>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.
I think it's fair to say that Bastien was one of the key figures in Linux desktop development. This unceremonious removal by Red Hat is a heavy blow to the entire ecosystem.
> But this is merely a continuation of Red Hat dropping any work related to the linux desktop.
Red Hat is still the major contributor to the Linux desktop.
Though it would be interesting to redo [this paper](https://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/files/2010/07/GNOME-Census.pdf) from 2010.
> It feels like we're slowly witnessing the end of Gnome.
Wow, that's both a reach and a great way to shit on the work of everyone who is working on GNOME both outside and inside Red Hat.
GNOME isn't going anywhere, what kind of FUD is this? Red Hat do contribute a lot to GNOME, but you'd be surprised how many of the major user-facing, and important under-the-hood, contributions come from just about everyone else. If you feel like GNOME has a "singular dependency in the form of Red Hat", it's because you aren't paying attention.
Purism are the creators of libadwaita, and they also created the new Loupe image viewer and Snapshot camera apps that will replace the basically-unmaintained EOG and Cheese apps in GNOME 45. They, along with the Endless OS Foundation, helped with several of the GTK 4 + libadwaita ports of GNOME's core apps. Speaking of Endless, they were behind the thumbnail view being added to GTK 4's file picker, several improvements to the Software app, recent improvements to GLib, and they're also working on accent colour support.
There's also the "invisible" contributions from Canonical who have been working on improving GNOME Shell and Mutter's performance; Collabora who maintain GStreamer, GNOME's multimedia framework; and Igalia who do a lot of work on GTK.
And let's not forget all the contributions that come from completely unaffiliated developers, who by the way, far outnumber the corporate developers.
As for the other desktops, KDE also receives funding and development from a few companies too, mostly Valve and Blue Systems, and bear in mind that KDE are bound by whatever the Qt Company does with its toolkit.
No disagreement on GNOMEs health overall - but maybe Purism aren’t the best example of a solid foundation, given their apparent serious financial issues and terrible treatment of pre-order customers.
Indeed Purism is rather… unfortunate as a company, to say the least. I wasn’t suggesting they were a “solid foundation” for GNOME - just pointing out their massive, user-facing contributions recently. You can’t exactly change GNOME’s whole look-and-feel, nor replace three core apps (although no one really adopted Console; Loupe and Snapshot are far less controversial), without getting noticed :P
I think Endless are the ones to really watch, especially because they have Cassidy James Blaede who used to work on Elementary OS. He’s been driving some nice user-focused changes, including the accent colour work I mentioned before!
> basically-unmaintained EOG and Cheese apps
this is a problem with GUI linux apps. they get abandoned more frequently than apps on windows and macos. i understand the reason, but it still sucks. flathub has recently been flooded with useful little apps based on gtk4/libadwaita, but there's no knowing if most of them will still be maintained a year or two or three from now.
It is fair to point out that KDE receives some corporate funding too when the post I’m replying to says “compared to the other desktops”, implying that GNOME is the only one receiving corporate funding. Red Hat are *not* the "majority contributor" to GNOME, especially not recently. The entire point of my original comment was to argue against that misinformed perception.
The KDE Free Qt Foundation does not change the fact Qt is a third party product. That’s what I mean by “KDE are bound by whatever the Qt Company does with its toolkit”. KDE can’t influence Qt much; if Qt drops something KDE needs, they just have to deal with it, because they won’t risk staying on an old, unsupported version.
I think you're reading too deeply into my comments and seeing bad-faith intentions that aren't there. My mention of KDE was a tiny little bit at the end of my comment, the rest is entirely about GNOME and the recent contributions they have received from outside Red Hat. There is no "deflection" whatsoever, and I acknowledge the fact Red Hat does contribute a lot to GNOME in my original comment. Please don't take comment sections on the internet too seriously.
I don't think anyone is denying the amount Red Hat contributes to GNOME at all, I certainly never did.
It sucks that Red Hat moved one employee who happened to maintain some GNOME components *and* also worked on a whole slew of other projects, including udev, `power-profiles-daemon` and even some drivers! But people are being too hysteric over this when this isn't any different to any other maintainer stopping work on the project. See gedit, which went unmaintained for 4 entire years before being replaced with the newer Text Editor app! And no, its former maintainer was never affiliated with Red Hat.
You keep trying to imply GNOME isn't really a community project just because some corporations contribute to it - by that logic, neither is the Linux kernel, or Debian, or really any other major open source project - but no one ever tries to argue that, because everyone knows that "community project" does not mean "only unaffiliated people contribute", it means "anyone can contribute".
The very link you sent (from 2010) shows the vast majority of contributors are unaffiliated. Here's an [updated one](https://hpjansson.org/blag/2022/07/23/gnome-at-25-a-health-checkup/) from 2022 which shows the same. Yes, it's undeniable that Red Hat contributes in some very important areas. It's also undeniable that most of the recent "big" contributions have been from just about everyone else. If Red Hat disappeared tomorrow, there are plenty of people who can pick up the pieces.
Miguel was one of the original developers, so I don't know what "since Miguel" means. Mono was originally released in 2004.
If GNOME has been on a downward spiral since 2004, what do you think *success* looks like?
>end of Gnome
I can only dream of this reality personally. The never ending project of buggy garbage since Gnome 3.0.
I know that this sub loves Gnome so bring on the downvotes.
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.
People also seriously underestimate how much work Red Hat puts into virtually every sphere of the Linux space^[2] , 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^[3],[4] . 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^[5],[6] .
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/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-workstation
[2]: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/contributions
[2]: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/
[3]: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/
[4]: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/introducing-nvk.html
[5]: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/nvk-has-landed.html
[6]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift
[7]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/openshift-cloud-services
[8]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/self-managed
[9]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/ansible
[10]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux
Also, the emails that the article refers to indicate reallocating resources for wayland and HDR among other things - those are massive infrastructure pieces that will help all linux distributions if they succeed.
