RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 9, 2013 6:48 UTC (Wed) by tetley80 (guest, #88691)
Parent article: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.9 released

The release of RHEL 5.9 also means that the development of RHEL 7 is heading towards final stages. Based on previous patterns of Fedora and RHEL releases, we will have the (much delayed) Fedora 18 as the base for RHEL 7.

As such, we will most likely have Gnome 3.6 as the default user interface in RHEL 7, which will have support for 10 years. This should set off alarms.

A curious mind might well ask:

(i) will the Gnome extensions (that make the desktop usable, ie. classic mode) for Gnome 3.6 be _stable_ and available _online_ [1] for 10 years?

(ii) if not, will Red Hat provide the appropriate subset of Gnome extensions as a standard package in RHEL 7 ?

(iii) if no to (ii), is Red Hat going to improve the fallback mode in Gnome 3.6, so that it is on par, in terms of functionality, with Gnome 2 in RHEL 6 ?

While the Gnome project recently announced that it will include by default a stable set of extensions that enable a "classic mode" [2], this only seems to apply to Gnome 3.8+ (ie. Fedora 19+). This is a problem, as Red Hat is not known for changing the Gnome version in RHEL once it has selected a Fedora release as the base (ie. Fedora 18 in this case).

[1] http://extensions.gnome.org/
[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/526082/

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 9, 2013 11:47 UTC (Wed) by mbar (guest, #73813) [Link] (1 responses)

None of this renders under SSH CLI, rest assured.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 9, 2013 12:56 UTC (Wed) by Company (guest, #57006) [Link]

That's just because nobody has ported gtk-cursed to GTK3/Clutter yet.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 9, 2013 12:38 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (9 responses)

Only possible answer: If you're a customer of Red Hat, contact Red Hat.

Aside from that, I'm not sure why giving support for 10 years should "set off alarms". That is why people pay for this. In any case, if you're a customer of Red Hat, you should pretty much know what the support is given upon and what not.

FWIW I use RHEL on a few servers.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 9, 2013 15:12 UTC (Wed) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link] (8 responses)

Also from personal experiences my impression is that most RHEL customers don't install/use GNOME or the desktop apps on most of their systems.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 9, 2013 15:37 UTC (Wed) by tetley80 (guest, #88691) [Link] (7 responses)

Then why do so many Red Hat employees work directly on Gnome as well as the graphics stack infrastructure (X et al) ?

Furthermore, Red Hat does offer a desktop product:
http://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/desktop/

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 9, 2013 15:57 UTC (Wed) by marduk (subscriber, #3831) [Link]

I have no doubt that some do, but as I said I believe that *most* don't, at least not in my experience. I do know of their desktop offering and employees working on desktop stuff, but it is relatively small compared to the number of employees working on other Red Hat products and services. Think Apple and their "server" offerings.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 9, 2013 16:33 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (5 responses)

> Then why do so many Red Hat employees work directly on Gnome as well as the graphics stack infrastructure (X et al) ?

Few people want to pay for a Linux Desktop because it's always really sucked. Traditionally speaking (past decade or so) you have always been far more productive in the majority of corporate environments by using a Windows desktop, installing a bunch of unix-related admin tools, and then having a separate Linux node you did your Linux/Unix hacking and administrative tasks from.

I expect that Redhat is interested in changing this. (I have found that Windows in VM on Linux provides good productivity) I also expect it's a difficult to allocate resources due to lack of current financial incentive.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 9, 2013 17:29 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] (2 responses)

> Traditionally speaking (past decade or so) you have always been far more
> productive in the majority of corporate environments by using a Windows
> desktop, installing a bunch of unix-related admin tools, and then having a
> separate Linux node you did your Linux/Unix hacking and administrative
> tasks from.

This isn't so anymore. I'm not talking about RedHat releases in particular (which aren't too suitable for desktop usage, since they are too far apart and fall behind rapid desktop advancements). In general however, any modern and up to date Linux distro can feel way more productive to use than Windows.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 10, 2013 14:56 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

> In general however, any modern and up to date Linux distro can feel way more productive to use than Windows.

