Red Hat stops all upstream and downstream work on desktop Bluetooth, multimedia applications (namely totem, rhythmbox and sound-juicer) and libfprint/fprintd

IBM strikes again

They have no idea how Red Hat was making money, they're just squeezing it dry.
- RedHats focus is on Enterprise Linux, Openshift, AWX, etc.
  
  Are they even a “competitor” in enterprise Linux desktop? Enterprise Linux servers, sure, and I suppose a good number of orgs who don’t want to deal with dissimilar “user” distros, but I’d think Canonical would have enterprise desktop Linux pretty much sealed by now.

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After 3 years on Fedora, the distro that finally made me stop hopping, I moved to openSUSE when I installed a new SSD. I have no idea what the future holds, but I'm good with switching now when convenient rather than later.
- so… how do you like openSuSE after 3 years of fedora?
@beta_tester @alounoz No, Fedora is independent and all Gnome is affected by this. It is very sad that RH is not interested in the Linux Desktop and I doubt that Canonical will assign resources to these projects.
- "independent" - Is it though?
  
  Redhat are the major sponsors of Fedora, much as they sponsored Centos before taking it over and killing it in classic "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish".
  
  I have doubts about the future of the entire EL ecosphere - I know not many enterprise level organisations are investing deeply into it right now, whether that's with RHEL or a rebuild. Too much doubt about Redhat's intentions with RHEL and the future of it.
- Independent then why did the RH lawyers make them remove the codecs from the distro earlier this year.
Sadly, this move by Red Hat is not unexpected. Personally, I do not recommend any Red Hat related distros, including clones. This breaks my heart since my first Linux experience was Red Hat Halloween, but the company is just taking ugly turn after ugly turn.
- Settle down Nancy. There's hundreds of linux distributions currently, some targeted towards desktop/gaming, and some targeted to the server and enterprise spaces. RedHat has always been the latter.
  
  Let's not get all Shakespearean dramatic about it, ok?
I’m also not sure about it, as I’ve always liked Fedora.

However, these news impact the whole Linux desktop, and GNOME in particular :(
- They are focusing on consolidating flatpak, and move toward immutable desktop. If you read the some press release in red hat blogs, they move their teams to make Wayland more stable now, and they aim to bring full flegede gaming desktop also 3D tools as most Hollywood company use RHEL on desktop for processing, it's what some of the engineer said on reddit, and libreoffice, rythmbox, totem, bluetooth, are offered with flatpak, so... User can move to that.
  
  Sadly their way of communicating always bad when they move to new project these days.. Really bad..
  
  And some other are making FUD on those news with community left confused and make assumptions..
openSUSE will welcome you and your friends :)
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Fedora exists separately from RHEL. RedHats decisions can only affect it so far as what they task their developers with.

However the community votes in which tech is included in Fedora. I wouldn't worry about the distro.
The problem is these companies are the bulk of the contributors to these projects.
- Yep. People think it's people in their spare time. I mean people have to eat and these companies are the ones who pay for most of the development.
I loved fedora and it is not easy to choose another distro that fits me that well, but I more and more loose trust in fedora and its future. I think I'll switch from fedora to a real community distro w/o corporation influence, step by step box by box, slowly but steady to get back my peace of mind.
- @barusu @beta_tester I've got unbuntu on an old celeron 2 core laptop. 3Gb of ram and 500Gb HD, sounding any gud? Am wanting to move a win10, 4Gb, 1Tb HD, to a Linux distro. Wud Kubuntu be a choice?
Absolutely. This is the end-result of all corporate backed distros.
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Fedora should be dropped try a community distro not a corporate one.
- Fedora is a community distro. Red hat just contributes a lot.
Recommend pop os instead, solid, no canonical bs, widely compatible, and will soon replace GNOME with cosmic
- I am really looking forward to. COSMIC but that is a bold claim.
- Full of system76's bias...
- Oh yeah we really do need yet another DE

This means that, in the medium-term at least, all those GNOME projects will go without a maintainer, reviewer, or triager:- gnome-bluetooth (including Settings panel and gnome-shell integration)- totem, totem-pl-parser, gom- libgnome-volume-control- libgudev- geocode-glib- gvfs AFC backendThose freedesktop projects will be archived until further notice:- power-profiles-daemon- switcheroo-control- iio-sensor-proxy- low-memory-monitorI will not be available for reviewing libfprint/fprintd, upower, grilo/grilo-plugins, gnome-desktop thumbnailer sandboxing patches, or any work related to XDG specifications.Kernel work, reviews and maintenance, including recent work on SteelSeries headset and Logitech devices kernel drivers, USB revoke for Flatpak Portal support, or core USB is suspended until further notice.

Gnome-bluetooth and gvfs are big. I don't use Gnome, I use a tiling window manager, with XFCE apps, but my workflow depends on these apps. I hope that Blueman is not dependent on gnome-bluetooth, but GVFS is literally essential, as that's what I use for mounting external volumes (mainly USBs). This is bad.
- For some stuff udisks2 + udiskie can do some of what you can get from gvfs...
Guess it's not wrong to think that they technically stopped to work on about everything for gnome for a while
That really sucks. I recently chose to use Nobara too, I hope these projects get picked up by another entity so Gnome as a whole doesn't suffer.
What gnome-bluetooth does that bluetooth-manager can't? It's just a button reorganization in GTK4.

