Bonum Certa Men Certa

IBM Red Hat Kills LibreOffice In Fedora and RHEL; Says “No longer has resources to maintain them.”

Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer

IBM Red Hat Kills LibreOffice In Fedora and RHEL; Says “No longer has resources to maintain them.”



Well, I hope you didn’t have any documents to edit. I suppose we’re all supposed to use GULAG CRASH and GULAG DOCS now anyway or something, or maybe they’ll be nice enough to ship a desktop link to MICROSHIT OFFICE for the GULAGWEB.



(No, SeaMonkey or other Web Standards-compliant browser users need not apply, obviously.)



I’m also told you can get LibreOffice from “FAT Pack” (FlatPak), the gargantuan and horrible package manager that barfs out “distro-agnostic” packages that are huge and don’t respect any of your system settings.



FAT Pack is also terrific in the fact that it has an alleged sandbox that lets applications access all sorts of things that are enough to damage your system with, but walls them off from parts of the system YOU need them to access during the usual and customary operation of the program.



I’ve been sitting here for years trying to ignore the increasingly awful IBM Red Hat situation, but now it is starting to affect Fedora. Distributions that have 3-4 people maintaining them have native packages for LibreOffice, and now it is the IBM Red Hat position that they need those “developer hours” (how many hours do they spend sending updates to a build bot?) fixing Wayland, which has routinely broken the ABI for little or no reason, as the developers themselves now openly admit to on the mailing lists.



They’re pressuring people to add FlatHub and then when they do it’s like all sorts of horrible things you didn’t want to see in your software center, like Microsoft Edge, the backdoored password stealer.



Flathub is also a security hazard itself, like Snaps are. Snaps already had some malware incidents like bitcoin miners. They don’t care if the software is proprietary. Just dump it in there, and when they can’t review it some poor user always ends up cleaning up the mess.



“My software is proprietary and is thus unreviewable. I have also decided that the sandbox level will be no sandbox at all. Thanks.” Do you want ants? This is how you get ants.



FlatHub only has one advantage over Snap in this department (for now).



You can filter out things that are under a Proprietary license in GNOME Software so you don’t have to see them and will not accidentally install the perfect cover for a Trojan Horse.



Flatpak breaks pretty much the strongest part of Linux security. That the distribution you’re running has reviewed and built everything.



If IBM Red Hat is really going to strong arm people that don’t want to use it, I must return again to Ron Swanson from Parks & Recreation to show what I’m likely going to have to do with Fedora.



When Mr. Swanson receives an “Excellence in Government Award” (as a Libertarian, this horrifies him and he doesn’t want anyone to ever find out), he saws it into pieces, burns it, and buries it in Illinois (a State so corrupt that nobody would ever think to look for the ashes here).



If you think this is extreme, consider that a core and major application has just been deemed “unimportant” by IBM Red Hat, no doubt to give Microsoft a boost with their Office programs (some of which are online, where that’s the DRM, and if you don’t pay them, they stop working, and they can make changes and you can’t hold out on the previous version).



I don’t think I want to stick around for what happens next.



I’m not keen to see where this goes. I hired an attorney who used Outlook and Office 365 and it was just very aggravating and unprofessional. And of course nobody supports large email attachments so I had to put it on my Google Drive and remove DAC so that she could access documents which included very sensitive information.



I don’t know who opens a Web browser to edit documents. Or even to do E-Mail. It’s just flat out retarded.



Like literally the best thing about a Chromebook is you can install Debian and put real programs for editing documents and managing your email in there. I may be the only person on Earth who has one and never opens Chrome. It’s a shame to see Fedora going in the other direction.



The article literally says that not having an office program will improve the desktop experience. That’s funny. Basically every Linux article I’ve read pitching it to people is it has a full Microsoft-compatible office program that doesn’t have some garbage activation server. You can’t blame the person who wrote it because they’re just quoting what some idiot GNOME (an IBM thrall) developer and also a Red Hat employee told them to say.



IBM Red Hat is just being cheap and pulling out from investment in Free Software.



