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Comment by drats | Hacker News Reader

Red Hat abandoned the desktop community/didn't take it seriously and then are surprised that someone who does gets all the mindshare and community goodwill?

It seems to me to be a miscalculation to say that the desktop hobby market has no money in it. All those younger school and university students which Ubuntu fosters will eventually be in positions where they get to choose what distribution is installed on their servers at work and it will be Ubuntu or Debian, and when GNU/Linux is rolled out on corporate or educational desktops these people are going to choose Ubuntu most likely.

I'd say either take the desktop seriously or re-evaluate your spending on it. Don't do a half-hearted job and expect people to love you. I understand this is probably the engineers getting frustrated at decisions which have been taken by the managers at RH.

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I remember when RedHat dropped their desktop version (ah, Redhat 9...). At the time I remember thinking is was a dumb move. That having a good, well supported enterprise desktop was too important to RedHat and Linux in general. Then they did their half-hearted spinoff into what is now Fedora, and for a while it seemed like it desktop Linux languished.

Now, I'm pretty sure it was the right move. Enterprise Linux pays the bills. There are very few major installations of Linux desktops, and that's about the only place where you could extract revenue.

I think that they decided that they couldn't make both the enterprise and desktop users happy. Enterprise servers want to be stable and predictable. Desktop users want the new shiny. They had to choose one. So they went out, bought a suit, and went with the ones that gave them more money. Based upon their current financials, it's hard to argue with that strategy. And the funny thing is, they still managed to contribute more code to Gnome than Ubuntu.

As a side note: I used to run all Red Hat servers... then dabbled in Gentoo but recently I've used all Ubuntu. Just this past week I've run into some issues with some very important software (to me), that seems to be related to something in Ubuntu. It runs perfectly in the more conservative RHEL 5, but fails on the more recent Ubuntu. This has made me think a lot about what I'll be using for my servers in the future...

You walked almost the same path as me then (re. distros), so I'll give you an advice: Debian. Ubuntu was never a proper server distribution. With their lack of own developers, majority of serious problems have to be pushed upstream as Debian issues anyways. If you liked the "conservative" RHEL, just go for Debian stable. It's the best of both worlds and it is what I'm happy to recommend these days.

The problem with Debian in the past (and I say this as someone who formerly maintained some packages and is a Big Fan) was that the release schedule was unpredictable. I don't know what that's like these days - anyone care to comment?

According to http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090729 the current policy is a two-year release schedule, with the next release expected in Q1/2 2012.

Seconded, though I'm more interested in Canonical's commitment to Ubuntu LTS releases: at work I don't want to have to upgrade distributions every two years (or six months: Fedora, Ubuntu non-LTS). The same goes for RHEL/CentOS. These distributions are attractive to me in a small business because of the support commitment of the organizations behind them.

The point is (and it's actually written in bold at the middle of the article) that Red Hat invests a lot more in the desktop than Canonical, while Canonical reaps all the benefits. Your argument that Red Hat is not treating the desktop seriously seems a bit shallow when comparing the amount invested by each company in desktop development.

Yeah, but Ubuntu's PR has always promoted the desktop (and laptop, and netbook..) They now talk about the server more than they used to, but ubuntu.com still gives the desktop a lot of emphasis.

Meanwhile:

* redhat.com's frontpage is devoid of anything but the odd "Desktop" link

* Way back in 2003, Red Hat's then-CEO said consumers should buy Windows [1]

* In 2008, Red Hat stated that "we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future." [2]

* In 2009, their CEO said "the concept of a desktop is kind of ridiculous in this day and age." [3]

I think you could say that Red Hat's focus makes sense, or even that their view on the Linux desktop is more honest. But Canonical, at least, has aspirations for the Linux desktop, while Red Hat decided a long time ago that they're not really fussed.

Credit where credit is due is one thing, and in [2] Red Hat lays claim to the work they put into the desktop, and its suitability for certain niches. But contrasting their PR with Canonical's, can anyone be surprised the "power user" Linux desktop set don't give Red Hat much attention?

[1] http://www.silicon.com/technology/software/2003/11/04/red-ha...

[2] http://press.redhat.com/2008/04/16/whats-going-on-with-red-h...

[3] http://www.techworld.com.au/article/296873/red_hat_ceo_quest...

And still... That's not the point. The point is that Canonical is targeting the desktop market, but their contributions seldom get upstreamed. OTOH Red Hat makes most of the contributions and they're not even focusing on that market.

Redhat is a much larger company with much larger resources. The contributions they are able to make is thus much larger. I don't see how this should be taken as a surprised. Their contribution to the desktop are nothing compared to their server side work.

Most of what Ubuntu/Canonical contributes is integration work which is specific to their distro in nature. That's already a lot of work for the size of their company. If Redhat wanted to they could promote Fedora as a desktop system. I know many organization that use it but for the man in the street (MITS) Ubuntu is just more visible. Red Hat could put some PR money on Fedora.

I see also a lot of work being put by Canonical in just replicating work that took Red Hat years to make. Building their enterprise infrastructure is sapping a lot of work. Landscape,Launchpad,Ubuntu One... (Launchpad could be dropped considering the other services popping up that are much better.) are expensive projects to make and aren't of much use to the FOSS community at large.

Red Hat concentrated on the enterprise. They certainly haven't abandoned it - they bought Qumranet as much for their desktop virtualization solution as the KVM technology.

These numbers show that Red Hat did the right thing too - they're a highly profitable company, and they're bringing massive value to the community. I really don't understand why you seem so aggrieved at a company which contributes so much.

They are highly profitable? Thank god. I don't know enough about them as a company, but it is really good to know they aren't teetering on the brink of destruction. They are currently in my list of companies I really want to stick around.

Their stock seems to be doing well. It's above pre-recession levels.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/27yrkwp (Google Finance)

I had some investments in the company for a while. It seems to be very well managed. There revenues have had a decent growth over the years I've followed it.

eventually be in positions where they get to choose what distribution is installed on their servers at work and it will be Ubuntu or Debian

Eventually is a very long time. I ought to be there by now, I've been using Linux and Unix in general professionally for 15 years now. But the Linux I use in production is dictated absolutely by what various vendors certify their products on. That's true for anyone doing anything more complicated than "a website".

> That's true for anyone doing anything more complicated than "a website".

You may be right. However, a very large proportion of servers are webservers.

I think you're dead right. I use Ubuntu on the desktop, and I would specify it for any server installation. Not because I dislike Red Hat, I'd just rather use something I'm familiar with.

> Red Hat abandoned the desktop community/didn't take it seriously and then are surprised that someone who does gets all the mindshare and community goodwill?

I don't know how a statement so riddled with misinformation got upvoted so high. Your comment is not only wrong, it goes out of it's way to spread FUD. So much wrong, I just don't know where to begin.

Oh, I'm sorry. I was unaware the commenter was referring to a post made by Red Hat rather than someone not from Red Hat. I wasn't aware that Red Hat no longer contributed to desktop linux.

No, no. Downvote me for being right.

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