IBM strikes again
They have no idea how Red Hat was making money, they’re just squeezing it dry.
RedHats focus is on Enterprise Linux, Openshift, AWX, etc.
Are they even a “competitor” in enterprise Linux desktop? Enterprise Linux servers, sure, and I suppose a good number of orgs who don’t want to deal with dissimilar “user” distros, but I’d think Canonical would have enterprise desktop Linux pretty much sealed by now.
I’ve had a couple jobs with RHEL workstations, and the university I went to had RHEL workstations too. Not sure what their market share is compared to canonical, but they definitely have a bunch of deployments on desktop.
“Enterprise” linux just feels like something RH invented for their own brand.
You can get LTS releases of a bunch of distros already, and some even offer similar levels of enterprise support (SUSE comes to mind).
I’ve seen orgs run their own distro/spin or something like Zorin or Ubuntu if they don’t want RHEL.
This is a fair point, but I don’t think Linux would be nearly as adopted in the business world without that branding. It’d be some fringe hobbyist thing and BSD would probably have become the server operating system of choice.
Fedora is a great OS. They also bought CoreOS a while ago and rolled it into their own offerings (fedora Coreos and RHEL Coreos). They’re also the primary developers of Pipewire, the de facto replacement for PulseAudio and potentially Gstreamer.
It’s really sad, in a fluke they’ve embraced, expanded, and extinguished OSS projects by making themselves the linchpin, and then selling to IBM. Goes to show that you should never trust those even with the best intentions, as they can eventually sell out.
Does that mean I should stop recommending people fedora with gnome?
I’m still confused about its future
After 3 years on Fedora, the distro that finally made me stop hopping, I moved to openSUSE when I installed a new SSD. I have no idea what the future holds, but I’m good with switching now when convenient rather than later.
so… how do you like openSuSE after 3 years of fedora?
Coming from Fedora/Cinnamon, I went with Tumbleweed/Plasma. As dumb as it sounds, checking out those “X things to do after installing openSUSE Tumbleweed” articles really helps get the ball rolling with adding the Packman repo, using opi for codecs, installing MS Fonts for compatibility, and other basic quality-of-life things like that. YaST does a lot of heavy lifting and hand holding, which can be good or bad depending on your Linux journey, experience, and/or philosophy - but it is very convenient. Honestly, like with anything Linux, you just kind of adjust til you find things you don’t like - which, to be honest, my main list of things is less with openSUSE itself and more with KDE Plasma.
I guess that’s a long way to say, I’ve been fine and haven’t missed Fedora.
I’m probably going to be switching from fedora too, what were your issues with KDE plasma?
Nothing broken or nonfunctional or anything. I’ve just been more of a fan of Cinnamon (and Xfce before that). I hadn’t tried Plasma in any real capacity in years, so figured I’d see where it’s at now; it’s fine. So they’re more complaints than issues - “old man yells at cloud”-type stuff because I have to figure out everything again, which is frustrating when you have a workflow.
Oh that’s good to hear- I’ll have to give it a shot!
Good excuse to clean house anyways
Having done the same trip (years of Fedora, then OpenSUSE) I’m super happy with my experience
Not OP, but I used Ubuntu for years and just installed OpenSUSE on my laptop last week. I really like Plasma compared to Gnome. The package manager repos needed a lot more configuring on openSUSE compared to Ubuntu, as there were a lot of software not available in the default repos. Things like my graphics drivers for my dedicated GPU needed a repo added. I also like apt a lot more than zypper. Zypper seems to complain about incompatibilities a lot, and it’s much slower. OpenSUSE has far more up to date packages than Ubuntu, which was the main reason I switched. I also really like btrfs and snapshotting built in. I haven’t figured out Yast yet. It seems confusing to me. I prefer to set configs from command line.
Once I had everything set up though, I can’t really tell the difference, which is ideal.
@beta_tester @alounoz No, Fedora is independent and all Gnome is affected by this. It is very sad that RH is not interested in the Linux Desktop and I doubt that Canonical will assign resources to these projects.
“independent” - Is it though?
Redhat are the major sponsors of Fedora, much as they sponsored Centos before taking it over and killing it in classic “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish”.
I have doubts about the future of the entire EL ecosphere - I know not many enterprise level organisations are investing deeply into it right now, whether that’s with RHEL or a rebuild. Too much doubt about Redhat’s intentions with RHEL and the future of it.