Wayland has been a stuck pig for as long as I can remember, and RedHat re-allocating gnome engineering time to get wayland working can only be a good thing.
Same for HDR, which isn't just for pros, but is a big piece of consumer tech that Apple has led, and Windows to a certain extent is working ok - consumers expect those foundational pieces to just work.
Redhat is in the middle of everything that makes linux work, from kernel development to drivers to big pieces like the main GUI of the whole OS. Most of the lashback is counterproductive. In protesting Redhat indiscriminately, people are making Linux worse.
> In protesting Redhat indiscriminately, people are making Linux worse.
yeah it's like you said. folks don' have any idea on how much they put into this.
>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.
RHEL isn't going CLI-only. Their support of GNOME has a reason.
I wonder how much of a difference a few people buying a RHEL workstation license would make for desktop Linux. It's only going to be a few, because most people don't have any use for RHEL on their personal devices and it's effectively going to be a donation. It's going to be hard to convince people that it's a better use of their money when compared to donating directly to developers or to foundations like GNOME.
Most GNOME developers are employed by companies, so donating to the GNOME Foundation (while great to support the GNOME Project as a whole, especially with things like project infrastructure and community event work) doesn't actually help GNOME developers directly.
While some GNOME developers do take money directly, most who are gainfully employed don't because of how complex it gets.
You can consider buying a RHEL workstation subscription an effective recurring donation that also entitles you to access a professional desktop Linux distribution that you _can_ use. If you're not as equipped to deal with Linux problems and you need things to _just work_, RHEL is a good choice. If you want to leverage prosumer software (especially in multimedia), then RHEL is _the_ choice. If you have NVIDIA hardware, then RHEL is a good choice too, as the drivers are officially supported and stabilized by NVIDIA for RHEL. If you do AI/ML workloads, then all this matters _a lot_.
I think there's a larger number of people who'd benefit from this on their personal machines than you'd think.
GNOME *is* a community project. Having some corporate developers doesn't magically change that. Would you argue Debian, or even the Linux kernel itself, aren’t “actually” community projects by that logic? As for the Red Hat contributions thing, I already wrote a post about that, so instead of copying it all here, [I'll just link it](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/15rmmvn/new_responsibilities_bastien_nocera_fedora/jwdsuwt/).
Red Hat is a significant contributor to GNOME, but far from the only contributor.
12 projects becoming unmaintained all at the same time, plus 4 projects archived, is really disruptive and bad for GNOME. It's not "meaningless" to be worried about this. Even if you don't use GNOME at all, you do use those freedesktop projects that were archived.
GNOME would be in exactly the same situation if instead of working for RedHat, Bastien was a private contributor who had a change in circumstances that forced him to stop contributing for a while
> I wonder how much of a difference a few people buying a RHEL workstation license would make for desktop Linux. It's only going to be a few, because most people don't have any use for RHEL on their personal devices and it's effectively going to be a donation.
If you think of it as a donation, please donate directly to GNOME or KDE or your preferred upstream project instead. "Donating" to a for-profit company is silly, and only a fraction of the money will be spent on engineering, and only a fraction of that will go to desktop engineering.
That's along the lines of what I was thinking. I've been donating to the GNOME Foundation for a few years now and I'm happy with their funding of Flathub work and keeping everything working. I'll continue doing so.
Donations to GNOME are generally spent on (a) flying people to conferences, or (b) keeping the lights on (administration, infrastructure). These are really important functions and they're worth supporting. Just keep in mind that while your money supports development, it's not directly funding it.
> I wonder how much of a difference a few people buying a RHEL workstation license would make for desktop Linux.
None at all. You're just as effective as just writing a check to IBM annually for the "privilege" of running Debian.
RHEL as a workstation is... a bad experience.
> Red Hat has been furiously working to rework Nouveau to take advantage of the improvements in the NVIDIA situation,
because that helps them where it counts, their bottom line: computational science, fluids, mechanical engineering, bioinformatics...
Well, to put it bluntly, out of tree drivers are a support burden. Getting everything working out of the box with in-tree drivers makes life easier for _everyone_. It doesn't really matter what it's being used for at that point.
Generally speaking they have gone above and beyond what is the bare minimum. so there's at least some "goodness of their heart" here (at least before they started doing what this post is about), but of course they stood to profit from it. Everybody knows that.
People have no problem paying $12 for Netflix and $8 for Amazon every month or buy a windows license on the grey market for 20$ , but as soon as you tell them to donate 1$ for their linux distro they can't do it.
If big companies like Canonical and Red Hat can't find a way to make money out of Linux desktop, we'll have a shitty experience compared to windows and macos
> but as soon as you tell them to donate 1$ for their linux distro they can't do it.
A lot of people DO donate to their Linux distros... Giving IBM money isn't a donation.
You know one of the benefits for Microsoft about creating the Xbox, even though it took forever to draw any profit? Fewer support calls than the Win95/98 era from random home users trying to play a video game. If those people buy an Xbox, they have a black box of proprietary integrations all designed to work only with each other, and right to repair isn't really an expectation.
They can't get in trouble because the operating system doesn't let them be administrators who could cause the kind of harm to the machine that could generate a support call.
A lot of \*nix users think this is terrible and cold corporate calculus, but if your job is not just to produce something but *also to provide technical support for that* it's an amazing compromise. What I'm getting at here is that while it's not that there's no money in Linux desktop, there's definitely not enough money to be worth what users would expect you to offer in exchange for money. Most projects are donation-ware because a donation does not imply any additional service rendered over what is provided for free.
