We (may) now know the real reason for that IBM takeover. A distraction for Red Hat to axe KDE While everyone was distracted by IBM's $34bn takeover bid, Red Hat quietly wrote a death-note for KDE – within Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to be precise. On October 30, the Linux distro biz emitted Fedora 29 and RHEL 7.6, and in the latter's changelog the following appears, which a Reg reader kindly just alerted us to: …
I used to work at HP and we setup thousands of Red Hat servers. I don't think any ever had any UI installed. They were all on virtual machines in data centers and SSH was the only access into them. If you did need X11 for some special software package it was probably just VNC with TWM.
For desktop Linux, there are much better distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, etc. You wouldn't want to pay for a RHEL license to get patches for a desktop system.
There are some desktop products which are "supported" only on RHEL so you have no choice but to use a fully blown UI.
In one of my past lives while I was still sysadminning, I had to rip out and replace with RHEL a perfectly working Debian setup which was honed to perfection and aligned exactly to our development process as a result of 5 years of work.
All of that because of an utter POS IDE by one well known embedded software vendor. The POS worked perfectly fine on Debian by the way, but the vendor refused to support both the POS and the POS code it generated.
The POS worked perfectly fine on Debian by the way, but the vendor refused to support both the POS and the POS code it generated.
So why not use it on Debian, and keep one RHEL system in a dusty corner just to reproduce problems & submit support requests?
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"If I'm not mistaking RedHat abandoned desktop 10 years ago in favor of server"
RH is not promoting desktop products loudly, but they're very much available.
https://www.redhat.com/en/store/red-hat-enterprise-linux-desktop-or-red-hat-enterprise-linux-workstation
*holds up hand, waves*
We run a lot of Unix (possible some of it is strictly Linux/MacOS by now) software for medical imaging research. That means not using a long term support type distribution. Scientific Linux, based on RHEL is a common choice, as is CentOS. However we've got a site license anyway, and the deployment and satellite server tools are useful. So yes, actually have a fair number of people on RHEL desktop and a few more using it in VM's. If we didn't we'd likely still be using a RHEL derived distro.
> Not only do we use desktop RHEL, we're using KDE.
Same here. CentOS (KDE spin) is my primary development desktop. It's pretty good, unlike the Piece of Shit Gnome that can (and should) die in a fire.
With IBM buying RH and the decision to kill off KDE, Devuan is now looking really good.
> With IBM buying RH and the decision to kill off KDE, Devuan is now looking really good.
Are you suggesting that Devuan wasn't looking very good before ?
As for IBM's gobble, from where I sit it may not be so ominous : RH commitment to the basics of the *NIX philosophyvhas been, erm "flaky" (to put it lightly) for some years now, and IBM is arguably not the worst sugar daddy to this respect (remember that RH was also cosying up to Redmond and Mountain View recently... and IBM may have lost some open-source love, but let's remember that it did save Linux' hide from the Darlek (*)(**) ).
As for the reasons of the gobble, everyone seems to be focussing on market value and growth speed. IBM strikes me as a steadiness-oriented business ; a mobile fortress rather than a racecar. It may not appeal to the younger generation, but it is key to IBM's core market even to this day : corporations that rely on mainframes. And to anyone who have worked with IBM customers the gobble was quite the obvious move : for the big'uns, while the backend is Z/OS, the frontend is RHEL.
(*McBride)
(**OK that more corporate interest than kindness of hart, but still)
"As for IBM's gobble, from where I sit it may not be so ominous"
I don't view this as ominous, either, mostly because nothing is lost. Red Hat has, for years now, essentially been the Microsoft of the Linux world, and it's been dead to me for a very long time. Even if it ceased to exist entirely, I would shed no tears.
Believe it or not, yeah, they do. Last I heard, the RH desktop team was effectively self-funding, i.e. we sell enough RHEL licenses for desktop use to cover the cost of running the desktop team. It's not a huge business that's gonna set the world on fire, but it's a business.
For most 'typical' desktop users Fedora or Ubuntu is going to make more sense, but there are some specific cases where people really want a desktop distro with RHEL's lifecycle and maintenance policies.
