Comment by Etheryte 12 hours ago
This is, in a way, why it's nice that we have companies like Red Hat, SUSE and so on. Even if you might not like their specific distros for one reason or another, they've found a way to make money in a way where they contribute back for everything they've received. Most companies don't do that.
Red Hat contributes to a broad spectrum of Linux packages, drivers, and of course the kernel itself [1].
One example is virtualization: the virtio stack is maintained by Red Hat (afaik). This is a huge driver behind the “democratization” of virtualization in general, allowing users and small companies to access performant virt without selling a kidney to VMware.
Also, Red Hat contributes to or maintains all of the components involved in OpenShift and OpenStack (one of which is virtio!).
Why should Red Hat be expected to contribute to Gentoo? A distro is funded by its own users. What distro directly contributes to another distro if it’s not a derivative or something?
Red Hat primarily contributes code to the kernel and various OSS projects, paid for by the clients on enterprise contracts. A paying client needs something and it gets done. Then the rest of us get to benefit by receiving the code for free. It’s a beautiful model.
If you look at lists of top contributors, Red Hat (along with the usual suspects in enterprise) are consistently at the top.
As others mentioned, Red Hat (and SUSE) has been amazing for the overall Linux community. They give back far more than what the GPL requires them to. Nearly every one of their paid "enterprise" products has a completely free and open source version.
For example:
- Red Hat Identity Management -> FreeIPA (i.e. Active Directory for Linux)
- Red Hat Satellite -> The Foreman + Katello
- Ansible ... Ansible.
- Red Hat OpenShift -> OKD
- And more I'm not going to list.Red Hat employs a significant number of GCC core devs.
https://insights.linuxfoundation.org/project/korg/contributo...
It looks like they're second to Intel, at least by LF's metric. That said driver code tends to be take up a lot of space compared to other areas. Just look at the mass of AMD template garbage here: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/gpu/dr...
Intel has long been a big contributor--mostly driver stuff as I understand it. (Intel does a lot more software work than most people realize.) Samsung was pretty high on the list at one point as well. My grad school roommate (now mostly retired though he keeps his hand in) was in the top 10 individual list at one point--mostly for networking-related stuff.
Yes, that would be nice but when I look at their Grub src.rpm for instance, some of those patches would look original but came from Debian.
Back in the day when the boxes were on display in brick-and-mortar stores, SuSE was a great way to get up and running with Linux.
SuSE/openSuSE is innovating plenty of stuff which other distros find it worth to immitate, e.g. CachyOS and omarchy as Arch-derivatives felt that openSuSE-style btrfs snapshots were pretty cool.
It's a rock-solid distro, and if I had a use for enterprise support, I'd probably look into SLES as a pretty serious contender.
The breadth of what they're doing seems unparalleled, i.e. they have rolling release (Tumbleweed), delayed rolling release (Slowroll) which is pretty unique in and of itself, point release (Leap), and then both Tumbleweed and Leap are available in immutable form as well (MicroOS, and Leap Micro respectively), and all of the aforementioned with a broad choice of desktops or as server-focused minimal environments with an impressively small footprint without making unreasonable tradeoffs. ...if you multiply out all of those choices it gives you, it turns into quite a hairy ball of combinatorics, but they're doing a decent job supporting it all.
As far as graphical tools for system administration go, YaST is one of the most powerful and they are currently investing in properly replacing it, now that its 20-year history makes for an out-of-date appearance. I tried their new Agama installer just today, and was very pleased with the direction they're taking.
...so, not quite sure what you're getting at with your "Back in the day..." I, too, remember the days of going to a brick-and-mortar store to buy Linux as a box set, and it was between RedHat and SuSE. Since then, I think they've lost mindshare because other options became numerous and turned up the loudness, but I think they've been quiety doing a pretty decent job all this time and are still beloved by those who care to pay attention.
SUSE has a lot of ex-Red Hatters at high levels these days. Their CEO ran Asia-Pacific for a long time and North America commercial sales for a shorter period.