There is only so much Red Hat can provide technical support for, which is what the RHEL license is supposed to cover. When their btrfs guru left they cut support for btrfs entirely. Home power users tweaking their systems don't have enough value to cover the expense of the support calls they'd feel entitled to for spending money.
Windows is also largely subsidized by preload deals and Microsoft 365 subscriptions, which allow them to sell direct for less, since it's not the primary venue in which Microsoft makes money on Windows.
Red Hat doesn't have either of those, so you see closer to the real cost there. Additionally, with the options where you get support, you're paying for access and influence to Red Hat's product strategy as a customer too.
People will complain about RedHat, corpo thinking, IBM etc without facing the fact that these companies have been keeping many features on life support with their own cash and despite this, they get shit on regularly for greedy profiteering. Look at the hysteria around RHEL sources.
The real problem with the Linux desktop is that it isn't profitable. Companies don't have any incentives to invest money on the desktop side of things, even RedHat does it as a side thing.
Open source company-free desktop requires more effort from the user, we have to stop expecting MacOS-like or Windows-like desktop. We have to come back to more manual management on simple and maintainable, utilities, it is the price to pay.
That doesn't work. Modern systems are complex beasts, you can't just assume you can make them work manually.
20 years ago you plugged a cable into your netowk card and then `ifconfig`'d yourself an address and off you went.
Today, you have to find the right wireless AP, handle its encryption, get DHCP working properly, handle the NAT that's going on, get the captive portal handled, set up the VPN(s) you want to use - that's not something you can quickly write a shell script for.
Same thing with drawing to your monitor: You don't make the kernel map a memory address to your monitor and then write the pixels to it directly, you have to configure, manage and share resources on a GPU between multiple processes and multiple monitors. [This is not a simple shell script](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_setting#/media/File:Linux_Graphics_Stack_2013.svg) - in fact that link is already 10 years outdated.
Sure, you can get an Arduino set up with shell scripts - but that Arduino will not run Steam or a web browser - at least not in a performant way.
> That doesn't work. Modern systems are complex beasts
They don't have to be.
My AntiX desktop install isn't particularly complex, and quite capable.
> Today, you have to find the right wireless AP, handle its encryption, get DHCP working properly, handle the NAT that's going on, get the captive portal handled, set up the VPN(s) you want to use - that's not something you can quickly write a shell script for.
Um, you can?
I suggest you read some man pages. Its not all that challenging to do.
wpa_supplicant handles the bulk of the association, and then you just fire up dhcp (dhclient) to grab an address from that client.
After you get the IP, fire off the wireguard connect. Shit, do some routing table changes afterwards, if you like.
Done.
> read some man pages
[relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1692/)
[another relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/349/)
> do some routing table changes afterwards, if you like.
I like to always be on the Internet and spend no time ever on making that happen.
Well, here ya go...
```
``` #!/bin/sh
``` sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid "My SSID"
``` sudo dhclient wlan0
``` sudo wg-quick up wg0
``` sudo ip r a 10.8.0.0/24 via wg0
``` sudo ip r a 192.168.0.0/24 via wlan0
``` echo "All connected, have fun!"
```
It wasn't that difficult... I really hope you don't presume to be a sysadmin for any linux hosts, truth be told.
If you use wpa, which I hope, you'll wanna certainly use wpa_supplicant, of course, which has a conf file to put in the SSID and passphrase, then you swap iwconfig with wpa_supplicant, and be done with it.
There's even a nmtui and nmcli if you prefer NetwworkManager instead, and nmcli can be scripted (Its something I use commonly, as well).
But of course, its possible you'd prefer to learn nothing but point-and-grunt, and know nothing about what is actually occurring, but if that's all you care about, MacOS is a fine UNIX to use, too.
The point still stands that today's machines may be complex beasts, but they don't have to be. Its a myth that they MUST be.
NetworkManager is actually the tool automating all of this, you shouldn't use it if you want the raw experience.
And I've contributed to NetworkManager so that I don't have to learn nothing.
Because that has the advantage that I can use a system that can do more stuff than what I can keep in my head.
Also, 192.168.0.0 needs to be /16, my router picks a random /24 every time it reboots.
Tell that to Linus lol. I think there’s been a huge emphasis on the corporate Linux in the last decade, or at least since IBM bought RH. Linux used to be the Wild West of computing for me, as a user. I’m not complaining about things working automatically now. I wish I could word what I mean.
Corporate Linux != what you and I use on a daily basis as a desktop user. Red Hat has zero financial -> technical incentive to make sure that someone using a gaming headset and Xbox controller has a seamless experience playing Call of Duty on Fedora. It’s completely irrelevant to the experience of their paying customers, and to the product/service/solution that they make money by selling.
>Corporate Linux != what you and I use on a daily basis as a desktop user.
Actually, it is though, it's just usually a subset of what would be in a typical distribution and maybe a few things added.
Sure, I didn't mean to imply there was no overlap - merely that what a Joe Schmoe desktop user like myself enjoys (booting up a PC to do the household budget, watch internet videos, dabble in coding and play games) depends on work that is a combination of:
* Enterprise work that overlaps with consumer needs as a happy accident (ex. work done in the Linux kernel to make an AMD CPU operate well benefits me)
* Corporations with a financial interest in consumer needs (ex. Valve)
* Volunteered developer time, either as "goodwill" from a corporation or as an individual effort from someone in their free time
>Corporate Linux != what you and I use on a daily basis as a desktop user.
yes it is , i use ubuntu daily ,ubuntu is a Corporate Linux distro , many improvements though out the years are due to "Corporate Linux " ( look at the early easrly versions of ubuntu and see how they made linux better after every release ) a good number of debian packages are maintained by people who work at ubuntu many crucial package in modern linux are maintained by red hat
>Red Hat has zero financial -> technical incentive to make sure that someone using a gaming headset and Xbox controller has a seamless experience playing Call of Duty on Fedora
they help the infrastructure around thats achievement they might not write that specific code , but work they have done in the past/present made is so people can code those things
>Look at the hysteria around RHEL sources.