At the university I went to, our CS department did everything they could on REL. Servers all ran it, and all machines in the labs were REL desktops. They probably want everything on the same level. Could they have had the workstations run fedora/ubuntu? Definitely, just as they could have put those on the servers and still been fine. Still, REL on the workstations probably helped in administering them.
I've been using GUI and IDE for almost a decade using RHEL at work (3 different companies) using Windows as a dumb graphics terminal connected thru RDP/VNC. Why bother working under Windows GUI/IDE if one can do the same in the same bare metal environment that the software will run on anyway? I don't understand why people think that's not feasible.
> I used to work at HP and we setup thousands of Red Hat servers. I don't think any ever had any UI installed. They were all on virtual machines in data centers and SSH was the only access into them.
Sure, and my previous job was providing infrastructure for an ISP (couldn't use "cloud" or other people's data centres for some deployments), where the the entire stack (virtualisation = RHEV, OS = RHEL, application server = JBoss) was Red Hat, and yes, the servers didn't have an X server installed, and only the minimal X libraries for the JRE package to install.
> If you did need X11 for some special software package it was probably just VNC with TWM.
Why would you install VNC for X11 when you could just use, you know, X11 (and e.g. ssh)?
> For desktop Linux, there are much better distributions like Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse, etc.
There are cases where RHEL is the better distribution. One of them is that the supported IDE for JBoss is JBoss developer studio ( https://developers.redhat.com/products/devstudio/download/ ) which is officially supported on RHEL. While it works fine on other distros, it's easier to get the same experience on a developer's machine (installing the jboss server from yum etc.) for deployment-related issues when running RHEL with access to the JBoss yum repos.
> You wouldn't want to pay for a RHEL license to get patches for a desktop system.
You don't need to: You can https://developers.redhat.com/products/rhel/download/ since
https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/03/31/no-cost-rhel-developer-subscription-now-available/
I've used both GNOME and KDE in the past, but eventually decided that those desktops that use less resources where for me. I was a fan of Enlightenment for a long time, even a developer for it. These days I use LXDE and LXDM, though I might give awesome a try some day.
On the other hand, I no longer use Red Hat based distros, I switched to Debian based ones long ago. Recently switched to Devuan for my main desktop and server boxen.
the last screenshot I saw of "new, shiny" KDE looked NOTHING like what I was accustomed to seeing, all 2D and FLATSO and "Gnome 3-ish"... like they drank the 2D FLATSO coolaid or something.
I'll stick with Mate, which should still be "installable" on RH, or something lighter like lxde. No need for 2D FLAT "looks like Chrome/Australis/Win-10-nic" instead of something I _liked_ from 5+ years ago, almost BRAG-worthy even.
"Up"-grading. SOOOO overrated!!!
If KDE had _NOT_ swallowed the FLATSO+Wayland 2-fisted GAGGER (aka 'plasma'), maybe it'd be "different enough" that people would WANT it more!!!
(you really DO have to make your product "different enough" when everybody ELSE is heading over the cliff, to keep your customers from doing a 'Mate' or 'Devuan', ya know??? Otherwise, your "new, shiny obsessed" out of touch "developers" who *FEEL* as if it's "OUR turn, now" to make DESKTOP COMPUTERS look like PHONE SCREENS will *RUIN* *EVERYTHING*!!! [whoops, too late]
Is still themeable.
Gnome a short while ago were talking dropping support for themes.
Whether that is just not dealing with any issues (which is fair enough, some badly designed themes out there) or actually cutting theme UI elements out, I've never sure.
ON Plasma you can restore the old KDE 4 Oxygen look if you wish.
the last screenshot I saw of "new, shiny" KDE looked NOTHING like what I was accustomed to seeing, all 2D and FLATSO and "Gnome 3-ish"... like they drank the 2D FLATSO coolaid or something.
It's a theme you're looking at. You can change that in a few seconds!
I was "talking" to someone the other day (on a forum) about how he had tried to get people interested in Linux (Xfce), and they rejected it out of hand when they saw it. That amazed me-- do people really not realize that you can change the appearance of things, particularly something like Linux (where product branding doesn't matter and choice has always been a priority)?