SUSE has always been pretty big in Europe but never was that prominent in North America except for IBM mainframes, which Red Hat chipped away at over time. (For a period, SUSE supported some mainframe features that Red Hat didn't--probably in part because some Red Hat engineering leadership was at least privately dismissive of the whole idea of running Linux on mainframes.)
Red hat certainly burns a lot of money in service of horrifyingly bad people. It's nice we get good software out of it, but this is not a funding model to glorify. And of course american businesses not producing open source is the single most malignant force on the planet.
> Red hat certainly burns a lot of money in service of horrifyingly bad people.
Red Hat also has a nasty habit of pushing their decisions onto the other distributions; e.g.
- systemd
- pulseaudio (this one was more Fedora IIRC)
- Wayland
- Pipewire (which, to be fair, wasn't terrible by the time I tried it)
Eh, pulseaudio got a lot better, and pipewire "just works" at this point (at least for me). Even Bluetooth audio works OOTB most of the time.
It's difficult to infer what kind of nuts is going on here.
If we're going to socialize production, let's do it properly.
Why is Wayland a disaster? Most of the Linux community is strongly in favor of it.
I don't know that Red Hat is a positive force. They seem to be on a crusade to make the Linux desktop incomprehensible to the casual user, which I suppose makes sense when their bread and butter depends on people paying them to fix stuff, instead of fixing it themselves.
You don’t know they are a positive force?
This, despite the fact that Rocky, Alma, Oracle Enterprise Linux, etc exist because of the hard work and money spent by Red Hat.
And what are those companies doing to fix this issue you claim Red Hat causes? Nothing. Because they like money, especially when all you have to do is rebuild and put your name on other people’s hard work.
And what exactly is incomprehensible? What exactly is it that they’re doing to the Linux desktop that make it so that people can’t fix their own problems? Isn’t the whole selling point of Rocky and Alma by most integrators is that it’s so easy you don’t need red hat to support it?
I think it's fair to say that Red Hat simply doesn't care about the desktop--at least beyond internal systems. You could argue the Fedora folks do to some degree but it's just not a priority and really isn't something that matters from a business perspective at all.
Well Red Hat did make a go at a supported enterprise desktop distro for a time and, as I wrote, Fedora--which Red Hat supports in a variety of ways for various purposes--is pretty much my default Linux distro.
So I'm not being critical. Yes, Red Hat employees do contribute to projects that are most relevant to the desktop even if doing so is not generally really the focus of their day jobs. And, no, other companies almost certainly haven't done more.
Off the top of my head System76 jumps to mind with their hardware and Pop!_OS.
> Can you name a company which does care about the linux desktop?
To some extent Valve. They have to, since the Steam Deck's desktop experience depends on the "Linux desktop" being a good experience.
Fedora is probably the best out-of-the-box desktop experience. Red Hat does great things, even if the IBM acquisition has screwed things up.
I find systemd pleasant for scheduling and running services but enraging in how much it has taken over every other thing in an IMO subpar way.
It's not just systemd, though. You have to look at the whole picture, like the design of GNOME or how GTK is now basically a GNOMEy toolkit only (and if you dare point this out on reddit, ebassi may go ballistics). They kind of take more and more control over the ecosystem and singularize it for their own control. This is also why I see the "wayland is the future", in part, as means to leverage away even more control; the situation is not the same, as xorg-server is indeed mostly just in maintenance work by a few heroes such as Alanc, but wayland is primarily, IMO, a IBM Red Hat project. Lo and behold, GNOME was the first to mandate wayland and abandon xorg, just as it was the first to slap down systemd into the ecosystem too.
NixOS is anything but a light abstraction (I say this as a NixOS user).
Tbh it feels like NixOS is convenient in a large part because of systemd and all the other crap you have to wire together for a usable (read compatible) Linux desktop. Better to have a fat programming language, runtime and collection of packages which exposes one declarative interface.
Much of this issue is caused by the integrate-this-grab-bag-of-tools-someone-made approach to system design, which of course also has upsides. Redhat seems to be really helping with amplifying the downsides by providing the money to make a few mediocre tools absurdly big tho.
Contribute back how and where? Definitely not to Gentoo if we look at the meagre numbers here.