In some cases, they join infamous shit-spreaders (such as the person trolling our TechRights IRC server) to cover themselves, like laying out false allegations against Richard M. Stallman, to justify it as a “moral imperative” to defund the Free Software Foundation.



(Jeff Epstein was actually closely affiliated with Bill Gates, who rode the LOLITA Express and visited Epstein in prison. Surely, IBM Red Hat will cancel their business deals with Microsoft? No?)



One does have to wonder if this time there was no way to possibly accuse anyone working on LibreOffice of rape or “transphobia” so they just said it would be better if the user had a computer that couldn’t do anything, and it improved the desktop experience.



Yeah, I need to stop being lazy and back up my files properly and move this over to someone that can do a little better than “We’re stripping it down to a Web browser to improve the experience.”



“Any community member is of course free to take over maintenance, both for the RPMS in Fedora and the Fedora LibreOffice Flatpak, but be aware that this is a sizable block of packages and dependencies and a significant amount of work to keep up with.”



Yeah, what, all three members of the Fedora “community” that haven’t been Kofler‘d?



Obviously, I’ve been “quieted” on Fedora IRC because I know full well how bad Flatpak sucks.



The only thing I’ve seen Flatpak’s alleged sandbox actually do is break themes and make it so my video downloader in Firefox does not work. So obviously Flatpak Firefox lasted oh about three seconds.



Thank God LibreWolf finally did an RPM.



It also tends to wall things off from the graphics card so that you get slow terrible screen drawing.



It turns out that walling desktop applications off from the system is stupid and pointless and breaks them in ways where the user doesn’t even want the application anymore.



The more usable Flatpak applications pretty much just opt out of the sandbox entirely because the person packaging them knows that this is the only way they actually run at all. Then you’re back to “RPM” where the thing can access pretty much whatever it wants (within the confines of what the system itself manages to enforce).



Only it’s a “really terrible RPM with full access, packaged with a lot of bloated rotting platforms that don’t get CVE fixes”. “Where’s the robot to pat you on the back, or the engineer? Or the children, perhaps? Now you see how all your so called power counts for absolutely nothing. How your entire empire of destruction comes crashing down over one….little…cherry.”

-Me on Fedora-Social


That’s when Khaytsus (Real name, Walter Francis) +q’d me and “won the argument” like Bill O’Reilly (O’RLY) did on Fox News.



Shut up! Shut up! Kill his mic!

-Bill O’RLY


Honestly, Khaytsus could have left it at this, but then had to also imply I am crazy.



That’s one way the Soviets dealt with dissent. Matthew J. Garrett‘s sockpuppets have accused me of being a “schizophrenic”. It’s in the #techrights logs.



The Soviets had this thing they’d do to discredit people. They had a diagnosis called “Sluggish Schizophrenia”, and the whole thing was made up. And when someone stepped out of line, they were accused of being one, and then the “mental health” laws took them away and you never saw that person again. They were off working on a highway and when they died they’d be buried underneath it.



The diagnosis has long been discredited because of its scientific inadequacy and its use as a means of confining dissenters.[6] It has never been used or recognized outside of the Soviet Union,[7] or by international organizations such as the World Health Organization.[8] It is considered a prime example of the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union.[9]

-Wikipedia


Unfortunately, abuse of psychiatry and accusations of “mental illness” were never limited to the despotic hellholes that you’d expect them to be in.



Evil gaslighting fucks use this all the time.



Wow man, lay off the meth. Seek help.. Serious real medical help. Seriously. You need help. Something has slid off your cracker.

-Khaytsus, (Real name, Walter Francis), in response to me not liking Flatpak and saying it the way I quoted myself.


I wonder when malicious shit-spreaders became like, most of the mods in the Fedora “Community”.



And then I was silenced, like many people that have criticized a Red Hat decision in public.



“They’re crazy. You hear me? You’re all fucking crazy! Hey, is it me or is it getting awfully quiet lately in the Fedora community?” -Fedora chatroom mods.



