know, and thus push, Ubuntu.
I see these moves us knuckling down on the customers they have and ignoring winning new ones. It’s very shortsighted.
Well, Fedora and Gnome were embraced and extended by IBM.
You know what’s next now.
Yep, Ubuntu will fork all of these, then trash them, introduce their alternatives, then drop support in 5 years.
Introducing unity 2
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This was my thought exactly. Work is a RHEL shop and I had settled on Fedora after distro hopping. Ubuntu was for the new guys getting into Linux.
My self hosted services were all CentOS and more recently Rocky/Alma. After the shenanigans RH pulled to make their source harder to obtain, I’m working through my personal ansible scripts to get up on Debain. I’ll never go back to RHEL or the forks.
Fedora is freaking amazing. Fresh & stable software, super clean UI, huge community…
Debian has stable but old software (kernel and packages), clean UI, huge community. But it’s harder to use, since you have to make a few more manual steps to leave it at where Fedora comes as default.
Fedora will always have a place as long as Red Hat stops shitting on it.
I don’t mind the old kernel, packages, etc. However, one of my biggest problems with debain so far is that SELinux isn’t installed by default… I’ve installed and enabled it but it doesn’t seem to let me SSH in. I’m still troubleshooting but its annoying to have to fight with it.
I’d love to continue to use Fedora but I have no faith in RedHat. They don’t give a shit about their community anymore, including Fedora, so I believe its just a matter of time before that’s dead too.
Fedora will probably get forked by the companies supporting enterprise Linux.
I am even more concerned about GNOME, since that will affect the majority of Linux distros or spins.
NSA SELinux is hard to configure/use. There was this exploit https://github.com/stealth/troubleshooter which some even called a backdoor rather than a vulnerability.
Do not trust anything that comes from a 3 letter government agency
So what should I use instead? Nothing?
I guess maybe docker does isolation so I could run all my apps in there.
I think Ubuntu has apparmour which they made themselves. Maybe look into that?
Fedora has been the “Linux if you want to use it for realsies” distro for me, while Ubuntu has become the “Linux if your grandma still wants to use her old laptop” distro.
🙄
Leap it is :)
Welp… Gnome will lost many of their contributor/maintainer… Well, at least KDE folks is backed by Novell(SUSE) and XFCE is purely maintained by community already. It seems Linux desktop is still safe. lol
SUSE was an independent company before, during, and after its 5 years under Novell. That’s a weird attribution to Novell when SUSE has always been the contributing company to Linux.
Oh, sorry… I thought they are one from the start… thx for correcting me.
But this was it’s year!
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And that’s alright. We got some stuff out of it that we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.
power-profiles-daemon is now archived? Dammit, that was a big one for Fedora.
It was introduced as the default power manager on Ubuntu 22.04 as well. 🤔
I am a little concerned to step in front of the hate machine here but this feels like a continued move away from app dev to more infrastructural stuff as previously announced by them. If so, I am all for it as not everybody is going to use Rhythmbox or LibreOffice but we can all use HDR and other core tech that Red Hat will develop instead. They are one of the few Linux companies that can fund these large, technical projects. Having them working on apps feels like a waste of their engineering potential.
But if they are moving towards infrastructure I doubt HDR will be on their radar - or any desktop related technology for that matter
Well, The Enterprise Linux war is just getting better and better!
You see contributing to Rhythmbox or not as part of the “Enterprise Linux war”?
I don’t understand :P
There is no Way this is going to improve anything Red Hat’s side
