IBM Signals That Fedora Is Basically Finished, as Work on Desktop Spins Collapses in a Matter of Days.

Fedora Is Basically Finished, as Work on Desktop Basically Collapses in a Matter of Days.

I’ve been blogging about my recent switch to openSUSE Leap and the collapse of Fedora due to “de-prioritization” by Red Hat, and Fedora basically falling into a gradual state of abandonment and bitrot.

Here’s what an IBM Red Hat employee says will happen now that Red Hat has divested itself from LibreOffice. As you can see, desktop Bluetooth and a lot of other things are now effectively abandoned and nobody cares what they do on your Fedora desktop anymore.

New responsibilities

As part of the same process outlined in Matthias Clasen’s “LibreOffice packages” email, my management chain has made the decision to stop all upstream and downstream work on desktop Bluetooth, multimedia applications (namely totem, rhythmbox and sound-juicer) and libfprint/fprintd. The rest of my upstream and downstream work will be reassigned depending on Red Hat’s own priorities (see below), as I am transferred to another team that deals with one of a list of Red Hat’s priority projects.

I’m very disappointed, because those particular projects were already starved for resources: I spent less than 10% of my work time on them in the past year, with other projects and responsibilities taking most of my time.

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 backend

Those freedesktop projects will be archived until further notice:

– power-profiles-daemon

– switcheroo-control

– iio-sensor-proxy

– low-memory-monitor

I 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.

All my Fedora packages were orphaned about a month and a half ago, it’s likely that there are still some that are orphaned, if there are takers. RHEL packages were unassigned about 3 weeks ago, they’ve been reassigned since then, so I cannot point to the new maintainer(s).

If you are a partner, or a customer, I would recommend that you get in touch with your Red Hat contacts to figure out what the plan is going forward for the projects you might be involved with.

If you are a colleague that will take on all or part of the 90% of the work that’s not being stopped, or a community member that was relying on my work to further advance your own projects, get in touch, I’ll do my best to accommodate your queries, time permitting.

I’ll try to make sure to update this post, or create a new one if and when any of the above changes.

-Bastien Nocera

Sounds like I made the right call to accelerate “Getting the Hell out of here.” mode.

As you can see, some of this affects the overall “Linux OS stack” and some of the damage is contained to GNOME, which I also abandoned as part of a migration to KDE.

The problems in GNOME are not just technical, but political, including (but hardly limited to) Molly “we can use our collective power to push others” de Blanc, one of the chief promoters of anti-Richard M. Stallman bullshit.

(The “petition” in question was totally false and fraudulent and was organized by anti-Free Software trolls and hosted on Microsoft GitHub. Also, eventually dozens of times as many real Free Software people signed a support letter of RMS.)

“I am a Debian Developer (non-uploading)”

Oh that’s cool. I don’t do shit for Debian either. Can I be a non-uploading developer?

People like Molly “Shove people around.” (she’s hardly alone there) are just another festering boil on GNOME.

Their Human Interface Guidelines (GNOME 3 threw out all of the money and time Sun spent on studying how users interacted with computers and replaced it with a paradigm that hardly works) and technical merits are laughable enough.

Their GUI skills are basically a blind ripoff of Apple at this point, and especially “All of our users are too stupid to use a mouse and keyboard.” Not even GNOME developers want to use it like it is, which is why it has “Tweaks”, which pretty much flies in the face of Havoc Pennington’s essay on the topic that “Preferences to make the program behave differently just mean your program was broken to begin with.”

Most bullshitters find that their odious ideas are not received well, so then they resort to becoming really nasty people and trying to use the “forces of collectivism” to “push people around”.

(A raving sociopath doesn’t have time to stop and gain consensus for anything they want to do, they just set fire to the Reichstag and declare an emergency.)

As for software, preferences aren’t intrinsically bad. But when you ship a user interface as disastrous as GNOME and then hide the preferences to make it functional again slightly, but which are there, you are just making it obvious that you know what you’ve done.

openSUSE Leap has been quite stable so far, which is to be expected considering the core OS is shared with SUSE Linux Enterprise, including the kernel.

However, at this point I would probably even recommend Oracle Linux over anything from Red Hat. Why? Well, it all comes down to a few things, including the fact that they state directly that they’re happy if you’re happy running “without official support” or paying them. If you don’t think you need it, more power to you. And you’ll get “the same bits” that their paying subscribers do, and nothing to switch to if you decide you want to buy support later.

Oracle makes sources available for their “Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel”, which IBM Red Hat has stopped doing, except for paying customers, which it is openly threatening with canceled subscriptions if they tell you what’s in the RHEL kernel.

IBM Red Hat is now behaving so badly that even Oracle openly trolls them on its blog.

I know it’s Oracle we’re talking about here. The same company that sued Google trying to extend copyrights to software APIs, and that’s bad, and that’s why I settled down on SUSE instead. But the stench of Oracle is now overwhelmed by IBM.

It’s like, “Who even smells the filthy cat box anymore when there’s weeks of rotting garbage in the trash can?”

The termite infestation of IBM and the “Shove people around with the forces of collectivism.” types have finally rotted out the foundation of almost every house that allowed them in.

It’s become totally obvious to me in the last week or so that IBM sees no future for Fedora and plans to divest itself of it gradually, and that they seem to see the future of RHEL as some dying “Oracle Solaris-like thing”.

Of course their competitors are salivating. When IBM finally ruins RHEL where will the customers go?