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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.




If by "given up", you mean still investing more (sometimes far more) into desktop Linux than practically anyone else.

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


To the extent required by Red-Hat Enterprise paying customers.

If anything, it shows how much everyone still cares.

Greetings from 2008 Slashdot,

https://www.slashdot.org/story/100116


Consumer desktop product. That's a category that nobody competes in. Apple sells hardware that incidentally includes macOS and Microsoft hasn't cared about selling Windows licenses directly to customers for years and their OEM licensing business for consumer devices (i.e. non-Pro licenses) is neat, but it couldn't sustain Windows by itself.


The shopping mall down the street certainly has Windows Home DVDs, as does Microsoft online store.

Try to find value added enterprise desktop.

https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/all-products


Those are incidental products of the big moneymakers being made up of the same parts, just like Fedora (and most other distros with the modern GNOME stack) exists because of RHEL.


They do control the desktop. Nobody else is close to them


Red Hat has not given up on desktop Linux. Not in the slightest.



That certainly aged poorly. Whoever wrote that had no clue what the next decade of Red Hat would actually be like.

When this was written, desktop Linux still looked like this https://distrowatch.com/images/screenshots/debian-lenny-gnom... and by 2018 a new set of desktop interoperability standards had been introduced and incorporated into most Linux desktops, with Red Hat as the main organization behind this.


Where is the desktop product?

https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/all-products

I see cloud, OpenShift, SAP, embedded, servers, desktop not really.


Their desktop products are Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation, Red Hat Edge, and the Red Hat Universal Base Image build system. The former is used heavily in particle physics laboratories (CERN and Fermilab use a mix of RHEL, Alma, CentOS) as well as some niche graphics workstations. The latter two are used for a lot of different things, but can be used to manage automatically-updating company-assigned desktops/laptops, and the tools behind it have been extended by the community to offer consumer-grade desktops like UBlue.

They have deep involvement in a ton of different Linux desktop technologies. They also package the Red Hat Flatpak repository, which is the RH equivalent of Fedora Flatpaks. These are Flatpaks that are built by combining the RPM build process with additional flatpak-specific metadata. There is ARM support for all of this, unlike Flathub which is spotty on non-x86-64 architectures. Currently RH Flatpaks is a "tech preview" feature of RHEL9, but it will likely be more fleshed out in RHEL10.

https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enter...

https://www.redhat.com/en/products/edge

https://redhat-connect.gitbook.io/partner-guide-for-red-hat-...

(Not a Red Hat project) https://ublue.it/

https://catalog.redhat.com/software/containers/rhel9/inkscap...


CERN researchers mostly use Windows and macOS, even if the LHC cluster is powered by Linux.

Back in 2003 - 2004, I was one of the few in my group, ATLAS/TDAQ, that bothered to have a laptop with Scientific Linux, and I doubt it has changed.

All of those projects are a by product that Red-Hat Enterprise Linux also needs a graphical user interface, not a desktop product on its own.


To say it was like this in 20 years ago and I doubt it has changed is pretty crass. Especially for such as Desktop Linux which is essentially unrecognizable from 20 years ago.


It has hardly changed beyond 1%, so I stand by my assumption.

One of the reasons why eventually I moved from a UNIX zealot, to someone that uses Google, Apple and Microsoft platforms.

And with exception of an aging netbook, only as Desktop VM.

Also as long as there is some form of POSIX support, it is good enough, regardless of the OS.




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