Red Hat is Dropping Its Support for LibreOffice (lwn.net) 141
The Red Hat Package Managers for LibreOffice "have recently been orphaned," according to a post by Red Hat manager Matthias Clasen on the "LibreOffice packages" mailing list, "and I thought it would be good to explain the reasons behind this."
The Red Hat Display Systems team (the team behind most of Red Hat's desktop efforts) has maintained the LibreOffice packages in Fedora for years as part of our work to support LibreOffice for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 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 work that will improve the workstation experience for Fedora as well as RHEL users, and which, we hope, will be positively received by the entire Linux community.
The tradeoff is that we are pivoting away from work we had been doing on desktop applications and will cease shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL starting in a future RHEL version. This also limits our ability to maintain it in future versions of Fedora.
We will continue to maintain LibreOffice in currently supported versions of RHEL (RHEL 7, 8 and 9) with needed CVEs and similar for the lifetime of those releases (as published on the Red Hat website). As part of that, 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.
Any community member is of course free to take over maintenance, both for the RPMs [Red Hat Package Managers] in Fedora and the Fedora LibreOffice Flatpak, but be aware that this is a sizable block of packages and dependencies and a significant amount of work to keep up with.
Commenters on LWN.net are now debating its impact.
One pointed out that "You will still find it in GNOME Software, which will install a Flatpak from FlatHub rather than an RPM from the distro."
The tradeoff is that we are pivoting away from work we had been doing on desktop applications and will cease shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL starting in a future RHEL version. This also limits our ability to maintain it in future versions of Fedora.
We will continue to maintain LibreOffice in currently supported versions of RHEL (RHEL 7, 8 and 9) with needed CVEs and similar for the lifetime of those releases (as published on the Red Hat website). As part of that, 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.
Any community member is of course free to take over maintenance, both for the RPMs [Red Hat Package Managers] in Fedora and the Fedora LibreOffice Flatpak, but be aware that this is a sizable block of packages and dependencies and a significant amount of work to keep up with.
Commenters on LWN.net are now debating its impact.
One pointed out that "You will still find it in GNOME Software, which will install a Flatpak from FlatHub rather than an RPM from the distro."
Is there a useful alternative? (Score:3)
Re:Is there a useful alternative? (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on what you mean by "useful alternative." Currently very few paying RHEL customers use LibreOffice. That is the fact. This issue has been hashed to death in the LWN thread, and I expect we'll see the same arguments here. Most of RH's customers who are using RHEL *on the desktop* use either Google Docs or Office 365 in the browser.
Certainly the future of office-style apps---open source or not---is in the browser. The person who maintained the RHEL LibreOffice packages has left Red Hat and now works for Collabora, is focused on using LibreOffice in collaborative, on-line way in the browser.
Meanwhile what goes into Fedora depends on the community. I'm sure LibreOffice will be available in Fedora for some time to come. And of course LO.org offers package downloads for Fedora (and also debian-based distros) directly, as well as flatpak.
I still use LibreOffice writer a fair amount for personal purposes, but my use of LibreOffice Calc has completely ceased in favor of Google Sheets, since I need to use my spreadsheet tools on my phone and share them with my associates.
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Most of RH's customers who are using RHEL *on the desktop* use either Google Docs or Office 365 in the browser.
Certainly the future of office-style apps---open source or not---is in the browser. The person who maintained the RHEL LibreOffice packages has left Red Hat and now works for Collabora, is focused on using LibreOffice in collaborative, on-line way in the browser.
I've never tried Collabora, but I definitely agree that the office suite has moved to the cloud.
One of the weird things about modern computing is it's still weirdly hard to share files, both to 3rd parties but even among your own devices. This is a huge issue for office apps where communication is kinda the point.
With a browser-based office app I don't need to worry about multiple versions floating around, wanting to work on it but not having it on the right device, wondering the exact version I attached in
Re:Is there a useful alternative? (Score:4, Insightful)
I've never tried Collabora, but I definitely agree that the office suite has moved to the cloud
Cool, so when internet access isn't available for some reason or another, a bunch of work comes to a standstill. Haven't the PHBs learned the fragility of depending on the cloud by now? Apparently not
Re: Is there a useful alternative? (Score:2)
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But your data is being scraped to the nth degree
A legit concern, though somewhat abstract and hard to quantify any harm from a business perspective.
and youâ(TM)d better make sure your subscription never fails to be processed.
