Red Hat To Stop Shipping LibreOffice In Future RHEL, Limiting Fedora LO Involvement

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Red Hat To Stop Shipping LibreOffice In Future RHEL, Limiting Fedora LO Involvement

Red Hat has decided they will be doing less work on desktop applications and will stop shipping LibreOffice as part of a future Red Hat Enterprise Linux release (presumably RHEL10). This is also limiting Red Hat's engagement in working on LibreOffice packaging for Fedora while the hope is that the Flatpak'ed LibreOffice will fill the void...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Red-Hat-Less-LibreOffice

[skeevy420]

I wonder how this is going to go over with everyone. Everyone hates Ubuntu when they do that with Snaps so it'll be interesting if to see if the same holds true with RHEL.

I'm of the belief that it's RHEL and if you're not getting your GUI programs from Flats you're doing it very, very wrong so I think this is a good move for them. I wouldn't be upset if they moved more over to Flats.

At the same time I wish Flats had more runtimes like v3 and v4 instead of just generic. That's the literal reason I use neither Snaps nor Flats and stick to the repos of the v3 optimized OS I use. I have a Zen 2 and a lot of computing power is wasted with v1.

[blacknova]

I'm pretty sure that is long term development decision:
1. Basic distro immutable, atomic updates
2. User's apps migrating to flatpaks.

[peterdk]

So, I thought red hat was also a desktop OS? Do these users not need Office? Or is Red Hat a server OS mainly these days?

[andyprough]

So, I thought red hat was also a desktop OS? Do these users not need Office? Or is Red Hat a server OS mainly these days?

RedHat is whatever the IBM accountants say it will be.

Next one will be: "well Google is already doing all the work on Chrome, so we don't have to offer Firefox packages anymore."

[avis]

Any community contributor to Fedora can step-up to maintain the LibreOffice RPMs if so desired, but it's a big undertaking given the size of the Microsoft Office competitor and the number of dependencies. Ultimately they are putting LibreOffice in the Flatpak basket as the way to leverage this open-source office suite moving forward.

Or maybe just maybe use this https://download.documentfoundation....office/stable/ which has worked for me perfectly over the past decade if not more.

RedHat is whatever the IBM accountants say it will be.

Next one will be: "well Google is already doing all the work on Chrome, so we don't have to offer Firefox packages anymore."

Yeah, and I've used the official Firefox/Thundebird releases from https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/ for as long as I remember because I hate delays for something as important as my web browser. Too many 0-days to afford waiting for your distro to get their act together.

[elatllat]

Ubuntu moving to snap and paid security. RHEL moving to flat and missing key desktop and server apps from the main repo and non-LTS kernel.

Maybe Debian and EndeavourOS are the way forward.

[ssokolow]

That's a shame. The LibreOffice Flatpak has some really annoying issues, such as using not using the XDG File Chooser portal, resulting in a GTK file chooser on KDE and greatly reduced ability to be sandboxed.

LibreOffice is one of the only applications where I COULD install it through Flatpak but I'm not.

So, I thought red hat was also a desktop OS? Do these users not need Office? Or is Red Hat a server OS mainly these days?

Red Hat is big on moving desktop application distribution to Flatpak. This is just another step in that direction.

[ssokolow]

Next one will be: "well Google is already doing all the work on Chrome, so we don't have to offer Firefox packages anymore."

Mozilla already maintains official Flatpak builds (they're one of the only cases where building the Flathub release is allowed to happen outside Flathub's build infrastructure) and I've been using them on Kubuntu 20.04 for around a year now with no complaints.

[dragon321]

I wonder how this is going to go over with everyone. Everyone hates Ubuntu when they do that with Snaps so it'll be interesting if to see if the same holds true with RHEL.

Compared to Snaps where backend is proprietary and hardcoded in source code, Flatpak is fully open source and decentralized (you can use whatever repo you want or create your own). Why would everyone that hates Ubuntu from moving from open source DEB to proprietary Snap hate Red Hat from moving from open source RPM to open source Flatpak?

Fedora already plays with immutable OS where you are supposed to use Flatpak for applications to keep them separated from core OS that is read only, I wouldn't be surprised if Red Hat wants to move further in that direction and slowly move from RPM to Flatpak.