One of them, just last night, remarked on how quiet the rooms get. You see what people have to deal with for critiquing a technical decision politely. You tell me who’s crazy.….. Nuts. Insane. Bonzo. No longer in control of one’s faculties. Three fries short of a happy meal. WACKO!



Of course probably nobody will step up to maintain LibreOffice because IBM has ran off and banned the community that would have done that. They didn’t “see the value” in having a community and it’s gone now.

Recent Techrights' Posts

SLAPP Censorship - Part 29 Out of 200: Violent Language Won't Go Away When You Use It in Your Site, Blog, and Social Control Media
abuse began in 2012 because I had politely and accurately criticised Red Hat
Lacking Business Model, Bluesky Has Become Slop and Gravitates Towards Plagiarism, Bots
LLM slop/plagiarism under the guise of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI)
 
Links 01/04/2026: Quantum Hype (Turing and Google), "US Fuel Prices Surge Past $4 a Gallon"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 01/04/2026: "Sacred Week of Cycling" and Zenity for Scripts
Links for the day
Losing Debian: Sruthi Chandran election flop
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
French judgment: parasitisme by FSFE & Matthias Kirschner (CO23.002709)
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Microsoft Uses April Fools to 'Joke' About Inserting "Age Verification" (Surveillance) Into Linux
MinceR says the "lkml [message/page] one is April Fools or at least they're trying to pass it off as April Fools [however] the [GitHub] one was archived on the 8th and yesterday, so that probably isn't..."
IBM "Headcount Reductions" by Early Retirement and Death
The tragedy at IBM started 33 years ago on the first of April
Red Hat: Latin-1 character set under threat from Bishop Michael Martin, North Carolina
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 01/04/2026: Microsoft GitHub Now Pushing Ads Into People's Code/Commits, Earth Overshoot Day Draws Nearer
Links for the day
What IBM and EPO Workers Have in Common: European Media Not Covering Very Major News (Press Became Dysfunctional)
Are IBM operatives working to scuttle the process of investigative journalism?
Free Speech in the United Kingdom When "Chilling Effect" is Increasingly Prevalent
If politicians cannot even use a term like "parasitic behaviour", then where do we as a society end up?
Oracle Lays Off Because of Debt and Commercial Issues, Not Slop
Like Scam Altman, Larry Ellison hangs around Cheeto King because he could use some bailouts in the form of government contracts or phony money with an incredible name like "Stargate"
The Real Reason Many Sites and Forums Shun Microsoft Lunduke
When forums say that they banned Microsoft Lunduke or don't want him mentioned it's probably because they are familiar with the "stench" that follows him around
Gemini Links 01/04/2026: Hallucinations, Stitching, and Type Systems
Links for the day
Lots of Layoffs at IBM, "Media Blackout" About Mass Layoffs at IBM's HashiCorp and Confluent Last Month
IBM is a dying company circling down the drain while manipulating or paying the media to pretend everything is fine
Microsoft Under Investigation by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) for Abusive Tactics
What's noteworthy is that this is "set to begin in May"
Sounds Like Red Hat (IBM) Layoffs in Slop Clothing
This is an IBM policy. They try to justify staff cuts.
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 31, 2026
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 31, 2026
In Time for April Fools (and Easter), 30,000 Oracle 'Pink Slips' While People Are Asleep
Oracle probably has no choice but to fire a ton of people
Gemini Links 31/03/2026: Five Years on Gemini (Rob's Gemini Capsule), OFFLIFIRSOCH 2026, and More
Links for the day
Slopfarms Persist, But Google Seems to Have Delisted Many
We are still checking
Links 31/03/2026: More Energy Shortages Noted, Taylor Swift Faces Trademark Infringement Suit
Links for the day
Chaff, Slop and Spam Help Distract From Parallel Crises at IBM
IBM seems very eager to undermine discussion about what goes on inside
IBM-Spawned Lexmark Sold, Then Came Mass Layoffs, Now the CEO Who Did This is Leaving
