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Red Hat orphans LibreOffice

by on05 June 2023


Gnome alone

The Red Hat Package Managers for LibreOffice have been orphaned, according to a post by Red Hat manager Matthias Clasen on the "LibreOffice packages" mailing list.

He said that the Red Hat Display Systems team (the team behind most of Red Hat's desktop efforts) has maintained the LibreOffice packages in Fedora for years as part of its work to support LibreOffice for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

“We are adjusting our engineering priorities for RHEL for Workstations and focusing on gaps in Wayland, building out HDR support, building out what's needed for colour-sensitive work, and a host of other refinements required by Workstation users. This is work that will improve the workstation experience for Fedora as well as RHEL users, and which, we hope, will be positively received by the entire Linux community,” Clasen said

This requires Red Hat to pivot away from work as it had been doing on desktop applications and cease shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL starting in a future RHEL version. This limits Red Hat’s ability to maintain it in future versions of Fedora.

Red Hat will maintain LibreOffice in supported versions of RHEL (RHEL 7, 8, and 9) with needed CVEs and similar for the lifetime of those releases (as published on the Red Hat website). As part of that, the engineers doing that work will contribute some fixes upstream to ensure LibreOffice works better as a Flatpak, which will be how most people consume LibreOffice in the long term.

Users will find LibreOffice in GNOME Software, which will install a Flatpak from FlatHub rather than an RPM from the distro.

 

Last modified on 05 June 2023
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