Not that hard, and cloud service operators aren't stupid, if your sub fails to be processed they'll give you tons of warnings and if it does cease they'll reactivate very quickly.
Someone rooting you and stealing the main credentials for the service, now that is a more serious concern.
And the cloud providers donâ(TM)t just ramp up the price ever so subtly.
A little, sure. But massive price increases would kill their subscriber base, so they're not really motivated to.
And you face t
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But your data is being scraped to the nth degree
A legit concern, though somewhat abstract and hard to quantify any harm from a business perspective.
And this hearkens back to one of the biggest problems associated with large corporations - they externalize costs. From a business perspective perhaps it's "hard to quantify", which is often just code for "easy and convenient to ignore". However, for the regular schmoes dealing with and relying on those corporations, the data scraping may have consequences which range from inconvenient to devastating.
But "meh, it's in de cloudz so that's somebody else's problem" - it's all good from a business perspective,
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One of the weird things about modern computing is it's still weirdly hard to share files, both to 3rd parties but even among your own devices.
^^^^THIS
After 40 fuckin' years you'd think they'd have this shit down by now, but nooooooo. I'm not saying it's easy, but they really should have had figured this out by now.
Open as DOCX, then convert to ODF, then save as PDF, then FML, then look at the utter fucking mess it's made, then give up and go home early because this shit is infuriating. Thank god I'll be retiring in 20 short years!
One too many steps (Score:3)
Open as DOCX, then convert to ODF, then save as PDF, then FML, then look at the utter fucking mess it's made, then give up and go home early because this shit is infuriating. Thank god I'll be retiring in 20 short years!
There's your problem: don't convert it to FML. The warning's right there in the name.
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Yeah, I have LO installed on my Fedora desktops, but I probably use it less than once a year. For work, it's all Google ($LASTJOB was Google and then switched to O365).
I've been using Fedora for my desktop since the project started, used Red Hat Linux before that back to about RHL 4, and Slackware and SLS before that. I remember buying a copy of WordPerfect for Linux (I liked WP5.1 on DOS back in the day). But documents and spreadsheets just aren't things I deal with on even a semi-regular basis for a long
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Yeah, I have LO installed on my Fedora desktops, but I probably use it less than once a year. For work, it's all Google ($LASTJOB was Google and then switched to O365).
I've been using Fedora for my desktop since the project started, used Red Hat Linux before that back to about RHL 4, and Slackware and SLS before that. I remember buying a copy of WordPerfect for Linux (I liked WP5.1 on DOS back in the day). But documents and spreadsheets just aren't things I deal with on even a semi-regular basis for a long time, and when I do, it's probably sending/receiving one from somebody else (so again, probably just using Google).
And yeah, packages get orphaned in Fedora all the time, when it's something a bunch of people want, usually somebody else steps up to own them. That's how a community-developed OS works. There are a bunch of people acting like this is the end of LO in Fedora (or even the end of Fedora itself)... somebody already took ownership of at least some of the packages, think they already got some co-maintainers even. Will they be able to handle it? Only time will tell.
So you might remember StarOffice? Which became LibreOffice... StarOffice was practically unuseable. A monolithic Java application which would consume any RAM available! Imagine trying to have a word processing document AND a spreadsheet open at the same time!
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Well technically, StarOffice begat OpenOffice.org, which then begat LibreOffice. :)
But yeah, I think I never successfully ran StarOffice. Most big Java things I've had to deal with tend to think Java is their OS and run everything in one process with a million threads (and when just one thread craps out, you have to restart the entire process). And none of those things were cross-platform, they just ran on Linux, so no excuse for not using a better design.
Re:Is there a useful alternative? (Score:4, Informative)
Most of Star Office was C/C++. Only some long-gone plugins used Java. Sun tried to use Star Office as a showcase Java app for odd reasons.
Re:Is there a useful alternative? (Score:4, Interesting)
You are misremembering. StarOffice was C++ and it was usable. I used to use StarOffice 4.2 on OS/2 back in the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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StarOffice was written in Java? When did that happen? Obviously it wasn't that way originally - StarWriter predates the birth of Java by 10 years, and had already added Calc, Base, Draw, Image and Chart before Java's first release.