Unless you need Active Directory integration, Outlook support, and 99% of all applications developed anywhere by anybody that are used by professionals.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 10, 2013 19:08 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

you are speaking for yourself.

Many professionals are able to operate quite nicely with Linux desktops.

If what you were saying was correct, none of the professionals would be able to run Macs because they have the same problem as linux for most of those applications that you are referring to.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 11, 2013 0:17 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Traditionally speaking (past decade or so) you have always been far more productive in the majority of corporate environments by using a Windows desktop, installing a bunch of unix-related admin tools, and then having a separate Linux node you did your Linux/Unix hacking and administrative tasks from.

Speak for yourself. In the (mercifully brief) period of my life when I was forced to use Windows at work, I hated it. I found the Windows desktop annoyingly unproductive and full of stupid design decisions that made my workflow intensely painful.

I'm lucky enough now to own my own company, so I have no concerns with Exchange integration, MS Office compatibility, etc. because the gold standard at my workplace is Linux on both server and desktop.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 11, 2013 21:48 UTC (Fri) by Jandar (subscriber, #85683) [Link]

> Traditionally speaking (past decade or so) you have always been far more productive in the majority of corporate environments by using a Windows desktop, installing a bunch of unix-related admin tools, and then having a separate Linux node you did your Linux/Unix hacking and administrative tasks from.

There are yet 80 days until 2013-04-01, so this joke is premature. Traditionally a Linux/Unix desktop was *far* more productive for Linux/Unix admin and hacking only since 7 a Windows desktop comes closer.

Our main admin has problems to install NX on local diskless clients so he installs diskfull Windows as substitute. The drop in productivity is staggering. Fortunately I have enough influence to prohibit such nonsense at my desk.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 9, 2013 16:15 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> As such, we will most likely have Gnome 3.6 as the default user interface in RHEL 7, which will have support for 10 years. This should set off alarms.

If by 'Alarms' you mean 'Ringing tidings of Joy' then, yes.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 9, 2013 16:35 UTC (Wed) by arjan (subscriber, #36785) [Link] (1 responses)

you'll not be able to buy hardware that runs gnome 3.6 on rhel7 after even a few years....
RHEL gets tons of backports for cpu and chipset support, but for graphics it tends to be much more time limited.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 10, 2013 0:22 UTC (Thu) by airlied (subscriber, #9104) [Link]

This might have been true for RHEL5, RHEL6 GPU support is quite different and involves fully supporting new HW for most of the lifetime of the product.

RHEL7 will continue in the RHEL6 model I would guess.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 9, 2013 17:25 UTC (Wed) by shmerl (guest, #65921) [Link] (5 responses)

RHEL packages KDE as well, so don't worry.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 10, 2013 2:16 UTC (Thu) by tetley80 (guest, #88691) [Link] (4 responses)

Well yes, however KDE in RHEL 6 is a disgrace. While KDE has improved notably over the years, RHEL 6 is stuck with KDE 4.3 which has lots of issues (eg. the kate editor crashing frequently, etc).

Red Hat could have included the considerably better KDE 4.4 at the time of finalising RHEL 6, and it is puzzling that they didn't. If I recall correctly, KDE 4.3 shipped in July 2009, while KDE 4.4 shipped in Feburary 2010. RHEL 6 was released in November 2010.

While I don't disagree that a decent amount of spit'n'polish is required to bring open-source software up to enterprise standards, I disagree that this should take around 15+ months (ie. the gap between KDE 4.3 and RHEL 6 release dates). Viable explanations for this are that Red Hat doesn't really care about KDE, and/or that Red Hat didn't fully trust KDE developers to minimize possible regressions between KDE 4.3 and 4.4 (which would be a puzzling attitude in itself, given that the point of new minor releases is to improve things).

