6 ms·

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 packa

by 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.
        CoastalCoder 3y ago
        > Unfortunately their pricing is per socket Heh, at first I parsed that as IPC socket. Now I'm amusing myself thinking about which companies would try to charge for that.
- 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.

by orra 3y ago

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.
        CoastalCoder 3y ago
        > Unfortunately their pricing is per socket Heh, at first I parsed that as IPC socket. Now I'm amusing myself thinking about which companies would try to charge for that.
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.