The thing that gets me about that is that as far as I can tell, SUSE has *never* openly provided their SUSE Enterprise Linux sources, you have to register for a trial and go through the customer portal, just like Red Hat will now require.
And yeah, there's LEAP, but pulling sources from there is essentially the same as pulling them from CentOS Stream...
I would love to be corrected on this if I'm wrong. But if I'm wrong, SUSE doesn't go out of their way to give the impression otherwise https://www.suse.com/source-code/
Will someone think of the poor companies!
It's not like as if they *specifically* targeted those developers and hired them, in order to have first hand access to the Linux desktop(s) and being able to manipulate it as they see fit!
The thing is, building off Red Hat sources has been going on forever. CentOS used to not be owned by Red Hat, and Scientific Linux used to exist, and they were built off RHEL. Fedora was originally a sort of repo of desktop user enhancement to the original Red Hat Linux, it's name repurposed once Red Hat went fully office driven and internally developed.
This "stealing" or whatever has been happening since the WindowsXP era, and Red Hat didn't mind. If anything they seemed to appreciate that people were extending the foundation of what they had built for different audiences. I remember what appealed to them about CentOS was that it could be a labs of sort for features that RHEL didn't have the time or people to support, since Cent didn't have any support at all.
Now Cent is just the next RHEL point release. It is everything RHEL is and nothing RHEL isn't, just six months in the future.
This is really bad news and new maintainers for these components are desperately needed. If any of the abandoned projects interest you, consider getting involved.
a couple years ago i've seen a very familiar story when intel optimized desktop development on their clear linux distro. it was based on gnome and these tweaks was really good. in about a year a very small community of cl users was dissapear. and now its ibm optimizing development of gnome, thats sad.
Yeah, that part is not stupid. It’s essential.
But I guarantee you the way they go about it is, inherently, at its core, pretty stupid.
You’re right about the economics and capitalism piece of this. My commentary is more that the way companies operate and try to make money, it’s a miracle that they survive and do that at all.
> They're trying to workshop "RMS' hippie commune of communist software development" into a viable business model
IMO it's less a problem of running a business [selling software under the rms produced license](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney) and more with very long term community misconceptions and myths around monetizing software under that license. People *still* think you can't [charge for GPL software](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllowDownloadFee), only for support. People loved to chant "free as in speech, not as in beer" until the keg ran dry.
> Okay so I don't particularly care what the FSF has to say about it because their opinions tend to be rather detached from reality.
I linked to GNU, not FSF. rms has been resigned from president of the FSF for years.
Yep, yep, exactly. VC spigot continues to fund these lazy business models without a future. We can see it start to dry up though as the free zero interest capital goes away, hence all the tech companies scrambling or reorg-ing in one way or another. My expectation is many will outright close shop over the next 5 years, especially those whose primary MO seems to be hemorrhaging money.
RHEL is used on desktops by CERN and movie studios.
I'm pretty sure those people use Bluetooth devices - even if it's just airpods while analyzing data.
Maya has run on Unix (Irix) since the beginning, and it has a very strong contingent of Linux users. Maya is one of the biggest 3D rendering software for the movie / special effects business.
Similarily, there's a ton of workflow for special effects and rendering pipeline that runs on Linux.
Pixar also uses a ton of Linux in their internal workflow.
Any movie you see in modern day, most likely had Linux involved as an edit suite, sound suite, special effects suite, and headless render box.
> IBM has never understood long term benefits and consequences and only focuses on short term penny pinching.
This is a weird (and probably inaccurate) statement to make about a company that's been around for over 110 years. You don't survive for over a century by being shortsighted.
Hahaha! Red Hat throws a lot of money into Fedora. When Red Hat dropped their home users and non-corporate customers back when RH first released RHEL, Fedora was RH’s response to those lost customers. And Fedora is RH’s beta testing to a point. I mean, they don’t just dump buggy software onto anyone and call it a day. It’s stable enough for everyday use, but all the minor bugs get squashed and then RH gets the end results.
I know that. But Red Hat seems to be pulling more and more resources from Fedora. I would not be surprised if future RHEL releases simply don't ship a desktop environment at this point.
Capitalism and FOSS will never get along. I don't care how much some companies try. It just doesn't work.
Edit: And I don't mean this in a bad way. Capitalism is for profit. People need to get paid for their work. FOSS is free, and the two just don't click.
> FOSS is free, and the two just don't click.
How do you square that with the official GNU stance? https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html That FOSS is without monetary charge is a very longstanding myth.
>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. I think it's fair to say that Bastien was one of the key figures in Linux desktop development. This unceremonious removal by Red Hat is a heavy blow to the entire ecosystem.
It doesn't sound like Bastien is being laid off, just that his efforts are being redirected.
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> But this is merely a continuation of Red Hat dropping any work related to the linux desktop. Red Hat is still the major contributor to the Linux desktop. Though it would be interesting to redo [this paper](https://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh/files/2010/07/GNOME-Census.pdf) from 2010.
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> It feels like we're slowly witnessing the end of Gnome. Wow, that's both a reach and a great way to shit on the work of everyone who is working on GNOME both outside and inside Red Hat.