Of course, later versions did *use* Java, but my understanding was that was simply the application scripting language - much like Visual Basic for Applications with Microsoft Office. Though I do feel like later versions of Base might have required it.
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I used Star Office 5 back on Red Hat 5.2. It worked quite well and was very usable at this point. Star Office was never written in Java. It was C++. It embedded Java to do filtering for document formats, so it did pull in a lot of resources. But Java was, if I recall, optional.
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Re:Is there a useful alternative? (Score:4, Informative)
StarOffice 5.x had some quirks, but most could be configured away, and it wasn't more memory hungry (or even just slower) than the successor OpenOffice, either, which used much of the same code. It also wasn't a Java application any more than OpenOffice/LibreOffice is*, and it wasn't any more 'monolithic', either. The difference was purely visual, it just used a common multiple document interface for all of its document types, not senselessly duplicating menus and function buttons and other controls for each document, thereby cluttering the screen more than necessary. Also, StarOffice 5.x included a calendar and a full-featured e-mail and usenet client. When everyone was exepcting that they might make all of that, including mail and calendar, just a little bit more Microsoft compatible in one of the next versions, so that it could actually become a drop-in replacement for Office and Outlook, the company was sold to Sun where it was cut down to the sorry remains that became OpenOffice 6. To do justice to Sun, if I remember correctly, some parts of StarOffice 5.x would have been more difficult to keep than others because they were licensed from others by StarDivision, the original company, and couldn't be made open source.
* Just before StarDivision disappeared and StarOffice was replaced by OpenOffice, there actually was a pure Java *version* of StarOffice, and it was a brilliant piece of Software, with two parts which optionally could be installed on two different machines and distribute load between both (client/server). It never was publicly available, but I've seen it in use once back then, and it looked great and seemed to work great, too. It was actually in commercial use at a big German internet services provider/web hoster as an early predecessor of what now is the LibreOffice-based 'Collabora'.
Re:Is there a useful alternative? (Score:5, Interesting)
Google docs is less cabable than MS Word 5 from 30 years ago. You can't even get proper image captions or custom styles without installing a buggy plugin from an unknown random author. I'm amazed that companies think they can replace a full office suite with a half baked browser app. Maybe office 365 is better.
Re:Is there a useful alternative? (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm amazed that companies think they can replace a full office suite with a half baked browser app.
The graphic artists need real DTP applications. Some of the people in legal need a very precise word processor. Whoever makes the documentation will need specialized software of some kind. There are other niche cases, but most people don't have any need to be that finicky. The goal is to transmit information effectively. Everyone doesn't have to be a damned artist about it, that's frankly a waste of time unless the material is going to be seen by huge numbers of people. And if it is, then it can be cleaned up by someone who does it all the time, and is good at it. Redhat probably did a survey (or just looked at usage, do they have something like popcon by default?) and figured out they would not lose any significant sales if they dropped LO.
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Google docs is less cabable than MS Word 5 from 30 years ago.
Have you tried Zoho Docs? It's at least as capable as recent version of Microsoft Word.
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I'm amazed that companies think they can replace a full office suite with a half baked browser app.
Not just think. They do. Actual companies use Google docs daily and it works for them. Sure if you do a feature comparison the "new" kid on the block will always be lacking features that the incumbents had sometimes years earlier, but then Google's development is largely data driven. It could very well be that Google isn't catering to people who need to put in image captions, and instead delivering other features users use.
What's the purpose of an image caption by the way? I just looked up how that's done i
Re: Is there a useful alternative? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also Word image captions can be cross-referenced. So if you ever need to put "refer to Figure 4", Figure 4 is a cross reference that will automatically update if you insert another image and it becomes Figure 5. Very useful for technical docs, user manuals etc.
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It's the 80/20 rule. Most people never use more than 20% of the functionality of MS Word. For them, Google Docs is just fine.
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And for most people, if you delve beyond that 20% there's a more appropriate tool (desktop publishing, HATs, LaTeX, etc.).
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Depends on what you mean by "useful alternative." Currently very few paying RHEL customers use LibreOffice. That is the fact. This issue has been hashed to death in the LWN thread, and I expect we'll see the same arguments here. Most of RH's customers who are using RHEL *on the desktop* use either Google Docs or Office 365 in the browser.
