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

Wed Jan 10 21:50:36 UTC 2024
Eric Curtin <ecurtin at redhat.com>

On Tue, 9 Jan 2024 at 14:16, Leon Fauster via CentOS-devel
<centos-devel at 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 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).

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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