8 ms·

New responsibilities

141 points by pabs3 3y ago

seltzered_ 3y ago
Reminds me of a recent argument that "Corporate open source was a zero interest rate phenomenon " ( https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/110873190911225266 https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/110873190911225266 )
orra 3y ago
He wasn't just the Fedora packager of Totem. I am pretty sure he was the upstream Totem maintainer. I had no idea how he managed to maintain so many other packages as well! And apparently on 10% of his work time. 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.
- Conan_Kudo 3y ago
  I don't think it's a secret that funding desktop Linux work has been a challenge. I've said in many other forums that if you want to sustain desktop Linux work, companies and people who work on it need to rewarded and funded for their work. 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-workstation https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-wor...
  - traverseda 3y ago
    Sure, but not Red hat. Especially now. Maybe pop os?
    - Dalewyn 3y ago
      If you weren't and aren't going to pay for Red Hat, you aren't going to pay for any other distro either. 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.
      - Karunamon 3y ago
        Presuming how someone else will spend their money and accusing them of engaging in special pleading when you don't like their answer is inherently confrontational, so please spare us the accusation of bad faith and just make your point directly the next time. 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.
        pastage 3y ago
        Mandrake was very good at marketing, they did Linux alot if good. Note Proxmox is now €100 per year that is possible even on tight budgets. I wonder how good their support is, at €500 - €1000 per year for remote ssh help that can really be worth it!
        Karunamon 3y ago
        Unfortunately their pricing is per socket, so that would be about €500 up front for me just for the ability to access a different repository and no support. (Not really useful) 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.
  - orra 3y ago
    That's an understandable plea. 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.
  - seabass-labrax 3y ago
    I'm curious why, as a contributor to both Red Hat and SUSE, you don't recommend SUSE Desktop[1] more often (ever?), considering that their pricing is competitive with Red Hat. Is there a technical reason, an especially positive experience with RHEL support or maybe something else entirely? [1]: https://www.suse.com/shop/desktop/ https://www.suse.com/shop/desktop/
    - Conan_Kudo 3y ago
      I have recommended SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop in contexts where people have talked about supporting desktop openSUSE financially. I have also previously mentioned SUSE as an option in other forums. 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/contributions https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/c... (non-exhaustive, but still...) [2]: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc... [3]: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/ https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-so... [4]: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/introducing-nvk.html https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/intr... [5]: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/nvk-has-landed.html https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/nvk-... [6]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens... [7]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/openshift-cloud-services https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens... [8]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/self-managed https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens... [9]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/ansible https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/ansible [10]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enter...
- traverseda 3y ago
  Well there are some pretty good desktop options that aren't gnome. Maybe without ibm/red-hats finger on the scale well see some other, better, options get more attention.
- TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
  Linux on the desktop was a viable thing circa 1998, with the publishing of Ximian Desktop. Office even worked great with Crossover. There was a lot of momentum. You could have taken any beige box, put RedHat, Ximian, and Crossover on it, and everything would "just work." Then Microsoft threw some of their loose change at Nat and Miguel, Ximian lost steam, and the Linux world wandered the wastes until Ubuntu sort of picked up where they left off. 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.
  - olau 3y ago
    This is not what happened. A quick reference is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ximian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ximian
    - TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
      I maintain that the distraction of their obviously impressive abilities towards Mono was a blow to desktop Linux that curtailed its rising popularity. IMO, Mono -- without support WinForms -- has been nothing more than a curiosity for the Linux world until the advent of .NET proper, and I say that as someone who has used it more than once to compile bespoke Windows programs for both Mac and Linux.
      - TillE 3y ago
        It's a little sad how Mono is dead, ironically killed by Microsoft not in a malicious way, but just because they open sourced their own superior product. Even Xamarin is finally on its way out, replaced by .NET MAUI. Mono did have an important impact, but it was mostly with games, especially Unity.
- dralley 3y ago
  >It's a shame they're now cutting that desktop work for real this time. 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.
- bayindirh 3y ago
  I don't like to be that blunt, but it seems like IBM is just re-focusing RedHat to be a middleware and OS provider for their products. 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.
izacus 3y ago
Here's a chance for HNers that were complaining over Red Hat to take some control away from them and sign up for maintenance of all those packages.
- deleted 3y ago
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doctor_eval 3y ago
Such a great quote in the comments to that article: > Silent|Storm said... > Q: What do you get when a company merges with IBM? > A: IBM.
- rwmj 3y ago
  Also a totally wrong "hot take". This decision was made by Red Hat alone.
  - doctor_eval 3y ago
    Sure, but the perception exists - whether you like it or not.
    - rwmj 3y ago
      People have wrong ideas about all sorts of things, that doesn't mean we need to perpetuate them.
