Comment by Etheryte

Red Hat contributes to a broad spectrum of Linux packages, drivers, and of course the kernel itself [1].

One example is virtualization: the virtio stack is maintained by Red Hat (afaik). This is a huge driver behind the “democratization” of virtualization in general, allowing users and small companies to access performant virt without selling a kidney to VMware.

Also, Red Hat contributes to or maintains all of the components involved in OpenShift and OpenStack (one of which is virtio!).

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/915435/

Why should Red Hat be expected to contribute to Gentoo? A distro is funded by its own users. What distro directly contributes to another distro if it’s not a derivative or something?

Red Hat primarily contributes code to the kernel and various OSS projects, paid for by the clients on enterprise contracts. A paying client needs something and it gets done. Then the rest of us get to benefit by receiving the code for free. It’s a beautiful model.

If you look at lists of top contributors, Red Hat (along with the usual suspects in enterprise) are consistently at the top.

Presumably, contribute to the entire ecosystem in terms of package maintenance and other non-monetary forms.

As others mentioned, Red Hat (and SUSE) has been amazing for the overall Linux community. They give back far more than what the GPL requires them to. Nearly every one of their paid "enterprise" products has a completely free and open source version.

For example:

  - Red Hat Identity Management -> FreeIPA  (i.e. Active Directory for Linux)
  - Red Hat Satellite -> The Foreman + Katello
  - Ansible ... Ansible.
  - Red Hat OpenShift -> OKD
  - And more I'm not going to list.

They contribute a lot to GNOME, libvirt, firewalld and other linux systems that I take advantage of even as a gentoo user.

Red Hat employs a significant number of GCC core devs.

Red Hat contributes a huge amount to the open source ecosystem. They're one of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel (maybe the biggest).

The OpenSUSE Tumbleweed installation on my desktop PC is nearing 2 years now and still rolling. It is a great and somewhat underrated distribution.

SuSE/openSuSE is innovating plenty of stuff which other distros find it worth to immitate, e.g. CachyOS and omarchy as Arch-derivatives felt that openSuSE-style btrfs snapshots were pretty cool.

It's a rock-solid distro, and if I had a use for enterprise support, I'd probably look into SLES as a pretty serious contender.

The breadth of what they're doing seems unparalleled, i.e. they have rolling release (Tumbleweed), delayed rolling release (Slowroll) which is pretty unique in and of itself, point release (Leap), and then both Tumbleweed and Leap are available in immutable form as well (MicroOS, and Leap Micro respectively), and all of the aforementioned with a broad choice of desktops or as server-focused minimal environments with an impressively small footprint without making unreasonable tradeoffs. ...if you multiply out all of those choices it gives you, it turns into quite a hairy ball of combinatorics, but they're doing a decent job supporting it all.

As far as graphical tools for system administration go, YaST is one of the most powerful and they are currently investing in properly replacing it, now that its 20-year history makes for an out-of-date appearance. I tried their new Agama installer just today, and was very pleased with the direction they're taking.

...so, not quite sure what you're getting at with your "Back in the day..." I, too, remember the days of going to a brick-and-mortar store to buy Linux as a box set, and it was between RedHat and SuSE. Since then, I think they've lost mindshare because other options became numerous and turned up the loudness, but I think they've been quiety doing a pretty decent job all this time and are still beloved by those who care to pay attention.

> Red hat certainly burns a lot of money in service of horrifyingly bad people.

Red Hat also has a nasty habit of pushing their decisions onto the other distributions; e.g.

- systemd

- pulseaudio (this one was more Fedora IIRC)

- Wayland

- Pipewire (which, to be fair, wasn't terrible by the time I tried it)

It's difficult to infer what kind of nuts is going on here.

I'm sorry but this is just completely disconnected from reality. Wayland is being successfully used every single day. Just because you don't like something doesn't mean it's inherently bad.

Why is Wayland a disaster? Most of the Linux community is strongly in favor of it.

You don’t know they are a positive force?

This, despite the fact that Rocky, Alma, Oracle Enterprise Linux, etc exist because of the hard work and money spent by Red Hat.

And what are those companies doing to fix this issue you claim Red Hat causes? Nothing. Because they like money, especially when all you have to do is rebuild and put your name on other people’s hard work.

And what exactly is incomprehensible? What exactly is it that they’re doing to the Linux desktop that make it so that people can’t fix their own problems? Isn’t the whole selling point of Rocky and Alma by most integrators is that it’s so easy you don’t need red hat to support it?

I think it's fair to say that Red Hat simply doesn't care about the desktop--at least beyond internal systems. You could argue the Fedora folks do to some degree but it's just not a priority and really isn't something that matters from a business perspective at all.

Fedora is probably the best out-of-the-box desktop experience. Red Hat does great things, even if the IBM acquisition has screwed things up.

I find systemd pleasant for scheduling and running services but enraging in how much it has taken over every other thing in an IMO subpar way.