Early in its development, Libre Office was "the free thing you used if you couldn't afford MS Office." Now that it has become clearly easier to use than even the standalone versions of MS Office, let alone the subscription monstrosity, dropping it is going to be bad for any Linux distro that pulls this stunt.
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Pretty much went full time LibreOffice for personal projects, and quite a few work ones as well, when I moved to MacOS a couple of years ago. Charting still isn't great, for straight ahead word processing and spreadsheet work, I've never had an issue.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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You're missing what's really going on here. RedHat is trying to push the entire Linux world onto FlatPak so they control the ecosystem (like what Canonical is doing with Snap). This is their way of saying, "Get the FlatPak."
RPMs are going to be only for CLI applications going forward, while all GUI applications will be FlatPak.
The future is not now (Score:4, Interesting)
I cannot speak to how Red Hat customers use productivity applications, but I don't believe that browser-based productivity applications are ready to take the place of desktop software.
Google Sheets is undeniably handy for sharing a simple table of data, but it's no equivalent to LibreOffice Calc.I could try to list all the features missing, but there's a more important point. Google has a long history of implementing useful tools or features and then suddenly dropping them.
I only use Google to share simple files that I won't be editing in the future. Even then, I usually create them in LO and export to Drive.
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A thing to remember with Google anything is that it may be sent to the Island of Misfit Toys at any time without recourse.
Re:Is there a useful alternative? (Score:4, Insightful)
>Certainly the future of office-style apps---open source or not---is in the browser
Man, fuck that. I ain't doin it.
Re:Is there a useful alternative? (Score:4, Interesting)
If the "office suite" has moved to the cloud, that's going to be a problem in multiple industries, particularly any work that not only needs to be secure, but needs to be able to "prove" it was secure.
Can a lawyer use an online tool to create, manage and record sensitive client data? Is that the best service a lawyer can provide, where the sensitive data is put in the hands of cloud providers who may or may not be doing their security properly?
If an investigator investigating a crime, or a witness in a trial has used online tools to record, save and/or prepare evidence into exhibits, how do they "prove" the integrity and confidentiality of the exhibits? Is the presenter of the exhibit going to have to attest to the confidentiality and integrity of "the cloud"? Because that's really not possible.
Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your data in your own hands!
Re:Is there a useful alternative? (Score:4, Interesting)
I haven't seen Office 365 or know if there's a way to self-host it, but I did use Google Docs at my 2020-2021 job and it's very hard to believe that it's sufficient for most businesses. None of their word processing docs or spreadsheets have contain confidential information?
Do you use it for some thing, but then have a local tools for some types of data? And Yog-Sothoth help you if they ever need to be combined or otherwise integrated.
If the boss doesn't care, I don't care. But if I were the boss, I would be firing people left and right if I found out they were sharing all out information with Google.
And I certainly wouldn't use remotely-stored solutions for anything personal. (Would you? Do I have a weird or unusual position?)
RHEL will drop desktop RPMs for Flatpaks (Score:2)
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From experience, Office 365 in the browser is not yet ready for wide spread use. Despite already being in wide spread use.
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Certainly the future of office-style apps---open source or not---is in the browser.
In the sense that this is where "everybody" is running toward this minute, yes. In the sense that it's a bright idea, not so much. It's one of those "own nothing and be happy" trends.
The person who maintained the RHEL LibreOffice packages has left Red Hat and now works for Collabora, is focused on using LibreOffice in collaborative, on-line way in the browser.
So red hat's libreoffice support hinged on one person and they're trying to rationalise their inability to hire someone else to do the same? The shareholders'll love this.
I still use LibreOffice writer a fair amount for personal purposes, but my use of LibreOffice Calc has completely ceased in favor of Google Sheets, since I need to use my spreadsheet tools on my phone and share them with my associates.
Meaning that file-level interop is still a complete failure.
Me, I use neither red hat nor libreoffice, so I don't particularly care. My interfacing with the outside world for official purposes is deliberately limited to paper only. So I write my letters in troff. But your comment does show that a lot of work remains to be done, despite two iso standards for office formats.