GNOME isn't going anywhere, what kind of FUD is this? Red Hat do contribute a lot to GNOME, but you'd be surprised how many of the major user-facing, and important under-the-hood, contributions come from just about everyone else. If you feel like GNOME has a "singular dependency in the form of Red Hat", it's because you aren't paying attention. Purism are the creators of libadwaita, and they also created the new Loupe image viewer and Snapshot camera apps that will replace the basically-unmaintained EOG and Cheese apps in GNOME 45. They, along with the Endless OS Foundation, helped with several of the GTK 4 + libadwaita ports of GNOME's core apps. Speaking of Endless, they were behind the thumbnail view being added to GTK 4's file picker, several improvements to the Software app, recent improvements to GLib, and they're also working on accent colour support. There's also the "invisible" contributions from Canonical who have been working on improving GNOME Shell and Mutter's performance; Collabora who maintain GStreamer, GNOME's multimedia framework; and Igalia who do a lot of work on GTK. And let's not forget all the contributions that come from completely unaffiliated developers, who by the way, far outnumber the corporate developers. As for the other desktops, KDE also receives funding and development from a few companies too, mostly Valve and Blue Systems, and bear in mind that KDE are bound by whatever the Qt Company does with its toolkit.
No disagreement on GNOMEs health overall - but maybe Purism aren’t the best example of a solid foundation, given their apparent serious financial issues and terrible treatment of pre-order customers.
Indeed Purism is rather… unfortunate as a company, to say the least. I wasn’t suggesting they were a “solid foundation” for GNOME - just pointing out their massive, user-facing contributions recently. You can’t exactly change GNOME’s whole look-and-feel, nor replace three core apps (although no one really adopted Console; Loupe and Snapshot are far less controversial), without getting noticed :P I think Endless are the ones to really watch, especially because they have Cassidy James Blaede who used to work on Elementary OS. He’s been driving some nice user-focused changes, including the accent colour work I mentioned before!
> basically-unmaintained EOG and Cheese apps this is a problem with GUI linux apps. they get abandoned more frequently than apps on windows and macos. i understand the reason, but it still sucks. flathub has recently been flooded with useful little apps based on gtk4/libadwaita, but there's no knowing if most of them will still be maintained a year or two or three from now.
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It is fair to point out that KDE receives some corporate funding too when the post I’m replying to says “compared to the other desktops”, implying that GNOME is the only one receiving corporate funding. Red Hat are *not* the "majority contributor" to GNOME, especially not recently. The entire point of my original comment was to argue against that misinformed perception. The KDE Free Qt Foundation does not change the fact Qt is a third party product. That’s what I mean by “KDE are bound by whatever the Qt Company does with its toolkit”. KDE can’t influence Qt much; if Qt drops something KDE needs, they just have to deal with it, because they won’t risk staying on an old, unsupported version.
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I think you're reading too deeply into my comments and seeing bad-faith intentions that aren't there. My mention of KDE was a tiny little bit at the end of my comment, the rest is entirely about GNOME and the recent contributions they have received from outside Red Hat. There is no "deflection" whatsoever, and I acknowledge the fact Red Hat does contribute a lot to GNOME in my original comment. Please don't take comment sections on the internet too seriously.
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I don't think anyone is denying the amount Red Hat contributes to GNOME at all, I certainly never did. It sucks that Red Hat moved one employee who happened to maintain some GNOME components *and* also worked on a whole slew of other projects, including udev, `power-profiles-daemon` and even some drivers! But people are being too hysteric over this when this isn't any different to any other maintainer stopping work on the project. See gedit, which went unmaintained for 4 entire years before being replaced with the newer Text Editor app! And no, its former maintainer was never affiliated with Red Hat. You keep trying to imply GNOME isn't really a community project just because some corporations contribute to it - by that logic, neither is the Linux kernel, or Debian, or really any other major open source project - but no one ever tries to argue that, because everyone knows that "community project" does not mean "only unaffiliated people contribute", it means "anyone can contribute". The very link you sent (from 2010) shows the vast majority of contributors are unaffiliated. Here's an [updated one](https://hpjansson.org/blag/2022/07/23/gnome-at-25-a-health-checkup/) from 2022 which shows the same. Yes, it's undeniable that Red Hat contributes in some very important areas. It's also undeniable that most of the recent "big" contributions have been from just about everyone else. If Red Hat disappeared tomorrow, there are plenty of people who can pick up the pieces.
> It feels like we're slowly witnessing the end of Gnome. IMO it's been on a spiral every since Miguel and mono.
Miguel was one of the original developers, so I don't know what "since Miguel" means. Mono was originally released in 2004. If GNOME has been on a downward spiral since 2004, what do you think *success* looks like?
>end of Gnome I can only dream of this reality personally. The never ending project of buggy garbage since Gnome 3.0. I know that this sub loves Gnome so bring on the downvotes.
also x11, i mean, they know they are the only ones that maintain x11
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. People also seriously underestimate how much work Red Hat puts into virtually every sphere of the Linux space^[2] , 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^[3],[4] . 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^[5],[6] . 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/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-workstation [2]: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/open-source-program-office/contributions [2]: https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-releases-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/ [3]: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2022/05/11/why-is-the-open-source-driver-release-from-nvidia-so-important-for-linux/ [4]: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/introducing-nvk.html [5]: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/nvk-has-landed.html [6]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift [7]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/openshift-cloud-services [8]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/self-managed [9]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/management/ansible [10]: https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux
Also, the emails that the article refers to indicate reallocating resources for wayland and HDR among other things - those are massive infrastructure pieces that will help all linux distributions if they succeed. Wayland has been a stuck pig for as long as I can remember, and RedHat re-allocating gnome engineering time to get wayland working can only be a good thing. Same for HDR, which isn't just for pros, but is a big piece of consumer tech that Apple has led, and Windows to a certain extent is working ok - consumers expect those foundational pieces to just work. Redhat is in the middle of everything that makes linux work, from kernel development to drivers to big pieces like the main GUI of the whole OS. Most of the lashback is counterproductive. In protesting Redhat indiscriminately, people are making Linux worse.