    - pjmlp 3y ago
      Just like people feel entitled to use for free, stuff that only exists because, Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Nintendo, ARM, Intel, AMD, NVidia,.... put engineering time to make it happen in some form or function. 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.
  - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    So what? I have been through some big company mergers -- the absorbed (or should I say assimilated) company managers would immediately start enforcing the larger company's stereotype policies, out of self-censorship... because they guessed, often correctly, that the writing was on the wall. E.g. managers would start firing to make their units appear to be more profitable, or remove work-from-home policies, etc. way before the merger was completed, in an effort to avoid being the first units to get the axe by the new parent.
deleted 3y ago
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BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
this is IBM firing its guns straight at liberty minded software 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.
- bonzini 3y ago
  If it makes you feel better, feel free to believe what you wrote. But it doesn't make it correct or accurate.
  - BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
    this is equally applicable to you: to believe you're right regardless of correctness for the sake of feeling well. 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.
    - bonzini 3y ago
      Do you know IBM has any responsibility in this choice? If you do, the productive thing to do would be to cite your sources. If you don't, it would be to state which assumptions led you to blame IBM's leadership rather than Red Hat's. But you did neither.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Here, take your pick, https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major
deleted 3y ago
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greatgib 3y ago
I guess the worse is not even for us, but I feel the pain of this guy that was stripped of his projects he was probably deeply involved with. 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.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  I was thinking that too. 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.
- vondur 3y ago
  I assume he's a really talented developer, and IBM/Redhat assigned him to a more pressing task. It sucks for desktop Linux, but I can't really blame IBM/Redhat for assigning him to more pressing issues.
reisse 3y ago
Honestly sad for desktop bluetooth, but good riddance for all the multimedia stuff (Rhytmbox, Totem and Sound Juicer). The fact that somebody in Red Hat paid the guy to maintain them, when the GNOME is still missing/delaying fundamental features, looks like either pure charity or bad management. Or maybe both.
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  Or one guy running all that stuff was so horrendously oversubscribed that keeping them running at all was an achievement?
  - reisse 3y ago
    That also fits into "bad management" part. Besides, in this case I'd be happier to have no "default" media player in Gnome than knowing it is maintained by some oversubscribed guy who deserves some rest.
    - n0tinventedhere 3y ago
      Gnome always had this problem of spreading thin instead of focusing. Lots of little tiny irrelevant apps just to have something to stamp a Gnome branding on. But even people who are really hardcore about using a Gnome desktop don't use those apps. 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".
      - skyfaller 3y ago
        I use Gnome Web to test websites with the WebKit engine from Linux. I'd be curious if there any other good WebKit browser options: I wasn't able to find anything else that I could easily install. (Nyxt apparently supports WebKit, but installing it is a pain, and I actually don't understand how to use their browser.) 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.
JonChesterfield 3y ago
Well, that seems grim. It's unlikely that IBM have chosen one developer to reassign to more obviously revenue generating activity, so this should probably be taken as warning that red hat's open source contribution is winding down. 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.
- reisse 3y ago
  Counterpoint: as a person who used Fedora and then Ubuntu daily for the last four years, and is watching closely for the new features in every release, this feels _fantastic_, but only if Red Hat delivers on the features they're pivoting to (HDR, proper high-resolution support, Wayland). 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.
  - di4na 3y ago
    You realise you will got hdr but not working bluetooth and mices?
    - reisse 3y ago
      gnome-bluetooth is only a GUI, the backend is BlueZ stack. Even if GUI part stops working the second it becomes unmaintained (which is not the case), the backend will continue to work, and you can choose any other frontend you like - see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/bluetooth https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/bluetooth .
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
This is fine, really. If a community doesn't maintain it, it's not valuable to the community. The best projects are the ones where someone has a personal interest in seeing it succeed. 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)
- pabs3 3y ago
  What has been your strategy for paying people to make it work? Buy RedHat, or ? I note that there are lots of Linux consulting companies out there.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  > Mac sucks balls 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.
  - lowbloodsugar 3y ago
    Right? “Desktop Linux” is macOS. It’s a working Unix but with all the desktop software I need. I develop software that runs on Linux but I’ve tried that on a Linux desktop and what a pain the ass.
  - coryrc 3y ago
    As someone who has been a Linux or Windows user all my life, every little interaction with the desktop environment is off in a way I'm not used to and it's uncomfortable and productivity-sapping. I don't think I'd go that far as saying "sucks balls" though. 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.
zb3 3y ago
Ok, but what are these new responsibilities? I don't see them mentioned anywhere
- alias301 3y ago
  From the linked email by Matthias Clasen: "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."
naikrovek 3y ago
how can anyone say that Linux is ready for the desktop when one a single person maintaining these projects can simply be reassigned by their employer, leaving those projects abandoned? 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.