Hard to “embrace” something you created. Fedora is 100% a Red Hat creation. They created Fedora when they created RHEL. Before that, it was just Red Hat Linux.
Fedora users are just “beta testers” for Red Hat’s main distro, RHEL, and it really did feel like it. I started on Fedora and moved on swiftly after finding better distros.
It is dependent in many ways but they can and do make independent decisions.
Independent then why did the RH lawyers make them remove the codecs from the distro earlier this year.
Because Red Hat is a distributor and sponsor of Fedora. The Fedora project is made up of around 30% Red Hat employees. This makes them liable if Fedora starts shipping codecs that are in violation of patent law.
OpenSuse also removed the codecs and they aren’t affiliated with Red Hat at all.
Sadly, this move by Red Hat is not unexpected. Personally, I do not recommend any Red Hat related distros, including clones. This breaks my heart since my first Linux experience was Red Hat Halloween, but the company is just taking ugly turn after ugly turn.
Settle down Nancy. There’s hundreds of linux distributions currently, some targeted towards desktop/gaming, and some targeted to the server and enterprise spaces. RedHat has always been the latter.
Let’s not get all Shakespearean dramatic about it, ok?
I mean RH is a big contributor to open source in general. I do not look forward to how they are behaving lately.
Exactly, and they have been for years. How removeding entitled do people need to be to advocate for “free and open source” software and then turn around and removed and moan when a corporate entity decides to shift focus to something that doesn’t benefit them directly?
I’m also not sure about it, as I’ve always liked Fedora.
However, these news impact the whole Linux desktop, and GNOME in particular :(
They are focusing on consolidating flatpak, and move toward immutable desktop. If you read the some press release in red hat blogs, they move their teams to make Wayland more stable now, and they aim to bring full flegede gaming desktop also 3D tools as most Hollywood company use RHEL on desktop for processing, it’s what some of the engineer said on reddit, and libreoffice, rythmbox, totem, bluetooth, are offered with flatpak, so… User can move to that.
Sadly their way of communicating always bad when they move to new project these days… Really bad…
And some other are making FUD on those news with community left confused and make assumptions…
However, this is not about dropping RPM in support of Flatpak. In this case, they asked an upstream maintainer to reduce their involvement. And it’s not FUD: it’s written in the blog post itself.
Yeah. But red hat already say it first, that it need to focus on other part of desktop for Wayland.
There are trade off when you are moving resources, and Red Hat do it for free…
So why I called it FUD, because they talk because they don’t know the chronology…
And for the post from Red Hat Engineer, I know they don’t like it, but Wayland need more focus also 3D part as it’s core part of Red Hat business and for greater masses… You can’t have shinny thing sucking out people or corporation without win win benefit… And the engineer are employed by red hat… That’s it.
openSUSE will welcome you and your friends :)
I switched from openSUSE to fedora, and currently fedora is the perfect distro for me.
Fedora exists separately from RHEL. RedHats decisions can only affect it so far as what they task their developers with.
However the community votes in which tech is included in Fedora. I wouldn’t worry about the distro.
The problem is these companies are the bulk of the contributors to these projects.
Yep. People think it’s people in their spare time. I mean people have to eat and these companies are the ones who pay for most of the development.
I loved fedora and it is not easy to choose another distro that fits me that well, but I more and more loose trust in fedora and its future. I think I’ll switch from fedora to a real community distro w/o corporation influence, step by step box by box, slowly but steady to get back my peace of mind.
@barusu @beta_tester I’ve got unbuntu on an old celeron 2 core laptop. 3Gb of ram and 500Gb HD, sounding any gud? Am wanting to move a win10, 4Gb, 1Tb HD, to a Linux distro. Wud Kubuntu be a choice?
Ubuntu is as well a corporate backed/driven distro even with some negative actions regarding user tracking in the past. I was thinking about real community distros like Debian, NixOS or Arch…
Absolutely. This is the end-result of all corporate backed distros.
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Fedora should be dropped try a community distro not a corporate one.
Fedora is a community distro. Red hat just contributes a lot.
This is the contentious part and also why I left Fedora.
Don’t get me wrong, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better community, better support or even a more innovative bunch. Besides RedHat’s involvement, Fedora has been in the vanguard for desktop technologies like PipeWire, Flatpaks, Wayland, heck they were one of the first to push systemd.
But my problem is that since RedHat holds sway over the Fedora leadership we cannot guarantee that the community will have the users best interests at heart.