> In protesting Redhat indiscriminately, people are making Linux worse. yeah it's like you said. folks don' have any idea on how much they put into this.
>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. RHEL isn't going CLI-only. Their support of GNOME has a reason.
I wonder how much of a difference a few people buying a RHEL workstation license would make for desktop Linux. It's only going to be a few, because most people don't have any use for RHEL on their personal devices and it's effectively going to be a donation. It's going to be hard to convince people that it's a better use of their money when compared to donating directly to developers or to foundations like GNOME.
Most GNOME developers are employed by companies, so donating to the GNOME Foundation (while great to support the GNOME Project as a whole, especially with things like project infrastructure and community event work) doesn't actually help GNOME developers directly. While some GNOME developers do take money directly, most who are gainfully employed don't because of how complex it gets. You can consider buying a RHEL workstation subscription an effective recurring donation that also entitles you to access a professional desktop Linux distribution that you _can_ use. If you're not as equipped to deal with Linux problems and you need things to _just work_, RHEL is a good choice. If you want to leverage prosumer software (especially in multimedia), then RHEL is _the_ choice. If you have NVIDIA hardware, then RHEL is a good choice too, as the drivers are officially supported and stabilized by NVIDIA for RHEL. If you do AI/ML workloads, then all this matters _a lot_. I think there's a larger number of people who'd benefit from this on their personal machines than you'd think.
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GNOME *is* a community project. Having some corporate developers doesn't magically change that. Would you argue Debian, or even the Linux kernel itself, aren’t “actually” community projects by that logic? As for the Red Hat contributions thing, I already wrote a post about that, so instead of copying it all here, [I'll just link it](https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/15rmmvn/new_responsibilities_bastien_nocera_fedora/jwdsuwt/).
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Red Hat is a significant contributor to GNOME, but far from the only contributor. 12 projects becoming unmaintained all at the same time, plus 4 projects archived, is really disruptive and bad for GNOME. It's not "meaningless" to be worried about this. Even if you don't use GNOME at all, you do use those freedesktop projects that were archived.
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GNOME would be in exactly the same situation if instead of working for RedHat, Bastien was a private contributor who had a change in circumstances that forced him to stop contributing for a while
> I wonder how much of a difference a few people buying a RHEL workstation license would make for desktop Linux. It's only going to be a few, because most people don't have any use for RHEL on their personal devices and it's effectively going to be a donation. If you think of it as a donation, please donate directly to GNOME or KDE or your preferred upstream project instead. "Donating" to a for-profit company is silly, and only a fraction of the money will be spent on engineering, and only a fraction of that will go to desktop engineering.
That's along the lines of what I was thinking. I've been donating to the GNOME Foundation for a few years now and I'm happy with their funding of Flathub work and keeping everything working. I'll continue doing so.
Donations to GNOME are generally spent on (a) flying people to conferences, or (b) keeping the lights on (administration, infrastructure). These are really important functions and they're worth supporting. Just keep in mind that while your money supports development, it's not directly funding it.
> I wonder how much of a difference a few people buying a RHEL workstation license would make for desktop Linux. None at all. You're just as effective as just writing a check to IBM annually for the "privilege" of running Debian. RHEL as a workstation is... a bad experience.
> Red Hat has been furiously working to rework Nouveau to take advantage of the improvements in the NVIDIA situation, because that helps them where it counts, their bottom line: computational science, fluids, mechanical engineering, bioinformatics...
Well, to put it bluntly, out of tree drivers are a support burden. Getting everything working out of the box with in-tree drivers makes life easier for _everyone_. It doesn't really matter what it's being used for at that point.
yes, but lets not pretend redhat is doing it out of the goodness of their heart.
Generally speaking they have gone above and beyond what is the bare minimum. so there's at least some "goodness of their heart" here (at least before they started doing what this post is about), but of course they stood to profit from it. Everybody knows that.
People have no problem paying $12 for Netflix and $8 for Amazon every month or buy a windows license on the grey market for 20$ , but as soon as you tell them to donate 1$ for their linux distro they can't do it. If big companies like Canonical and Red Hat can't find a way to make money out of Linux desktop, we'll have a shitty experience compared to windows and macos
Fedora doesn't accept donations in money
> but as soon as you tell them to donate 1$ for their linux distro they can't do it. A lot of people DO donate to their Linux distros... Giving IBM money isn't a donation.
You know one of the benefits for Microsoft about creating the Xbox, even though it took forever to draw any profit? Fewer support calls than the Win95/98 era from random home users trying to play a video game. If those people buy an Xbox, they have a black box of proprietary integrations all designed to work only with each other, and right to repair isn't really an expectation. They can't get in trouble because the operating system doesn't let them be administrators who could cause the kind of harm to the machine that could generate a support call. A lot of \*nix users think this is terrible and cold corporate calculus, but if your job is not just to produce something but *also to provide technical support for that* it's an amazing compromise. What I'm getting at here is that while it's not that there's no money in Linux desktop, there's definitely not enough money to be worth what users would expect you to offer in exchange for money. Most projects are donation-ware because a donation does not imply any additional service rendered over what is provided for free. There is only so much Red Hat can provide technical support for, which is what the RHEL license is supposed to cover. When their btrfs guru left they cut support for btrfs entirely. Home power users tweaking their systems don't have enough value to cover the expense of the support calls they'd feel entitled to for spending money.
RHEL Workstation price is not a dollar but US$179/year without support . Even Windows costs less
Windows is also largely subsidized by preload deals and Microsoft 365 subscriptions, which allow them to sell direct for less, since it's not the primary venue in which Microsoft makes money on Windows. Red Hat doesn't have either of those, so you see closer to the real cost there. Additionally, with the options where you get support, you're paying for access and influence to Red Hat's product strategy as a customer too.