Its IBM. The only applicants were probably over 35 and deemed unsuitable.
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>despite two iso standards for office formats.
To be fair, only one of those has any compliant implementations, and those (mostly) work pretty well amongst each other. Microsoft Office files are NOT compliant with the published specification, and compliant files will often not open correctly.
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As the commenters on TFA are reporting, it would seem that for office stuff everyone uses browser based apps nowadays..., mostly Microsoft 365 or Google Docs, even if their base system is Linux. One open source alternative would, of course, be the LibreOffice based 'Collabora', a version of which is an option of every NextCloud installation.
Personally I still like the classic office suite, although I never really liked the StarOffice mutilation that started out as OpenOffice and later forked into LibreOffic
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As the commenters on TFA are reporting, it would seem that for office stuff everyone uses browser based apps nowadays..., mostly Microsoft 365 or Google Docs, even if their base system is Linux. One open source alternative would, of course, be the LibreOffice based 'Collabora', a version of which is an option of every NextCloud installation.
Personally I still like the classic office suite, although I never really liked the StarOffice mutilation that started out as OpenOffice and later forked into LibreOffice. I specifically have my nags with LibreOffice which at some point began to introduce usability deteriorations just to mimick Microsoft Office's misbehaviors, some without even the option to be switched off in the settings. (Which is one of the reasons why I more and more use Softmaker Office even though it isn't open source...)
Ohhh you know the horror of StarOffice? I used to watch top while running it... and see that memory eaten.. and eaten... until there was none left. Back in those days having 16G of RAM on your desktop was for the real high rollers. But I had 8 and there was no way that StarOffice was useable.
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I have no idea what you did there, but I was using the application since StarWriter 2, following up to the last complete StarOffice version which was 5.2, and on my systems it always performed really well, and these never had exceptionally much RAM or CPU power, either. It was my only office suite back then, I never used anything else, and I was really happy with it. That said, I wasn't using Linux back then, it was on OS/2, but I don't think that could have made such a difference; I'd rather think OS/2 was
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Just download it and install it yourself? Or is that something RHEL users cannot do?
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Does LO not do their own RPMs? You can download from them direct...
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I've not been thrilled with LibreOffice. It's okay, but for any FOSS package to be accepted as a viable alternative to MS Office, it's got to have decent compatibility with MS Office.
Sadly, LibreOffice just doesn't cut it in that regard. Opening Word docs in LO is always hit or miss, and its label handling is ridiculously bad- especially when going back and forth between the two.
Make a label or template in MS Office and 9 times out of 10 it'll be a fucked up mess when you open it in LO. (The same is true go
Re:Is there a useful alternative? (Score:4, Informative)
I have had zero problems opening Word Docs in LibreOffice. I have even been able to open a few that a co-worker couldn't open in Word and then write them back out in Word format so they could use it.
It shouldn't be much surprise that there are a pile of corner cases. When MS was forced to actually document the MS Word format, the specs ran over 6000 pages and still wasn't complete. It turns out that a lot of the 'format' was just binary dumps of whatever C struct was in use at the time rather than any sort of attempt at proper serialization.
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I have had zero problems opening Word Docs in LibreOffice. I have even been able to open a few that a co-worker couldn't open in Word and then write them back out in Word format so they could use it.
I think this is what they mean by "Your Mileage May Vary".
I'm glad it works for you, I wish I had that kind of experience with LibreOffice.
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I don't think the office suite is dying. Most people need a semi-component word processor. Some people may need a spreadsheet. But we hit "peak office suite" probably over a decade ago.
Evan at work, if someone took away my office suite, I don't think I would even notice.
I check the software metering logs on my work machine, and it has been 3 months since I launched MS Word. I've never opened PowerPoint or Access even once in the last 3 years. And I only open Excel to open email attachments that other people
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WPS Office is awesome, light and free. ODF not supported but Microsoft Office format support is even better than LibreOffice's.
https://linux.wps.com/ [wps.com]
I use RHEL on server. So not an issue. (Score:3)
Re:I use RHEL on server. So not an issue. (Score:5, Insightful)
Red Hat dropped the desktop long ago.
And yet they are focusing their efforts on Wayland and colour management. Are they important to your server?
Honestly I find this a boneheadded move. I've never seen a machine need colour management without an office application.