So when people say “use a community distro”, they mean a non-captured one.
And again; Fedora is awesome, the community is awesome, been using it for years, but switched to NixOS like a month ago because I don’t trust the direction RedHat/IBM is taking Fedora.
Most likely they’ll push some of these projects to Fedora, make them maintain the projects, then some years down the line sell those projects as apart of their service.
There is a conflict of interest here and a clear opportunistic angle. RedHat wants to use the Fedora community as a free of charge testing grounds, in effect creating a userbase of free QA testers for future software.
This is predatory, it is an insult to the community, but the community is captured, and therefore will play ball with RedHat. This is the problem. If the community would give some assurances and protections, that would be nice, but so far it seems the Fedora community is more than willing to play ball with IBM/RedHat.
WWLTD?
I always thought Fedora was his preferred distro.
While yes red hat may try something like that, they also maintain lots of packages and develop technologies that fedora uses, so fedora is still benefiting from said arrangement. It is a trade off here, but I would argue it’s more than worth it as it’s better to be free qa and get decent software than not be anybody’s qa but either not have or have poor quality software.
Is it why do Redhat lawyers have any say on Fedora then?
Red hat owns the trademarks as fedora isn’t a real legal entity. Red hat employees also hold most spots in the council, and financially support the project. The council spots are voted upon so they don’t have to be red hatters that’s just who we chose.
Recommend pop os instead, solid, no canonical bs, widely compatible, and will soon replace GNOME with cosmic
I am really looking forward to. COSMIC but that is a bold claim.
What is bold?
I probably misread your comment that COSMiC would replace GNOME. I realize now that you only meant on PopOS.
Bold=brave
Full of system76’s bias…
Oh yeah we really do need yet another DE
This means that, in the medium-term at least, all those GNOME projects will go without a maintainer, reviewer, or triager:- gnome-bluetooth (including Settings panel and gnome-shell integration)- totem, totem-pl-parser, gom- libgnome-volume-control- libgudev- geocode-glib- gvfs AFC backendThose freedesktop projects will be archived until further notice:- power-profiles-daemon- switcheroo-control- iio-sensor-proxy- low-memory-monitorI will not be available for reviewing libfprint/fprintd, upower, grilo/grilo-plugins, gnome-desktop thumbnailer sandboxing patches, or any work related to XDG specifications.Kernel work, reviews and maintenance, including recent work on SteelSeries headset and Logitech devices kernel drivers, USB revoke for Flatpak Portal support, or core USB is suspended until further notice.
Gnome-bluetooth and gvfs are big. I don’t use Gnome, I use a tiling window manager, with XFCE apps, but my workflow depends on these apps. I hope that Blueman is not dependent on gnome-bluetooth, but GVFS is literally essential, as that’s what I use for mounting external volumes (mainly USBs). This is bad.
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Guess it’s not wrong to think that they technically stopped to work on about everything for gnome for a while
That really sucks. I recently chose to use Nobara too, I hope these projects get picked up by another entity so Gnome as a whole doesn’t suffer.
What gnome-bluetooth does that bluetooth-manager can’t? It’s just a button reorganization in GTK4.
There is no more Red Hat. It’s IBM now.
I’m getting quite fond of the coining of this concept of “enremovedtification”.
I just wish it had a better name. ‘Enremovedtification’ sounds stupid.
Corporate Coprophilia
better
Personally I’m not a fan of cussing in terms meant to be widespread. So my personal substitute, while wordier, is currently “corporate product worsening”
“Enterprise rot”
“Corporate decay”
“Business defecation”
much better
Corporate poopification.
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Corpodecay
I can see where they’d spend less maintaining rhythmbox and totem as they don’t really help with office productivity. So many keyboards and mice are Bluetooth these days it kinda seems weird to stop working on the tools you’re customers actually need.
Rhythmbox already got replaced and I don’t think anyone uses totem. I did a little but it would never work properly.
Like you said tho Bluetooth is weird to stop supporting same with power profiles
What disgusts me the most about Red Hat is their fake focus on “the open source community.” The fact is, the “community” is nothing more to them than free labor. They only seek out and merge changes and fixes that appeal to their enterprise customers. removed them, they’re getting paid, so let them do it themselves IMO.
FUD
You can disagree with the comment above, but it’s not “FUD”, it’s just criticism.