I'm hoping that Red Hat will not make similar mistakes with Gnome 3.6 / 3.8 when it comes to composing RHEL 7. With the amount of Red Hat employees working on Gnome, there should be more trust that things are not going to break between releases.

To be clear, I'm not advocating the constant update of Gnome components in RHEL. Instead, I'm advocating that the choice of Gnome components in RHEL 7 should be based on UI usability and ease of discovery from the point of view of people used to "preceding" desktop paradigms (ie. most people).

The jump between Gnome 2 and 3 is massive in terms of how the interface has changed. As such, Gnome extensions (that allow the desktop to behave in a more traditional manner, ie. classic mode) are absolutely essential.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 10, 2013 10:49 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (3 responses)

You should really just contact Red Hat.

It seems a bit weird though that you seem to want arbitrary versions of software, yet use RHEL. It is not known to provide the latest versions of any software (e.g. advocating a GNOME version which is still under development and 2 versions ahead of what is in latest stable Fedora). If you don't want the GNOME provided by RHEL7, then RHEL6 will still be supported until RHEL8 is out.

Regarding crashing program (Kate), raise a ticket?

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 10, 2013 15:08 UTC (Thu) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> It seems a bit weird though that you seem to want arbitrary versions of software, yet use RHEL.

Well, Ideally you should just be able to upgrade the stuff you care about.

That way you only deal with the crap you want to deal with and let the rest of the OS stay the same. The idea that you need to upgrade your entire OS to get a latest version of Kate (or whatever) is idiotic.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 10, 2013 16:20 UTC (Thu) by tetley80 (guest, #88691) [Link] (1 responses)

you seem to want arbitrary versions of software

No, that's not my intent.

It would be awfully nice for Gnome 3.whatever shipped in RHEL 7 not to rely on the online Gnome extensions site (which is always in flux [*]), and instead ship a stable set of extensions (as a package) that enable classic UI elements. This can be done for whatever version of Gnome chosen by RH.

[*] A quite probable use case scenario: user gets a RHEL 7 box with Gnome 3.n interface and is stumped/annoyed/etc due to the UI change. He/she finds a nice set of extensions on the Gnome extensions site to make the UI more "traditional". Fast forward 1 year, when the user wants to setup a RHEL 7 box for a friend, as it's great for xyz. The online extensions now require Gnome 3.n+2, and no longer work with Gnome 3.n. The friend is sh*t-out-of-luck and is highly displeased by being stuck with the weird interface in RHEL.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 10, 2013 17:04 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

But various developers are exactly working to provide tarballs of a small set of extensions. You cannot expect GNOME to provide the level of support that you pay RH for.

In any case, the site does not require any specific GNOME version. In theory it could and there are no guarantees. Still, same situation exists for Firefox and various other software.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 10, 2013 11:50 UTC (Thu) by compte (guest, #60316) [Link] (1 responses)

Some Fedora employees are working on the XFCE desktop.
The Mate desktop, which is a fork from Gnome, has been available since F17.

RHEL 7 and Gnome extensions

Posted Jan 11, 2013 22:48 UTC (Fri) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]

Fedora is not a company, so Fedora employee doesn't mean much.

And Fedora is not RHEL, the 2 have separate decision making groups, different release cycles, different goals. While packages are mostly based on Fedora ( easy to check using the srpm ), not all of them are in Fedora. For example, non free stuff is a example, or package that fedora didn't accept yet, like for some specific software like pulp, katello.

And the that are coming from Fedora get a extra round of QA, various checks ( license, crypto and export check, etc ). I would not be surprised if the Common Criteria or NIST had also some requirement regarding auditing and build.

Also, I think there is much more freedom for selecting the version of packages in RHEL, as there is more time for that and no expectation to run the latest and greatest.

Finally, AFAIK, there is no public planning for the release, so you cannot do much except speculate about what will be shipped. That doesn't sound a very productive way to spent your time.