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

The "Alicante Mafia" - Part VII - The Industrial Actions Began Yesterday, Here's Why
The "Alicante Mafia" might not last much longer
openai.com Traffic Said to Have Fallen 50% in the Past Three Months, Reports Say It Nearly Ran Out of Money to Borrow
After the slop frenzy all we'll have left is environmental destruction
Rudeness and Vulgarity Won't Stop Journalism About Free Software
we seem to be on the right path
IBM Plans for Layoffs Becoming Clearer With "Employee Reviews"
Of course this impacts Red Hat as well
 
Richard Stallman's Talk at Georgia Tech is Just 2 Days Away
We're still curious to see how malicious people (or trolls) in social control media will try to slant his talk as "bad"
EPO's Web Site Misused for Propaganda About Illegal Kangaroo Courts to Distract From EPO Scandals and Judicial Crisis in Europe
UPC is illegal and unconstitutional
Gemini Links 21/01/2026: Edible Circuits and "Sayonara HTTP"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, January 20, 2026
IRC logs for Tuesday, January 20, 2026
IBM Hides Its Own Destruction (and Red Hat's)
It's like scenes out of '1984', which is what a now-famous advertisement from Apple compared IBM to
LLM Slop Not Dead Yet, Examples of Slop About "Linux"
We wish to see the totals down to zero
Links 20/01/2026: Cheeto Blackmails France Into 'Peace' While Looking to Annex EU, Mass Layoffs in Capgemini (Microsoft Reseller/Promoter) in France
Links for the day
Gemini Links 20/01/2026: Boxing and "Inbox Zero" Success
Links for the day
Windows and Slop Declining While Microsoft Silences Critics
Microsoft tries to suppress facts while faking 'demand' by imposing slop on everybody, everywhere
IBM Kills OzLabs, Signalling An Attack on Free Software (a Sign for Red Hat)
ibiblio also appears to have died (or experiences critical issues)
Red Hat Vice President Leaving After Nearly Two Decades
IBM's culture of secrecy is not compatible with Free software
Links 20/01/2026: "ChatGPT Health" (Latest Distraction From Being Insolvent) Flops and Raises Concerns, "The U.S. Military Faces a Reckoning on Greenland"
Links for the day
Readers Pleased With Layout Changes
Two days ago we began improving clarity and accessibility in the site
IBM is Outsourcing Red Hat's Fedora to Slop to 'Save Money'
If IBM cared about quality rather than alleged "cost savings" (cutting corners), it would assign more IBM staff to Fedora, but instead the exact opposite happened, with the likes of Cotton and Miller removed from the project
European Patent Office (EPO) Industrial Actions Formally Start in Two Hours
As per the latest (revised) action plan, today workers will slow down their work and limit patent grants
Microsoft Under Fresh Investigation by the Italian Competition Authority
In 2025 we kept a running tally of 30,000+ Microsoft layoffs, so 40k this year would not be unthinkable
The "Alicante Mafia" - Part VI - More Strikes Planned at the EPO, Starting This Month
Yesterday we said that friends of Berenguer or inside Berenguer's circle may have left
Gemini Links 20/01/2026: New Tea, Using a Roku at a Hotel, and "Voltage-Based Power Management for Any Raspberry Pi"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, January 19, 2026
IRC logs for Monday, January 19, 2026
If You Don't Want "Linux" to Become "Windows", Then Follow GNU
GAFAM isn't a friend of Linux; it's only a user in the same sense clients are "users" of a brothel
Links 19/01/2026: National Broadcasters on World or Local Affairs Up to a Week Ago
Links for the day
Gemini Links 19/01/2026: Game Boy and "The Lounge" (IRC) for the Elderly
Links for the day
Slopfarms in Google News (at Least Three Today) With Fake 'Articles' About "Linux"
Google itself is trying to promote its own slop ("Overview") at the expense of original and credible sources
Links 19/01/2026: ChatGPT’s Defects and The Guardian on Why So-called "AI Companies Will Fail"
Links for the day
This is What the Slop Bubble Popping Can Look Like
Maybe not an overnight collapse, but getting there gradually
IBM Quiet About Its Plan for Red Hat Amid Accelerated Bluewashing
Something is going on at Red Hat
The "Alicante Mafia" - Part V - It Seems Like Some People Are Already Leaving "The Mafia"
they have a rough idea of what's coming
Microsoft Means War, Microsoft is on the Side of ICE
Microsoft, people-ready
More Confirmatory Rumours Regarding "Massive" Red Hat Layoffs
Ecosystem and sales said to be targeted
Proprietary UNIX is What We'll Have If IBM Red Hat Gets Its Way
IBM Red Hat wants to control everything, even if that means killing everybody
Free Software in Times of Peace (and Times of War, Too)
GAFAM and IBM are war companies
Founder of GNU/Linux (RMS) Speaks in US University (College) This Week
The auditorium has very high capacity and this is his "college comeback" talk in the United States
Office Meetings Are Most Useful to the Least Productive Workers
In my "office life" days I really didn't like meetings
LinuxSecurity and Linuxiac Are Still Slopfarms, Even Anthony Pell Does It
We suppose waiting another month or another year won't change a thing
Claim That the Board of Directors at IBM Isn't Happy With How the Company is Run
IBM tries to project an image of strength to the whole world, especially to its clients
Links 18/01/2026: Legal Trouble for xAI, Climate Concerns, Data Breaches and More
Links for the day
'Vibe Coding', Chatbots, and Other Bots (e.g. "Agents" Disguised as "Superintelligence") Aren't Saving You Time
False marketing, FOMO marketing tactics
Gemini Links 19/01/2026: Analog Cameras and Plucker in 2026, US Losing Acceptability in Europe
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, January 18, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, January 18, 2026