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When IBM bought Red Hat this was the kind of thing I worried might happen: That Red Hat might stop supporting the Linux Desktop. I have no idea how their announcement makes any sense. They want to improve workstation experience by... not offering an office application any more? Like, what do you even mean by workstation?
There are enough places to read that announcement and related reactions.
Flatpak will be the recommended way to get / install LibreOffice on RHEL and Fedora. In https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fe... it states: "the engineers doing that work will contribute some fixes upstream to ensure LibreOffice works better as a Flatpak, which we expect to be the way that most people consume LibreOffice in the long term." Install instructions are already written: https://acces…
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This is probably how things will be moving. It doesn't make sense for every single distro to maintain customized versions of user level applications now that we have one package that works everywhere.
You're talking about AppImages right? I've tried several times to understand how Flatpak works and how to integrate a CMake build with Flatpak.. and I'm honestly befuddled. Granted a quick Google search does show the situation has improved a bit in the past year. I imagine if you're trying to package a Zig or Clojure application it's going to be a lot of figuring things out on your own
The TL;DR is that AppImage amounts to a self-extracting archive, and you need an application where all the binaries and libraries have a relative rpath. So rather than loading /usr/lib/libz.so, it uses $BINARY/../lib/libz.so.
That part's not too bad, but what can cause a lot of trouble is that there's a fair amount of stuff that uses dlopen at runtime. So you might find that you think you packaged everything, but then the app loads some module from the host system, the API isn't compatible and it explodes in some confusing fashion.
So yeah, Linux app distribution is a pain no matter what it seems.
This LWN article makes the matter supremely confusing. The linked mailing list post is way better and clearer and it would be good to get this submission changed to it: https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/20230601183054.12057.45907@m... Key excerpts: > … the LibreOffice RPMS have recently been orphaned … > … will contribute some fixes upstream to ensure LibreOffice works better as a Flatpak, which we expect to be the way…
This is probably how things will be moving. It doesn't make sense for every single distro to maintain customized versions of user level applications now that we have one package that works everywhere.
It does make sense for at least one distro to be offering this, as there are numerous reasons to favor the traditional linux distro way of doing things. Flatpak is better for a lot of use cases, but it's missing a lot by not having a centralized system of checks and balances provided by a Linux distro.
Fedora Flatpak brings back a lot of the advantages of traditional Linux distributions, but unfortunately Fedora/RHEL likely won't be maintaining a Fedora Flatpak version of LibreOffice.
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I think this is a small step in the right direction. IMHO, Flatpak (and similar schemes) with strict sandboxing should be the only distribution method for user applications. If I install LibreOffice, I want to be asked for permission before it tries to access my microphone or location or other sensitive resources. If you want to give that application access to everything your user has access to, that’s fine, but it s…
> If I install LibreOffice, I want to be asked for permission before it tries to access my microphone or location or other sensitive resources. This isn't some untrusted unauditable binary blob from a possibly shady manufacturer. Everything it will or will not do is right there for everyone to see in the published source code from which it is compiled and packaged. Furthermore nothing is fundamentally stopping anyone…
Sandboxes should be the must in this century and mobile OSs are much more ahead here.
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I wouldn't be surprised if the reason has more to do with the number of users. I haven't used LO in some time, but back when I only used linux, I never found it to be a particularly pleasant experience. It definitely looks better now that I'm looking at it, but I switched to using google docs back at university. If RH find it to be a lot of work that is supporting very few users, then it doesn't have to say anything…
>> If RH find it to be a lot of work that is supporting very few users, then it doesn't have to say anything about their solvency. Just a spreadsheet cost calculation. A Linux distribution is more than the sum of its parts. Having out-of-the-box ability to read MS office docs is a huge deal. Nobody wants to fuck around installing something extra to read a defacto standard document format.
When IBM bought Red Hat this was the kind of thing I worried might happen: That Red Hat might stop supporting the Linux Desktop. I have no idea how their announcement makes any sense. They want to improve workstation experience by... not offering an office application any more? Like, what do you even mean by workstation?
Red-Hat has officially given up on the Linux Desktop about 15 years ago. There are enough places to read that announcement and related reactions.
Desktop is simultaneously not a large priority for Red Hat, and even less of a priority for every corporate player that isn't Red Hat.
RH is still doing a lot of work on things like Pipewire, Wayland, Flatpak, Gtk, Gnome, AMD graphics drivers (David Arlie wrote RADV), making the Nvidia graphics drivers situation suck less, Mesa, etc. They were doing nearly all of the Xorg maintenance too and nobody really picked it up after they stopped.
The only company with a comparable level of investment in desktop Linux is maybe Collabora or (to a lesser degree and with a much more restricted focus) Valve
> We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building out what’s needed for color-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by Workstation users.
This is a long-standing and important effort [1] to make Wayland more plausible for image/video-editing.
[0]: https://lwn.net/ml/fedora-devel/20230601183054.12057.45907@m... [1]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/m...
It's possible with some love. Blender did it, it is quickly becoming an accepted tool in 3D graphics circles, if not the standard.
I think most commenters on lwn are misunderstanding this gravely. RHEL not supporting LibreOffice doesn't mean you can still install it, right? It just means RH won't offer support for it? Also does not mean you must use Flatpak to use it, does it? Am I missing something? If it does make sense business-wise, it's their call. I'm pretty sure they know their userbase and did the math. I also prefer efforts put on Wayla…
> If it does not make sense business-wise, it's their call. I'm pretty sure they know their userbase and did the math. This assumes companies don't make mistakes. They do. A lot. And if users aren't allowed to voice concern then they will make many more mistakes.
Generally, RHEL does exactly what RHEL customers want. They are extremely loyal to their user base.
The issues come when these changes set a trend and ripple to the rest of the community, and affect people who would never become a RH customer in the first place (e.g. anti-systemd fanatics)