It’s FUD, redhat is a major contributor paying developers. It’s a sad news but it’s crazy to say redhat just profits free contributors.
Ok, so you don’t know what FUD means.
Not Power Profiles Daemon…
Yeah, this was the saddest part of the announcement for me. Just when amd_pstate was getting good and power-profiles-daemon provided an easy way to toggle its performance state.
GNOME getting affected is insanely bad. removed IBM, glad that ThinkPad was bought by Lenovo. ThinkPad under IBM would have become worse than Alienware.
ThinkPad under Lenovo has also gotten much worse to the point that I don’t really consider them anymore …
Last time I looked you couldn’t even buy a 2-in-1 with upgradeable memory (or RAM > 16 GB) anymore and for replacing the keyboard you now have to disassemble the entire ThinkPad. Unlike my L390 Yoga and X201 Tablet, where the RAM is slotted and where the keyboard can easily be changed by removing three screws (which is important to me, as I prefer US International over my local layout and I also value a clean keyboard when buying used). In my experience ThinkPad batteries also tend to loose capacity rather quickly? In addition we already have the second X1 Yoga with a broken hinge within three years of normal usage in my family (luckily this device has a five year warranty, so we’ll see if the warranty covers it) …
Maybe this has changed since the first L13 Yoga (haven’t read about any new hardware from Lenovo since then), but these were the main reasons why I decided to buy one of the last new L390 Yogas instead of its successor and why I no longer consider ThinkPads to be more desirable than any other laptop.
So the TrackPoint, thermals, keyboard, durability, Linux friendliness, officially allowed user repairability, great anti-glare screen coating and superior quality to any consumer grade laptop or Macbook are not factors to you, or are you willing to drop the ball just because, where other laptop makers are worse on basically all criterias and even hate you for user repairability, Lenovo forgoes a couple of your criterias and personal disagreements?
You are not logical and reasonable when you say “I no longer consider ThinkPads to be more desirable than any other laptop.”
the TrackPoint
is nice and I prefer it to touchpads. But I don’t value it enough to still prioritise ThinkPads over other brands.
the keyboard
is no longer replaceable without disassembling the entire laptop (since the L13 Yoga Gen2). One of the things that made me prefer ThinkPads over the rest.
The typing experience is decent, but I could type just fine on other laptops as well.
Linux friendliness
In which way is a ThinkPad more Linux-friendly than others?
I mean, I can’t even use all the hardware I bought on Linux, as the fingerprint reader doesn’t have any Linux support, whereas older ThinkPads (up to the Yoga 460) had a fingerprint reader that worked great on Linux. I also haven’t received a single UEFI update on Linux through fwupd (I use Fedora if that matters).
I had an inexpensive Acer non-convertible laptop (bought without an OS from the factory) and a HP ENVY x360 (bought for its beefier AMD hardware, but eventually returned after attempts to fix the faulty digitizer failed multiple times) and Linux ran just fine on them as well.
officially allowed user repairability
I agree that it still is an advantage that Lenovo offers HMMs and spare parts.
But if I need to disassemble the entire laptop (which is something I really want to avoid) to replace a keyboard or most components are soldered, a hardware maintenance manual for ThinkPads is of much less value to me than it used to be.
durability superior quality
In which way are ThinkPads “superior quality” or “durable”?
the keyboard is no longer replaceable without disassembling the entire laptop (since the L13 Yoga Gen2). One of the things that made me prefer ThinkPads over the rest.
This is a Yoga exclusive problem due to its non conventional form and function. This is not a ThinkPad problem. You can just lift off the clips on ThinkPads and plug in and out the cable beneath keyboard to replace.
In which way is a ThinkPad more Linux-friendly than others? I mean, I can’t even use all the hardware I bought on Linux, as the fingerprint reader doesn’t have any Linux support
Fingerprint reader is a very unique issue and the lack of hardware support is an anomaly. Users of Yoga and newest L serie generations apparently are reporting this, but not users of other ThinkPads. The Linux hardware support for Bluetooth, WiFi and other stuff is far superior to any other mainstream laptop maker.
In which way are ThinkPads “superior quality” or “durable”?
ThinkPads are resistant against drops and falls and have MILSPEC-810G certification, similar to rugged phones, which also allows them to be resistant against dust, sand, fungus, mist, extreme temperature and other harsh environmental conditions. Only laptops like Panasonic Toughbook get certified for this stuff, mainstream laptops outside ThinkPads do not. My ThinkPad has fallen 2-3 feet multiple times and even thrown across a room, and I am using it in front of me right now.