There is no more Red Hat. It's IBM now.

I'm getting quite fond of the coining of this concept of "enshittification".

I just wish it had a better name. 'Enshittification' sounds stupid.
- Corporate Coprophilia
- Personally I'm not a fan of cussing in terms meant to be widespread. So my personal substitute, while wordier, is currently "corporate product worsening"
- Corpodecay

I can see where they'd spend less maintaining rhythmbox and totem as they don't really help with office productivity. So many keyboards and mice are Bluetooth these days it kinda seems weird to stop working on the tools you're customers actually need.

Rhythmbox already got replaced and I don't think anyone uses totem. I did a little but it would never work properly.

Like you said tho Bluetooth is weird to stop supporting same with power profiles

Not Power Profiles Daemon...

Yeah, this was the saddest part of the announcement for me. Just when amd_pstate was getting good and power-profiles-daemon provided an easy way to toggle its performance state.

What disgusts me the most about Red Hat is their fake focus on "the open source community." The fact is, the "community" is nothing more to them than free labor. They only seek out and merge changes and fixes that appeal to their enterprise customers. Fuck them, they're getting paid, so let them do it themselves IMO.

FUD
- You can disagree with the comment above, but it's not "FUD", it's just criticism.

GNOME getting affected is insanely bad. Fuck IBM, glad that ThinkPad was bought by Lenovo. ThinkPad under IBM would have become worse than Alienware.

ThinkPad under Lenovo has also gotten much worse to the point that I don't really consider them anymore ...

Last time I looked you couldn't even buy a 2-in-1 with upgradeable memory (or RAM > 16 GB) anymore and for replacing the keyboard you now have to disassemble the entire ThinkPad. Unlike my L390 Yoga and X201 Tablet, where the RAM is slotted and where the keyboard can easily be changed by removing three screws (which is important to me, as I prefer US International over my local layout and I also value a clean keyboard when buying used). In my experience ThinkPad batteries also tend to loose capacity rather quickly? In addition we already have the second X1 Yoga with a broken hinge within three years of normal usage in my family (luckily this device has a five year warranty, so we'll see if the warranty covers it) ...

Maybe this has changed since the first L13 Yoga (haven't read about any new hardware from Lenovo since then), but these were the main reasons why I decided to buy one of the last new L390 Yogas instead of its successor and why I no longer consider ThinkPads to be more desirable than any other laptop.
- So the TrackPoint, thermals, keyboard, durability, Linux friendliness, officially allowed user repairability, great anti-glare screen coating and superior quality to any consumer grade laptop or Macbook are not factors to you, or are you willing to drop the ball just because, where other laptop makers are worse on basically all criterias and even hate you for user repairability, Lenovo forgoes a couple of your criterias and personal disagreements?
  
  You are not logical and reasonable when you say "I no longer consider ThinkPads to be more desirable than any other laptop."
KDE will return to its rightful throne.
- I doubt it will. KDE needs to entirely change its vision of it being this mixed bag of customisation supremacy, and instead forego some of it to become performance and UX oriented like GNOME. KDE needs to do a 180 flip, and the community will tear it one apart if it "becomes the devil" or whatever nonsense the anti-GNOME zealots drum up.

I used to like RedHat.

To be honest, those never really worked reliably. i don't know where really lies the issue but loading a bunch of file and some file can freeze, make the app unresponsible that only a kill can resolve.
Is it a gstreamer issue? Rhythmbox has always looked bloated and never able to do what a simple audacious can do with the same file collection.

Regarding RHEL, they are pushing ITs to the cloud and not their own, I mean, I will do the necessary to not promote, support their products.

Such a shame. The best distro out there being hurt by these decisions...

No point using RHEL or related distros like Fedora after this news. You're potentially investing in the managed decline of a company that simply doesn't bother with supporting anyone who isn't paying them big bucks.

If you wanted a stable desktop Linux with LTS releases and a mature third party software stack you're better off with literally any other Ubuntu, SUSE, or Debian-based distro. Paying money to the latter will likely benefit the wider linux ecosystem more than paying RH that same money, too

I loved fedora and it is not easy to choose another distro that fits me that well, but I more and more loose trust in fedora and its future. I think I'll switch from fedora to a real community distro w/o corporation influence, step by step box by box, slowly but steady to get back my peace of mind.

Doesn't this violate the gpl

How could stopping work on projects violate the gpl?
- Didn't you see the slave labor clause in there? You're indebted for at least 3 decades when you start a new GPL project.
Red Hat has decided to stop allocating resources for maintaining and improving these parts of the freedesktop project. Red Hat isn't working on proprietary versions of them. They've just decided to stop paying for work to be done on them. It just so happens that many of these projects were only being maintained by Red Hat employees, it seems.

Are people still using this closed-source-like distribution?