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I've never seen a machine need colour management without an office application.
Would you call something like Darktable [darktable.org] an office application? Photographers definitely need colour management.
Re:I use RHEL on server. So not an issue. (Score:4, Interesting)
No you misunderstand what I meant. I've never seen a workstation used by a photographer, graphic designer, etc, which didn't also have a word processor, spreadsheet, and email client installed on it as an absolute minimum. Colour management is important but it isn't a special purpose application that works in a vacuum on a single purpose machine. It's very strange to say you're focusing on workstations but leaving out an application that is almost universally required on workstations.
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More likely people doing intelligence gathering operations work than photographers.
Possibly a few FX houses on Blender 3 too.
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Photographers are probably using Ubuntu.
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I don't think RedHat is in much danger from accusations of making any sense at all for the last few years.
The sooner everyone gets that memo, the better off the Linux ecosystem will be.
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The problem is that the other big fish is Canonical, and they have never made sense. Perhaps we need to start looking at SUSE again.
Which "entire linux community"? (Score:5, Insightful)
I use LibreOffice but I believe Wayland is a solution looking for problem wasting god knows how many man hours reinventing the wheel (poorly so far). So from my POV they've got their priorities entirely backwards.
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It is Red Hat, what do you expect?
Re:Which "entire linux community"? (Score:5, Interesting)
As an X holdout myself, I'm not sure I agree. Wayland is supposed to fix some issues with the X design that impact things that use modern graphics features, especially games, but also even video playback. It's also much better at the eye candy desktop environment stuff, but as I use twm, I'm clearly not their target audience. I'm under the impression that it drops network transparency, so you still need the X layer on top of Wayland if you do that, and with network speeds increasing, that's becoming much more practical now than ever. (I use that every day with work over a VPN; thanks fibre!)
At this point, my main reason for sticking with X is that I don't want to change my desktop environment that I've been using essentially as-is for 30+ years. My .twmrc file dates back to 1991 with hundreds of edits since then, plus multiple patches to twm itself (all but one accepted back into the mainline code). Until there's something that I care about that requires Wayland, the change is disruption for change's sake.
I would be interested in hearing from anyone in a similar situation that has changed, though. What was the experience like, good and bad?
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My current experience is that the theoretical performance improvements and the theoretical compatibility improvements are still purely theoretical, and I assume that like systemd, they always will be. The visual look isn't actually any different from running Xorg with the same compositing window manager, except when it's malfunctioning.
Re:Which "entire linux community"? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wayland is supposed to fix some issues with the X design that impact things that use modern graphics features, especially games, but also even video playback.
It's meant to, but it also introduces a whole load of new problems. They decided that most features of X were "out of scope". End result, Wayland doesn't even support basic stuff like screen recording. Some compositors do as a kind of out of band thing. In order to not have to have every screen recorder program independently support every compositor, they need to settle on a new protocol and have them all share a library of some sort. Which is in the process of happening.
What this does is mean that all the so-called "cruft" which has been "stripped out" in Wayland has instead not been stripped out[*] but put into separate libraries which have all the same functionality. And the "bad" thing of X11's extension versioning problem (something which has been vastly overblown and is full of misleading claims) is now deferred to the system library versioning system which... well... you need to be ABI compatible to link, semantically compatible to work and literally nothing enforces that, just like X11 extensions.
So a good 90% of the problems it solves by declaring them to be "someone else's problem", but they are still a problem and get solved with the same issues elsewhere. The rest like vsync events and various flags... cool beans, but that could have been done with a new API call in X.
Basically it's a big breaking change which in practice moves a few code repository boundaries around relative to the functionality. They also missed the big changes coming through like high-DPI and HDR. Somehow the super cool bloat free clean Wayland code base did not in fact make those things quick to implement. Actually X has supported HDR for decades (10 bit colour), though since the world went through a long, stable period of 8 bit colour, a lot of people ended up specifically coding to that and some things mess up and make unwarranted assumptions.
Is there tuff wrong with X? Yep. Does wayland fix the right things? To a large extent, nope.
[*] Except for the pixel drawing code. But seriously that was "bloat" by the scale of a Sun 3/60 with 8M of RAM. Utterly irrelevant in terms of bloat for 30 years now.