Edit: I have figured you out, you donkey (not the reply fellow above), downvoting every comment I make on my account. Go touch grass and snip your internet cable with a scissor. And maybe eat some removed and get diarrhea too.
This is a Yoga exclusive problem due to its non conventional form and function.
That’s the only form factor that’s relevant to me, so that’s what I evaluate. Other ThinkPads and laptops don’t matter to me.
The Linux hardware support for Bluetooth, WiFi and other stuff is far superior to any other mainstream laptop maker.
How? They use the same Intel/Broadcom/Realtek chips as everyone else.
MILSPEC-810G certification
If this is something you require, ok. But that’s not something I value at all. I haven’t dropped a laptop yet and don’t need any certifications.
What I see is a lot of plastic cracking and breaking off with the X-series tablets (own an X201t and owned multiple X230t in the past) and new laptops starting to creak after mostly sitting on a desk for a couple of months. So overall I don’t think the build quality is anything special and I believe there are laptops for the same price that hold up as well or better over time. But it isn’t terrible either, it is just ok in my opinion.
Edit: I have figured you out, you donkey, downvoting every comment I make on my account. Go touch grass and snip your internet cable with a scissor. And maybe eat some removed and get diarrhea too.
I don’t think I have downvoted a single comment from you, at least not in this thread.
Before you misunderstand, sorry, you are not that person. Whoever did it undid their downvote, and I just wanted to know that it was intentionally being done since the past week to me, and I do have a clue who it is. I got a lot of enemies due to being a known privacy advocate, moreso because I am also a communist (we get hate from libs lol).
If you want the 2-in-1 form, I am afraid you barely have options to begin with, let alone ones that are as easy to work with as conventional laptops. This is both a problem that you chose and one that industry is forced to inflict, as part of the engineering complexity and user not having a chunky 3kg device.
Lenovo maintains a Linux compatibility chart for ThinkPads and provides support for it. I have not seen mainstream laptop makers make any such efforts outside of that Dell XPS Developer Edition model with Ubuntu years ago. Most makers just ship preinstalled Ubuntu without putting in their own effort. With ThinkPads being heavily used in corporate sector, Linux gets some support as some companies do use it over Windows.
I think the MILSPEC certification is extremely useful, especially since you probably do use your device like a handheld tablet. Maybe you do not need it, but almost everyone will always benefit from it. Knowing your data is safe and rescuable even when the device gets a lot of physical abuse is the greatest benefit. IMHO you do not appreciate how good the ThinkPad is, compared to what garbage others make, and it may be a case of grass is greener on the other side.
KDE will return to its rightful throne.
I doubt it will. KDE needs to entirely change its vision of it being this mixed bag of customisation supremacy, and instead forego some of it to become performance and UX oriented like GNOME. KDE needs to do a 180 flip, and the community will tear it one apart if it “becomes the devil” or whatever nonsense the anti-GNOME zealots drum up.
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True.
I used to like RedHat.
To be honest, those never really worked reliably. i don’t know where really lies the issue but loading a bunch of file and some file can freeze, make the app unresponsible that only a kill can resolve.
Is it a gstreamer issue? Rhythmbox has always looked bloated and never able to do what a simple audacious can do with the same file collection.Regarding RHEL, they are pushing ITs to the cloud and not their own, I mean, I will do the necessary to not promote, support their products.
Such a shame. The best distro out there being hurt by these decisions…
No point using RHEL or related distros like Fedora after this news. You’re potentially investing in the managed decline of a company that simply doesn’t bother with supporting anyone who isn’t paying them big bucks.
If you wanted a stable desktop Linux with LTS releases and a mature third party software stack you’re better off with literally any other Ubuntu, SUSE, or Debian-based distro. Paying money to the latter will likely benefit the wider linux ecosystem more than paying RH that same money, too
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Doesn’t this violate the gpl
How could stopping work on projects violate the gpl?
Didn’t you see the slave labor clause in there? You’re indebted for at least 3 decades when you start a new GPL project.
The GPLv4 is looking promising.
Red Hat has decided to stop allocating resources for maintaining and improving these parts of the freedesktop project. Red Hat isn’t working on proprietary versions of them. They’ve just decided to stop paying for work to be done on them. It just so happens that many of these projects were only being maintained by Red Hat employees, it seems.
