On Tue, 9 Jan 2024 at 14:16, Leon Fauster via CentOS-devel centos-devel@centos.org wrote:
Am 09.01.24 um 13:49 schrieb Neal Gompa:
On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 7:17 AM Simon Matter simon.matter@invoca.ch wrote:
Am 09.01.24 um 00:52 schrieb John Cooper via CentOS-devel:
Additionally I don’t know how many of you can get or read the PC Pro publication. However in one of their issues last year they were providing options for what people can do when Windows 10 comes to the end of its support lifecycle.
One of the options was to switch to Linux they only mentioned Ubuntu Linux and Linux Mint. Though that doesn’t preclude people switching to RHEL on their ex-Windows 10 computers when that point is reached. Though there’s the options of RHEL 8 and RHEL 9 it would be advantageous in several respects including environmental ones, to take it into account for RHEL 10. It may even be a basis for a conversion campaign involving compatible systems that were once Windows 10, to promote conversion from Windows 10 to RHEL 10.
Just think of the irony of going from Windows 10 to RHEL 10 as your new operating system on the computer!
That would be funny but - it seems that RH's agenda does not have a focus on workstation scenarios anymore. Main productivity applications are already marked as deprecated. So, they will not be included in a future major release:
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/9/htm...
I'm working for a company in the retail business and we're running exclusively on (RH)EL/clones for the lasts decades. Also running remote desktops using our own solution based on NX libs. It was a pain to realize that RHEL is drifting away more and more from providing what is required in our environment. It became clearer and clearer that our future road will go away from RHEL despite maintaining quite a large inhouse repo for all kind of our own packages of software used, from development to normal office to server applications.
None of these packages are a surprise though: Qt 5 is being replaced with Qt 6[1], Motif is dead, Xorg is being replaced with Xwayland[2], LibreOffice transitioned to the community in Fedora in the summer[3], GTK2 is EOL upstream, gedit is replaced with gnome-text-editor[4][5], etc.
If people care about using RHEL as a workstation as customers, they should be making that known through their contacts with Red Hat Sales and Red Hat Support. What I've gathered so far is that this is happening for some of them because they believe customers aren't really using them and so the effort is wasted. Some of them are for other reasons (Motif/GTK2 being dead, Wayland being the future, etc.), but dedicated RHEL workstation priority use-cases are counted through purchases of RHEL subscriptions for that purpose. If you're not doing that, then it's no surprise they think nobody is using them.
I just gave a hint and also mainly about "productivity applications" (not widget toolkits). For instance, Libreoffice is gone in the future (EL10). Evolution (nativ e-mail client) is deprecated already. rhythmbox not in EL9 anymore. Even my tech docs written in LaTeX can't be build anymore (missing TeX parts). I could investigate more scenarios where RHEL as workstation would not fulfill the requirements (its off-topic already). Just a week ago, I build gnome-network-displays for EL9 locally to stream my display to a screen for productivity proposes.
Someone could argue that this should be all in containers (its the future right? - My prediction is, that some day RHEL will be an Immutable OS).
FWIW, containers are a great solution if you can't find a package for your given distro (it's the first alternative I look to). Most UI applications work great these days in a container via toolbox/distrobox.
On the other side and for the sake of fairness; RH is pushing Wayland (as you already said) and working on HDR/GPU support [1] and thats great!
I don't think that RH thinks that nobody is using RHEL on desktop computers. Its just a matter of resources that pushes such decisions. So, you a right, if just the half of the server variant subscriptions would exist for the workstation variant ...
[1] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/rhel-10-plans-wayland-and-xorg-server
-- Leon
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