141 points by pabs3 3y ago

Reminds me of a recent argument that "Corporate open source was a zero interest rate phenomenon " ( https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/110873190911225266 https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/110873190911225266 )

orra 3y ago

He wasn't just the Fedora packager of Totem. I am pretty sure he was the upstream Totem maintainer. I had no idea how he managed to maintain so many other packages as well! And apparently on 10% of his work time. 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.

Conan_Kudo 3y ago
I don't think it's a secret that funding desktop Linux work has been a challenge. I've said in many other forums that if you want to sustain desktop Linux work, companies and people who work on it need to rewarded and funded for their work. 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-workstation https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-wor...
- traverseda 3y ago
  Sure, but not Red hat. Especially now. Maybe pop os?
  - Dalewyn 3y ago
    If you weren't and aren't going to pay for Red Hat, you aren't going to pay for any other distro either. 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.
    - Karunamon 3y ago
      Presuming how someone else will spend their money and accusing them of engaging in special pleading when you don't like their answer is inherently confrontational, so please spare us the accusation of bad faith and just make your point directly the next time. 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.
      - pastage 3y ago
        Mandrake was very good at marketing, they did Linux alot if good. Note Proxmox is now €100 per year that is possible even on tight budgets. I wonder how good their support is, at €500 - €1000 per year for remote ssh help that can really be worth it!
        Karunamon 3y ago
        Unfortunately their pricing is per socket, so that would be about €500 up front for me just for the ability to access a different repository and no support. (Not really useful) 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.
- orra 3y ago
  That's an understandable plea. 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.
- seabass-labrax 3y ago
  I'm curious why, as a contributor to both Red Hat and SUSE, you don't recommend SUSE Desktop[1] more often (ever?), considering that their pricing is competitive with Red Hat. Is there a technical reason, an especially positive experience with RHEL support or maybe something else entirely? [1]: https://www.suse.com/shop/desktop/ https://www.suse.com/shop/desktop/
  - Conan_Kudo 3y ago
    I have recommended SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop in contexts where people have talked about supporting desktop openSUSE financially. I have also previously mentioned SUSE as an option in other forums. 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/contributions https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/c... (non-exhaustive, but still...) [2]: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/ https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-sourc... [3]: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/ https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-so... [4]: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/introducing-nvk.html https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/intr... [5]: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/nvk-has-landed.html https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/nvk-... [6]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens... [7]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/openshift-cloud-services https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens... [8]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/self-managed https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/opens... [9]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/ansible https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/ansible [10]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enter...
traverseda 3y ago
Well there are some pretty good desktop options that aren't gnome. Maybe without ibm/red-hats finger on the scale well see some other, better, options get more attention.
TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
Linux on the desktop was a viable thing circa 1998, with the publishing of Ximian Desktop. Office even worked great with Crossover. There was a lot of momentum. You could have taken any beige box, put RedHat, Ximian, and Crossover on it, and everything would "just work." Then Microsoft threw some of their loose change at Nat and Miguel, Ximian lost steam, and the Linux world wandered the wastes until Ubuntu sort of picked up where they left off. 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.
- olau 3y ago
  This is not what happened. A quick reference is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ximian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ximian
  - TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
    I maintain that the distraction of their obviously impressive abilities towards Mono was a blow to desktop Linux that curtailed its rising popularity. IMO, Mono -- without support WinForms -- has been nothing more than a curiosity for the Linux world until the advent of .NET proper, and I say that as someone who has used it more than once to compile bespoke Windows programs for both Mac and Linux.
    - TillE 3y ago
      It's a little sad how Mono is dead, ironically killed by Microsoft not in a malicious way, but just because they open sourced their own superior product. Even Xamarin is finally on its way out, replaced by .NET MAUI. Mono did have an important impact, but it was mostly with games, especially Unity.
dralley 3y ago
>It's a shame they're now cutting that desktop work for real this time. 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.
bayindirh 3y ago
I don't like to be that blunt, but it seems like IBM is just re-focusing RedHat to be a middleware and OS provider for their products. 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.

izacus 3y ago

Here's a chance for HNers that were complaining over Red Hat to take some control away from them and sign up for maintenance of all those packages.

deleted 3y ago
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doctor_eval 3y ago

Such a great quote in the comments to that article: > Silent|Storm said... > Q: What do you get when a company merges with IBM? > A: IBM.

rwmj 3y ago
Also a totally wrong "hot take". This decision was made by Red Hat alone.
- doctor_eval 3y ago
  Sure, but the perception exists - whether you like it or not.
  - rwmj 3y ago
    People have wrong ideas about all sorts of things, that doesn't mean we need to perpetuate them.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Just like people feel entitled to use for free, stuff that only exists because, Facebook, Google, Apple, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony, Nintendo, ARM, Intel, AMD, NVidia,.... put engineering time to make it happen in some form or function. 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.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  So what? I have been through some big company mergers -- the absorbed (or should I say assimilated) company managers would immediately start enforcing the larger company's stereotype policies, out of self-censorship... because they guessed, often correctly, that the writing was on the wall. E.g. managers would start firing to make their units appear to be more profitable, or remove work-from-home policies, etc. way before the merger was completed, in an effort to avoid being the first units to get the axe by the new parent.