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but that could have been done with a new API call in X
Were you going to write that code? The maintainers of X don't want to maintain X, they want to maintain Wayland. So unless you're stepping up to do that yourself, sit down and be quiet.
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I don't think we want them to maintain Wayland, either. They fucked up X so bad that they couldn't fix it.
Re: Which "entire linux community"? (Score:2)
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Were you going to write that code?
I was gonna. doesn't seem much point any more.
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I still have a problem with Wayland's big lie when it was being introduced.It was loudly claimed that it could support remote apps just like X. In many ways it reminded me of Homer Simpson pawning the TV. Broker: Is it cable ready? Homer: Ready as she'll ever be!
Not sure what issues you are having. (Score:2)
I'm typing this on a Manjaro Desktop (AMD 5800X with RX6750 video card) running wayland on KDE. So far no real issues. I play games on Steam Proton, it works really , really well. They are probably 10-15% faster on Wayland vs X. VSCode runs well as do Jetbrains products, Sublime text and Libre Office runs no issues. Quite happy with it,
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The problem with Wayland is that it works on some hardware/software configurations but not others. I don't have a single computer that can run Wayland. On my desktop it's because I run KDE on FreeBSD (I have found some people have hacked it into working, but it's a painful and unstable process that I get no benefit from). On my laptops it's because stupid libinput doesn't want to play nice with my trackpads. Ever try to calibrate a trackpad using libinput? Open up a terminal and do some weird voodoo and if
Re:Which "entire linux community"? (Score:4)
Any X app can steal your password manager passphrase. It's not OK.
Re:Which "entire linux community"? (Score:4, Interesting)
What I don't get is why it's cheaper to do a whole new system than just fix that. I get that X11 is crufty. Why doesn't it make sense to move the cruftiest parts out, and come up with a way to firewall apps from one another? The ability of X apps to snoop on each other is massively useful in addition to being an admittedly huge security risk. Whether Wayland continues to be a thing or not, I might add. Maybe it's actually best to have two systems.
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Why doesn't it make sense to move the cruftiest parts out, and come up with a way to firewall apps from one another?
Have you seen X's code? There's only three people on this planet who still have a grasp of most of the codebase and all three of them now work on Wayland and call X dead to them. So, by all means, anyone wanting to deep dive into a insanely old codebase that's got so many layers of band-aids, HAVE AT IT.
X isn't just an insecure protocol. X just isn't a technology that's near impossible to keep up with the advancements in modern GPUs. X is a code base is completely UNKNOWNABLE. Literally, if there is a
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There are two reasons they can't just fix it on X. One is that only a small handful of people understand very much of X.org's internals. And I doubt very many people have a good understanding of the X protocol either. But it's clear that some of X11's problems are architectural and cannot be fixed. And every time something is fixed with an extension it makes X.org more bloated and more crufty. I recall watching a talk nearly 10 years ago by Daniel Stone, a core X.org and now wayland developer explainin
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Was it this? downloading.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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That could probably be addressed without discarding the whole thing.
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Any X app can steal your password manager passphrase. It's not OK.
That is only a problem if you assume that some "app"s (more precisely: X11 clients permitted to communicate with the same server instance) must be assumed to be malware. Which is reasonable to assume if - but only if - those "app"s were blindly downloaded from the Internet, and did not come as part of the operating system.
If you assume that some application, which "root" or you as user X deliberately installed, is malware, then you have many many other security issues and channels leaking data, besides X11.
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Traditionally, any app on Linux can steal the data from any other app of the same user.
If you really want to isolate application by locking thins done, you could also do this with X. X has all the security hooks for this. People were working on this before it wall abandoned for Wayland. By now this would be all done.
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...locking things down.
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Any X app can steal your password manager passphrase. It's not OK.
Not if the password requesting app does a keyboard grab.
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but I believe Wayland is a solution looking for problem
Not understanding the problem or not having the problem yourself doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Stop gaslighting developers.
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The funny part is that Gnome itself is targeting an app-centric desktop philosophy where only one app is visible at any time so why then would I need fancy transparent windows?
Maybe Wayland is better (than X
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X works fine for me on a single desktop. Transparent windows and decorations are neat but in the end I just turn it off anyway.
