One more time about Red Hat
On December 25, I wrote about how Red Hat is fucking shitting on Linux. I mentioned that RHEL 10 Beta and CentOS Stream 10 removed most graphical desktop applications, because they’re “transitioning to providing desktop applications via Flatpak.” And I said that Red Hat definitely threw down the gauntlet, by not caring in the least about desktop users.
Now it seems that they don’t care much about any kind of users!
DWW reviewed CentOS 10 Stream and noted:
There are few applications in evidence, no development tools, no container manager, no media support, not even a web browser. Further, there is no graphical web browser in the default repositories and, on a distribution in a family of projects which promote Flatpak as the path into the future, there are no Flatpak repositories enabled.
DW’s Jesse Smith is a bit dumb here: all of CentOS 10 Stream’s faults also exist in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.0 Beta, specifically the “no GUI apps, just use Flatpak if you can” (because it’s not enabled). This is not a CentOS-specific issue!
But he’s even dumber to have missed the real question: OK, no Firefox, no Chrome or Chromium, but GNOME has always had its own web browser, called Epiphany! Now it’s simply “GNOME Web” (or Web in the menus), but still epiphany
as a binary. So:
Why no Epiphany?
This question is even more legitimate once you remember that there are several Linux administration tools are primarily or exclusively available as web applications. To only mention one that’s developed by Red Hat: Cockpit. Red Hat: An introduction to Cockpit, a browser-based administration tool for Linux.
To realize the degree of mental disability reached by “Red Hat, an IBM business,” guess what? Cockpit not only exists in CentOS 10 Stream’s and RHEL’s repos, but it’s even on the installation media!
OK, let me put it for retards:
- CentOS Stream 10 and RHEL 10 include Cockpit.
- Cockpit requires a web browser.
- CentOS Stream 10 and RHEL 10 do not include a browser.
- Therefore, Cockpit cannot be accessed from within neither of CentOS Stream 10 nor RHEL 10!
Also, let me restate this:
- Red Hat controls and steers GNOME.
- RHEL and CentOS Stream only support GNOME for a DE (EPEL is a non-supported repo managed by Fedora, so it doesn’t count).
- GNOME still has its own web browser,
epiphany
, no matter it’s rarely used by people. - Red Hat can’t be bothered to include GNOME’s own web browser, preferring to deliver a partly useless distro!
Epiphany does not exist at all for CentOS and RHEL, not even in EPEL; it does exist in Fedora. (Debian and Ubuntu: the package is called epiphany-browser
.)
So Red Hat, the company that has dumbified and destroyed GNOME, can’t even stand by GNOME’s own, official browser?! It’s not even that bad: it includes basic ad blocking and, despite the lack of add-ons, it’s just perfect for web-based server administration tools!
And the full DVD edition of CentOS 10 Stream x86_64 weighs 6.8 GB! What for?! For a castrated, Wayland-only GNOME?
Fuck Red Hat. They’re a disgrace.
So Cockpit is not usable… This is ridiculous!
How can a company as important yesterday and today as Red Hat do this kind of thing? It’s suicidal.
In short, they and any distro based on them are to be shunned.
Well, you enable Flathub…
I did not check what AlmaLinux 10 Beta does. Maybe they do add a browser. Oh, wait, they do it!
Good. But some will tell you that Rocky is more “100% RHEL-like” than Alma, which deviates on certain points, as here with the browser and mail client. So what does Rocky Linux do?
I couldn’t care less. And they didn’t release any beta of version 10.