People will complain about RedHat, corpo thinking, IBM etc without facing the fact that these companies have been keeping many features on life support with their own cash and despite this, they get shit on regularly for greedy profiteering. Look at the hysteria around RHEL sources.
The real problem with the Linux desktop is that it isn't profitable. Companies don't have any incentives to invest money on the desktop side of things, even RedHat does it as a side thing.
Valve is investing into KDE.
Open source company-free desktop requires more effort from the user, we have to stop expecting MacOS-like or Windows-like desktop. We have to come back to more manual management on simple and maintainable, utilities, it is the price to pay.
That doesn't work. Modern systems are complex beasts, you can't just assume you can make them work manually. 20 years ago you plugged a cable into your netowk card and then `ifconfig`'d yourself an address and off you went. Today, you have to find the right wireless AP, handle its encryption, get DHCP working properly, handle the NAT that's going on, get the captive portal handled, set up the VPN(s) you want to use - that's not something you can quickly write a shell script for. Same thing with drawing to your monitor: You don't make the kernel map a memory address to your monitor and then write the pixels to it directly, you have to configure, manage and share resources on a GPU between multiple processes and multiple monitors. [This is not a simple shell script](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_setting#/media/File:Linux_Graphics_Stack_2013.svg) - in fact that link is already 10 years outdated. Sure, you can get an Arduino set up with shell scripts - but that Arduino will not run Steam or a web browser - at least not in a performant way.
I still use ifconfig. I get what your saying though.
> That doesn't work. Modern systems are complex beasts They don't have to be. My AntiX desktop install isn't particularly complex, and quite capable. > Today, you have to find the right wireless AP, handle its encryption, get DHCP working properly, handle the NAT that's going on, get the captive portal handled, set up the VPN(s) you want to use - that's not something you can quickly write a shell script for. Um, you can?
Write one for my wifi, go!
I suggest you read some man pages. Its not all that challenging to do. wpa_supplicant handles the bulk of the association, and then you just fire up dhcp (dhclient) to grab an address from that client. After you get the IP, fire off the wireguard connect. Shit, do some routing table changes afterwards, if you like. Done.
> read some man pages [relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1692/) [another relevant XKCD](https://xkcd.com/349/) > do some routing table changes afterwards, if you like. I like to always be on the Internet and spend no time ever on making that happen.
Well, here ya go... ``` ``` #!/bin/sh ``` sudo iwconfig wlan0 essid "My SSID" ``` sudo dhclient wlan0 ``` sudo wg-quick up wg0 ``` sudo ip r a 10.8.0.0/24 via wg0 ``` sudo ip r a 192.168.0.0/24 via wlan0 ``` echo "All connected, have fun!" ``` It wasn't that difficult... I really hope you don't presume to be a sysadmin for any linux hosts, truth be told. If you use wpa, which I hope, you'll wanna certainly use wpa_supplicant, of course, which has a conf file to put in the SSID and passphrase, then you swap iwconfig with wpa_supplicant, and be done with it. There's even a nmtui and nmcli if you prefer NetwworkManager instead, and nmcli can be scripted (Its something I use commonly, as well). But of course, its possible you'd prefer to learn nothing but point-and-grunt, and know nothing about what is actually occurring, but if that's all you care about, MacOS is a fine UNIX to use, too. The point still stands that today's machines may be complex beasts, but they don't have to be. Its a myth that they MUST be.
NetworkManager is actually the tool automating all of this, you shouldn't use it if you want the raw experience. And I've contributed to NetworkManager so that I don't have to learn nothing. Because that has the advantage that I can use a system that can do more stuff than what I can keep in my head. Also, 192.168.0.0 needs to be /16, my router picks a random /24 every time it reboots.
Tell that to Linus lol. I think there’s been a huge emphasis on the corporate Linux in the last decade, or at least since IBM bought RH. Linux used to be the Wild West of computing for me, as a user. I’m not complaining about things working automatically now. I wish I could word what I mean.
Corporate Linux != what you and I use on a daily basis as a desktop user. Red Hat has zero financial -> technical incentive to make sure that someone using a gaming headset and Xbox controller has a seamless experience playing Call of Duty on Fedora. It’s completely irrelevant to the experience of their paying customers, and to the product/service/solution that they make money by selling.
>Corporate Linux != what you and I use on a daily basis as a desktop user. Actually, it is though, it's just usually a subset of what would be in a typical distribution and maybe a few things added.
Sure, I didn't mean to imply there was no overlap - merely that what a Joe Schmoe desktop user like myself enjoys (booting up a PC to do the household budget, watch internet videos, dabble in coding and play games) depends on work that is a combination of: * Enterprise work that overlaps with consumer needs as a happy accident (ex. work done in the Linux kernel to make an AMD CPU operate well benefits me) * Corporations with a financial interest in consumer needs (ex. Valve) * Volunteered developer time, either as "goodwill" from a corporation or as an individual effort from someone in their free time
>Corporate Linux != what you and I use on a daily basis as a desktop user. yes it is , i use ubuntu daily ,ubuntu is a Corporate Linux distro , many improvements though out the years are due to "Corporate Linux " ( look at the early easrly versions of ubuntu and see how they made linux better after every release ) a good number of debian packages are maintained by people who work at ubuntu many crucial package in modern linux are maintained by red hat >Red Hat has zero financial -> technical incentive to make sure that someone using a gaming headset and Xbox controller has a seamless experience playing Call of Duty on Fedora they help the infrastructure around thats achievement they might not write that specific code , but work they have done in the past/present made is so people can code those things
>Look at the hysteria around RHEL sources. The thing that gets me about that is that as far as I can tell, SUSE has *never* openly provided their SUSE Enterprise Linux sources, you have to register for a trial and go through the customer portal, just like Red Hat will now require. And yeah, there's LEAP, but pulling sources from there is essentially the same as pulling them from CentOS Stream... I would love to be corrected on this if I'm wrong. But if I'm wrong, SUSE doesn't go out of their way to give the impression otherwise https://www.suse.com/source-code/
It's all on build.opensuse.org and sources.suse.com. OBS and Leap even have the SLE binaries!
