[CentOS-devel] Feedback on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 plans

Tue Jan 9 14:16:33 UTC 2024
Leon Fauster <leonfauster at googlemail.com>

Am 09.01.24 um 13:49 schrieb Neal Gompa:
> On Tue, Jan 9, 2024 at 7:17 AM Simon Matter <simon.matter at 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/html/9.3_release_notes/deprecated-functionality#deprecated-packages
>>
>> 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).

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