Cool story. The very developers of X decided it didn't work fine for them anymore and moved on, and transparent windows and decorations wasn't a feature they added, it was a side effect of the change in architecture.
Again. You not understanding the problem doesn't mean it doesn't exist. There's no such thing as change for change sake. People don't spend a significant portion of their lives, and companies don't pay people's large salaries to sit around and re-arrange deck chairs.
Does it at least have a smaller memory and storage footprint than X?
It has a smaller everything t
one acronym: GDPR (Score:2)
considering both Google's and Microsoft's offerings of cloud office suites are verboten in the EU, guess redhat is going the way of the dodo around here...
long live other linux distros.
RHEL is dead (to me) (Score:4, Insightful)
Death spiral (Score:2, Insightful)
This is Red hat's death spiral. They are just going to keep ramping up their "support" fees to an ever shrinking pool of clients. Those clients are too lazy or too stupid to recognize which way the wind is blowing and escape Red hat's dead clutches.
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You wish, their money is from servers including cloud and mainframe. You think people buy Red Hat to do word processing?
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That's what I meant. Their server side customer base is shrinking, even as they keep extracting more money from it.
I don't follow their pricing but are they increasing subscription fees?
If not, they their customer base is steadily growing [lightreading.com].
If looks like one of the ways they're doing it is by building hybrid clouds [sdxcentral.com]:
IBM CEO Arvind Krishna explained the most significant pieces of hybrid cloud are offering “a platform that can straddle multiple public clouds, private cloud and on-premise properties” in an open, secure and flexible manner.
An internal cloud that can work with 3rd party cloud services sounds like a
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Red Hat has been a server company for a long time.
Companies have been moving from data centers to cloud for a long time. That can have risks with vendor lock in. And you need to build your systems differently too.
Kubernetes (k8s) is a good way to go on cloud. It handles HA and horizontal scaling inherently. Its very different from having a bunch of systems (physical or VMs) talking to each other. Google open sourced k8s to change developers designed and operated systems. k8s still needs to talk to the
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I'll bite. Can you show me where the cost of their subscriptions keeps ramping up? I'll wait...
Wow (Score:2)
They don't have the resources for both? Do they really need to choose one or the other? I don't get it, I thought RH was profitable. LibreOffice is *the* desktop office productivity suite (apart from OpenOffice of course). It's kind of a good thing to have around.
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I dunno, not providing an office suite for any editing or even viewing of office type docs seems like a real bad idea to me, even if it's seldom used.
How Much effort is it to Maintain LO Package? (Score:2)
How much effort is it to maintain a relatively mature like libre office? Sure, it is not 0 effort but not that much either. I bet there is more into that decision
Maybe it's just me but since IBM took over Redhat and centos, things have not been too good for either.
Maybe someone has a different take but my experience is many companies and users moving away to different distros
It's really too bad, was a great distro
Wayland Remote Desktop (Score:2)
Hopefully more attention will be paid to the huge gap that is Wayland Remote Desktop (which still doesn't exist).
Am I Missing Something? Build it? (Score:2)
So a distro doesn't include an application that you want; build it.
same RHEL price (Score:2)
Now with less software.
What does it even mean? (Score:2)
Microsoft Office in the browser is shit. (Score:2)
Anyone who has used it knows what I mean.
fired (Score:3)
Read LWN, then follow a link to fedora development mailing list, read all emails and you will find an useful link: Caolán McNamara was the LibreOffice maintainer for RHEL/Fedora and one of the main upstream developers, for some clearly unstated reason, he just moved from Red Hat to Collabora [meeksfamily.uk] (not clear if he was fired, was unhappy under the IBM management or some other reason). Without the packager, Red Hat/IBM choice was to orphan the huge package instead of bringing another packager.
Honestly, this is a disaster for anyone using Red Hat/Fedora/Red Hat derivatives on the desktop (me included). For the moment, it seems like a group of Fedora contributors are trying to take ownership and maintain LO for Fedora, but it remains to be seen how well it will go. Most likely option for Fedora desktop users is to change distro,
Install LO Flatpak in Fedora (Score:5, Informative)
The summary states that LibreOffice will still be available as a Flatpak through GNOME Software in Fedora and that the maintainers of LO in RHEL 9 will be helping the upstream LO team maintain the Flatpak.