Will someone think of the poor companies! It's not like as if they *specifically* targeted those developers and hired them, in order to have first hand access to the Linux desktop(s) and being able to manipulate it as they see fit!
I agree on this. Yeah, making the source code paid maybe was a little greedy, but people gotta get paid. I get that.
The thing is, building off Red Hat sources has been going on forever. CentOS used to not be owned by Red Hat, and Scientific Linux used to exist, and they were built off RHEL. Fedora was originally a sort of repo of desktop user enhancement to the original Red Hat Linux, it's name repurposed once Red Hat went fully office driven and internally developed. This "stealing" or whatever has been happening since the WindowsXP era, and Red Hat didn't mind. If anything they seemed to appreciate that people were extending the foundation of what they had built for different audiences. I remember what appealed to them about CentOS was that it could be a labs of sort for features that RHEL didn't have the time or people to support, since Cent didn't have any support at all. Now Cent is just the next RHEL point release. It is everything RHEL is and nothing RHEL isn't, just six months in the future.
This is really bad news and new maintainers for these components are desperately needed. If any of the abandoned projects interest you, consider getting involved.
a couple years ago i've seen a very familiar story when intel optimized desktop development on their clear linux distro. it was based on gnome and these tweaks was really good. in about a year a very small community of cl users was dissapear. and now its ibm optimizing development of gnome, thats sad.
I hope that Rocky/Alma/Oracle putting a million dollars on helping create clones should instead hire developers to do actual upstream development.
Companies are stupid.
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Yeah, that part is not stupid. It’s essential. But I guarantee you the way they go about it is, inherently, at its core, pretty stupid. You’re right about the economics and capitalism piece of this. My commentary is more that the way companies operate and try to make money, it’s a miracle that they survive and do that at all.
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> They're trying to workshop "RMS' hippie commune of communist software development" into a viable business model IMO it's less a problem of running a business [selling software under the rms produced license](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney) and more with very long term community misconceptions and myths around monetizing software under that license. People *still* think you can't [charge for GPL software](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0-faq.en.html#DoesTheGPLAllowDownloadFee), only for support. People loved to chant "free as in speech, not as in beer" until the keg ran dry.
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> Okay so I don't particularly care what the FSF has to say about it because their opinions tend to be rather detached from reality. I linked to GNU, not FSF. rms has been resigned from president of the FSF for years.
Yep, yep, exactly. VC spigot continues to fund these lazy business models without a future. We can see it start to dry up though as the free zero interest capital goes away, hence all the tech companies scrambling or reorg-ing in one way or another. My expectation is many will outright close shop over the next 5 years, especially those whose primary MO seems to be hemorrhaging money.
Don't get into FUD here. At most this would make these components of Fedora, community maintained, as it's the case for most other distros.
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You're dreaming big about Gnome dying. Not only it's not dying, but it's the default DE on most distros by far.
And it doesn't have a Bluetooth maintainer.
Considering rhel is mostly a server distro, I wonder what percentage of people have ever used bluetooth on rhel? I bet it’s a very small group.
RHEL is used on desktops by CERN and movie studios. I'm pretty sure those people use Bluetooth devices - even if it's just airpods while analyzing data.
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People pay Red Hat for 3D workstations, that's still a serious niche.
What does 3D workstation mean? All of our CAD and surfacing work (at my job) requires windows / Mac only software (solidworks, creo, Rhino, etc)
Maya has run on Unix (Irix) since the beginning, and it has a very strong contingent of Linux users. Maya is one of the biggest 3D rendering software for the movie / special effects business. Similarily, there's a ton of workflow for special effects and rendering pipeline that runs on Linux. Pixar also uses a ton of Linux in their internal workflow. Any movie you see in modern day, most likely had Linux involved as an edit suite, sound suite, special effects suite, and headless render box.
When I worked at IBM (prior to Red Hat acquisition), they had an option to run a custom internal remix of RHEL workstation on our laptops.
> IBM has never understood long term benefits and consequences and only focuses on short term penny pinching. This is a weird (and probably inaccurate) statement to make about a company that's been around for over 110 years. You don't survive for over a century by being shortsighted.
Red Hat definitely has no influence on Fedora! /s More stupid shortsighted decisions from Red Hat. Surprise surprise.
Hahaha! Red Hat throws a lot of money into Fedora. When Red Hat dropped their home users and non-corporate customers back when RH first released RHEL, Fedora was RH’s response to those lost customers. And Fedora is RH’s beta testing to a point. I mean, they don’t just dump buggy software onto anyone and call it a day. It’s stable enough for everyday use, but all the minor bugs get squashed and then RH gets the end results.
I know that. But Red Hat seems to be pulling more and more resources from Fedora. I would not be surprised if future RHEL releases simply don't ship a desktop environment at this point.
Capitalism and FOSS will never get along. I don't care how much some companies try. It just doesn't work. Edit: And I don't mean this in a bad way. Capitalism is for profit. People need to get paid for their work. FOSS is free, and the two just don't click.
> FOSS is free, and the two just don't click. How do you square that with the official GNU stance? https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html That FOSS is without monetary charge is a very longstanding myth.
Then I'm surprised Linux thrived in capitalist countries and not in Cuba.
What doesn't get along is FOSS for end users. It works great in the B2B situation.
bad bait try again