The KDE distros I've tried come with several widget themes (Oxygen, Fusion, Redmond, Breeze) and several icon themes, along with many color schemes (and you can make your own). If that's not good enough, install the QtCurve widget theme (really a theme engine), and you will have nearly limitless control over every element of the UI appearance-wise without having to touch a config file.
You've been poisoned by too much iOS, MacOS, Windows, or something that has made you forget that you can change the appearance in Linux. The rest of the world may have concluded that options just confuse the poor little brains of the end users, so nearly every customization option has to be removed to keep their precious little heads from exploding, but KDE isn't a part of that world. Even the more minimal DEs like LXDE and Xfce use GTK+ themes and whatever icon scheme you wish. We're not using iOS here.
Linux Mint just dropped KDE and i just don't know what distro to use.
I've been using Devuan as my main desktop for a bit to get to know it with KDE. I'd previously used Mint with KDE for a number of older converts.
Now I'm starting to move them to Devuan/KDE. Not a problem thus far.
I also found the cinnamon version that comes with Devuan Ascii to be quite nice, finally a Cinnamon I can like. Devuan's Mate needs work to get it looking as nice as what they have in Mint last I looked.
I've used both GNOME and KDE in the past, but eventually decided that those desktops that use less resources where for me.
That being the case, you may want to give KDE a(nother) try.
The devs have been hard at work reducing the memory footprint recently, and it's surprisingly lightweight now.
"That being the case, you may want to give KDE a(nother) try.
The devs have been hard at work reducing the memory footprint recently, and it's surprisingly lightweight now."
@Bombastic and Updraft102
Recent KDE Plasma 5 from Alien Bob's packages for Slackware Current. On a Thinkpad X60 (core duo) with 1.5Gb ram, usable, firefox/libreoffice writer/music player. 1 Gb ram isn't happening - goes straight into swap.
Concur on Eric's KDE stuff, and pretty much everything else that he has packaged for Slackware. (Alien BOB's real name is Eric Hameleers. He answers to both.)
http://www.slackware.com/~alien/
Running Slack-stable on a 16 year old HP laptop (zv5105, Radeon 9000 IGP) with 2gigs. It works just fine, rarely hits swap when doing normal office stuff. Note that it's still on Slack 14.2's version of KDE4, I don't plan on trying Plasma5 on it.
"That being the case, you may want to give KDE a(nother) try."
Right, until you encounter the "Teutonic KDE Knights" who monitor the shit out of user forums, to delete anyone bitching about obvious faults in KDE. The Kubuntu list moderators were the worst.
I went to Debian, along with others, and switched to XFCE.
JWM.
While I once enjoyed the cheerfulness of icon-based desktop environments, I realized quite a while ago that nothing beats the brutal efficiency of a lightweight windows manager + console. I have no particular interest in fancy backgounds, animations or desktop clutter. My computers are work tools, and them being more efficient means more time for me for non-work stuff -like computer games or mindlessly posting on El Reg ... oh wait. Bugger
"there is overwhelming interest in desktop technologies such as Ggnome and Wayland"
There is? From what I've seen, the people who use Gnome use it because it comes with their distro, not because they have actively chosen it. And does anybody care about Wayland? Is any important distribution[0] even fiddling about with Wayland anymore? Near as I can tell, Wayland is conspicuous by it's absence ... it's only in use in the Fedora world, the rest of us are over the idea.
"there is overwhelming interest in desktop technologies such as Ggnome and Wayland"
My understanding of Wayland is it was intended to improve support for modern graphics hardware and APIs. The X model was also seen as having security problems. However it's been done with the typical "let's break Unix traditions and just dismiss anyone who objects as backwards" approach that characterised Gnome development a couple of years ago (and maybe since, but that's when I stopped trying to give feedback and switched to KDE) and systemd's feature creep. I suppose it's the kind of skewed world-view you can get when you're surrounded by the people working on those systems, of course Gnome and Wayland developers are interested in Gnome and Wayland!
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