Red Hat Abandons Consumer Linux Desktop

[HardOCP News]

So Red Hat’s Linux development team is abandoning its consumer Linux desktop to focus on products like Red Hat Global Desktop. RHGD is intended to work with the company's server products designed for businesses and developers.

It’s worth pointing out what’s missing in the list above: we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future. An explanation: as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers.

 

[farfromhome]

New blog post, but old news. Red Hat abandoned the consumer desktop long ago, when they discontinued vanilla consumer-oriented Red Hat Linux and kicked off community-managed Fedora. That blog post just reaffirmed what they've been doing for years. SuSE did the same thing with the consumer-oriented SuSE Linux and made openSuSE too. Of the old-guard commercial distros, only Mandriva (formerly Mandrake) is still around as a commercial consumer-oriented product, and they were in bankruptcy for a while, though now they're in the black again.

Commercial consumer Linux has two main issues right now: The dominance of Windows (of course) makes it hard for them to convince OEM's to pre-load it, which is the primary way they could make money, and the huge success of non-commercial distros like Ubuntu make it hard for a commercial distro to compete.

(Side note: I said commercial, not closed-source; most commercial distros that have had any success have been fully open-source, as the community tends to shun closed distros. Even SuSE, which was open-source but had a closed development model and a proprietary control panel eventually opened up after enough pressure [and a buyout from Novell]. The only exceptions I can think of are Xandros and Lindows/Linspire, but they are aimed at a completely different demographic than SuSE and Mandriva.)

 

[rabident]

Checkpoint SPlat has been a pretty sucessful closed source commercial distro.

 

[eeyrjmr]

They aint been in the "desktop" market for years
THAT is what fedora is for


They provide a desktop-tuned version of RedHat for corporate users tho

 

[BillLeeLee]

I didn't even know they were still in the desktop aside from the Fedora community, since all that I am familiar with from them these days are Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the RH Application Stack.