Red Hat and deprecating KDE

Klaus

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 15:05:57 +0100

Red Hat and KDE â€“ Jonathan Riddell's Diary

Posted on 2/11/2018
By a strange coincidece the news broke this morning that RHEL is deprecating KDE. The real surprise here is that RHEL supported KDE all. Back in the 90s they were entirely against KDE and put lots of effort into our friendly rivals Gnome. It made some sense since at the time Qt was under a not-quite-free licence and thereâ€™s no reason why a company would want to support another companyâ€™s lock in as well as shipping incompatible licences. By the time Qt become fully free they were firmly behind Gnome.

KDE

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phanisvara das

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 15:32:26 +0100

very good take on the situation, by an insider for a change. so far i've only seen people from the outside, speculating.

Waitman Gobble

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 15:41:24 +0100

I think it's interesting that Red Hat has 12,000 employees and 3 billion USD annual revenue, IBM bought it for 33 Billion.

I've used RHEL on some servers in the past, it's not free of charge. But as far as I know I've never had any contact with a Red Hat employee. I never felt like i was gaining anything by using RHEL. Maybe people say like Microsoft "you get support" which is actually like, yeah when monkey's fly out my ass I will get support from Microsoft.

M. Dent

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 17:45:16 +0100

On the other hand, the fact that you haven't NEEDED to contact RHEL support says that those employees are doing their job?

Waitman Gobble

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 18:13:12 +0100

I don't know. I started using Linux with Red Hat in the 1990's, where you would have to select drivers and build the kernel during the install. It did not detect any hardware back then. That i remember anyway. The 'stable' idea of running stuff that hasn't been updated for years doesn't work for me. Not being able to upgrade major versions is desireable to companies like Rackspace, because they can migrate and upsell.

M. Dent

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 18:23:03 +0100

You're right - it detected virtually nothing. My first experience with Linux was 0.9? I downloaded the Gentoo distribution over a T1 line as a stack of 3.5" floppies just before I left the IT department of the college I was transferring from. "Highspeed Internet," LOL

Mike Macgirvin

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 20:18:02 +0100

We used RedHat Pro at Symantec ca. 2006. The RedHat business model is providing "enterprise grade" software and providing paid support for it. The term "enterprise grade" has an elite connotation in the Fortune 500. PHP and MySQL didn't make the cut (although MySQL was allowed entry into this elite club after it was acquired by Sun).

You were either running Windows or RedHat and your software stack was Java and Oracle.

Waitman Gobble

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 21:04:44 +0100

i haven't been in the elite circle :) I had a 144k dsl line at 16k feet from the CO (that's about the limit they would go) and was hosting web sites on an NT4 server, back then everyone was still pretty much using dial up so nobody much noticed. MS email cost a freaking fortune though, so at first I wrote my own SMTP and POP servers using C++. But they weren't threaded and my mailbox strategy was screwy, so quickly I had to bail on that. This brought me to Linux, a way I could offer email for customers without paying per user costs.

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