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BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago

this is IBM firing its guns straight at liberty minded software 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.

bonzini 3y ago
If it makes you feel better, feel free to believe what you wrote. But it doesn't make it correct or accurate.
- BSEdlMMldESB 3y ago
  this is equally applicable to you: to believe you're right regardless of correctness for the sake of feeling well. 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.
  - bonzini 3y ago
    Do you know IBM has any responsibility in this choice? If you do, the productive thing to do would be to cite your sources. If you don't, it would be to state which assumptions led you to blame IBM's leadership rather than Red Hat's. But you did neither.
pjmlp 3y ago
Here, take your pick, https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major

deleted 3y ago

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greatgib 3y ago

I guess the worse is not even for us, but I feel the pain of this guy that was stripped of his projects he was probably deeply involved with. 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.

CoastalCoder 3y ago
I was thinking that too. 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.
vondur 3y ago
I assume he's a really talented developer, and IBM/Redhat assigned him to a more pressing task. It sucks for desktop Linux, but I can't really blame IBM/Redhat for assigning him to more pressing issues.

reisse 3y ago

Honestly sad for desktop bluetooth, but good riddance for all the multimedia stuff (Rhytmbox, Totem and Sound Juicer). The fact that somebody in Red Hat paid the guy to maintain them, when the GNOME is still missing/delaying fundamental features, looks like either pure charity or bad management. Or maybe both.

JonChesterfield 3y ago
Or one guy running all that stuff was so horrendously oversubscribed that keeping them running at all was an achievement?
- reisse 3y ago
  That also fits into "bad management" part. Besides, in this case I'd be happier to have no "default" media player in Gnome than knowing it is maintained by some oversubscribed guy who deserves some rest.
  - n0tinventedhere 3y ago
    Gnome always had this problem of spreading thin instead of focusing. Lots of little tiny irrelevant apps just to have something to stamp a Gnome branding on. But even people who are really hardcore about using a Gnome desktop don't use those apps. 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".
    - skyfaller 3y ago
      I use Gnome Web to test websites with the WebKit engine from Linux. I'd be curious if there any other good WebKit browser options: I wasn't able to find anything else that I could easily install. (Nyxt apparently supports WebKit, but installing it is a pain, and I actually don't understand how to use their browser.) 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.

JonChesterfield 3y ago

Well, that seems grim. It's unlikely that IBM have chosen one developer to reassign to more obviously revenue generating activity, so this should probably be taken as warning that red hat's open source contribution is winding down. 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.

reisse 3y ago
Counterpoint: as a person who used Fedora and then Ubuntu daily for the last four years, and is watching closely for the new features in every release, this feels _fantastic_, but only if Red Hat delivers on the features they're pivoting to (HDR, proper high-resolution support, Wayland). 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.
- di4na 3y ago
  You realise you will got hdr but not working bluetooth and mices?
  - reisse 3y ago
    gnome-bluetooth is only a GUI, the backend is BlueZ stack. Even if GUI part stops working the second it becomes unmaintained (which is not the case), the backend will continue to work, and you can choose any other frontend you like - see https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/bluetooth https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/bluetooth .

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

This is fine, really. If a community doesn't maintain it, it's not valuable to the community. The best projects are the ones where someone has a personal interest in seeing it succeed. 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)

pabs3 3y ago
What has been your strategy for paying people to make it work? Buy RedHat, or ? I note that there are lots of Linux consulting companies out there.
hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
> Mac sucks balls 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.
- lowbloodsugar 3y ago
  Right? “Desktop Linux” is macOS. It’s a working Unix but with all the desktop software I need. I develop software that runs on Linux but I’ve tried that on a Linux desktop and what a pain the ass.
- coryrc 3y ago
  As someone who has been a Linux or Windows user all my life, every little interaction with the desktop environment is off in a way I'm not used to and it's uncomfortable and productivity-sapping. I don't think I'd go that far as saying "sucks balls" though. 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.

zb3 3y ago

Ok, but what are these new responsibilities? I don't see them mentioned anywhere

alias301 3y ago
From the linked email by Matthias Clasen: "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."

naikrovek 3y ago

how can anyone say that Linux is ready for the desktop when one a single person maintaining these projects can simply be reassigned by their employer, leaving those projects abandoned? 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.