IBM is really not a magnet for talent at this point
Not April Fools But April First: Red Hat Staff Becoming "IBM"
claims of mass layoffs set to kick off at IBM some time soon
Gemini Links 31/03/2026: Antenna Packed Up, AuraGem and AuraSearch Maintenance
Links for the day
Links 31/03/2026: More Social Control Media Bans, BBC Now Run by GAFAM (US) Executive
Links for the day
'Broligarchs' Don't Want Science, They Want Entertainers to Entertain Them (and Make Them Richer)
Of course this will result in things getting worse in the sciences and everyone who relies on the sciences
When Republics Turn From Democratic Governments Into Imperialistic Dictatorships
What goes on in the US would require talking about politics
Companies That Have Nothing Except Buzzwords and Promises Will Perish
Dishonest media will perish along with the companies it is covering up for
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to be Grilled in Two Weeks' Time by the British Government for "Recent Regulatory Failures"
we escalated to our politicians
GNU/Linux Will Thrive as Long as It's Modular, Not Monolithic
To IBM, it's all about money. Nothing else matters.
EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part X - People Are Leaving
"I was happy to be at the EPO in the beginning, but since I realized it's all a big mafia"
IBM's 33 Years as a "Financial Engineering" (Accounting Tricks) Company
In relation to Red Hat, this "financial engineering" involves culling many workers and trying to replace them with slop
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 30, 2026
IRC logs for Monday, March 30, 2026
Links 31/03/2026: Rising Costs, Cyberattacks, Novo Patent Expiry
Links for the day
Gemini Links 31/03/2026: American Spring, Distributed Systems Simulator, and Calculus for Electronics
Links for the day
SUEPO Central Made a Strike (or Striking) Success
Europe has more than enough qualified patent officials
IBM Layoffs and Their Expected Scope in April 2026
Such layoffs impact not only IBM "proper"
SLAPP Censorship - Part 28 Out of 200: Facing Consequences for Impersonation and Worse
It's not "funny". It is moreover libellous.
Links 30/03/2026: South Korea Next to Curb Social Control Media Addiction and Manipulation, Notorious Patents in the US Challenged
Links for the day
Gemini Links 30/03/2026: Going Back to Wrist Watches and Why LLMs in Programming Suck
Links for the day
Did IBM Pay thestreet.com for Puff Pieces? (Like It Did With Forbes)
If so, there is no disclosure
Wikipedia - Funded by Slop-pushing Companies and 'Broligarchs' - Gave Benefit of the Doubt to Slop, Then Regretted It
Wikipedia sucks. Without slop it'll suck a little less.
Payoffs of Lifelong Commitments
"The Lifelong Activist"
Links 30/03/2026: "We Can’t Income-Tax Ultra-Elites"; "The Pirate Bay’s Oldest Torrent Turned 22"
Links for the day
Today, Europe's Second-Largest Institution (EPO) Goes on Strike That Can Last Until 2027. Nobody in the Media Covers This!
"We stand with the protesters"
When the Cost (or Time) of Maintenance Exceeds the Value
In recent years it seems like more people learn to remove things from their lives, not add more things
Passage of Wealth Upwards, Blaming the Victims
Tim Sweeney's net worth is 5.1 billion USD according to Forbes
More Media Needs to Tell the Public Slop is a Giant Bubble, It Should Stop Taking "Sponsorship" Money to Inflate This Bubble
If enough of (what's left of) the media changes its tune and quits being a parrot of GAFAM, then we can debate slop like grown-ups
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 29, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, March 29, 2026
Trying to Hide One's Abuses by Imposing Silence on Critics ("My Profile Was Private")
With enough daylight, sooner or later everyone knows you are a vampire
Fedora Badges System Shows the Demise of Fedora Under IBM
IBM isn't good at keeping what it buys
IBM is Sunsetting Red Hat, It Only Uses the Brand and the Shell
IBM buys or spins off companies as containers for "toxic assets" and debt
Cisco Systems is a Still Weak Spot With Bug Doors
nothing to offer except storytelling
EPO Strike Begins Today and It's the Longest One Yet (Can Last a Year)
Where's the media?
Gemini Links 30/03/2026: Approaching April and Arvelie Calendar
Links for the day