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Desktop is not a large market for Red Hat. Even their employees mostly use Fedora.

The only place I really see RHEL workstations is in special purpose applications, and in most of those the users either have a separate Windows box, or they Citrix/RDP into the corporate Windows environment to do normal office productivity things anyway.

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Seattle3503 14 hours ago | parent [-]

About ten years ago I worked in a bioinformatics lab. All the work machines were centrally managed RHEL machines. I guess it's different now?

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thyristan 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Ubuntu basically ate their lunch for the desktop case. It used to be that commercial software required SuSE or RedHat on the desktop to get support. But especially RedHat always suffered from the curse of being ancient compared to other desktop distros. When Ubuntu became big enough for commercial software to target, people chose that because Ubuntu was just more recent.

Also, several releases ago, RedHat already started to wind down their desktop efforts, just leaving server/container/cloud as the primary use case for RHEL, with desktops just as "this could also work". That latest decision to drop a lot of desktop related stuff is just a logical continuation of this policy.

	▲	dec0dedab0de 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Ubuntu was easier to install, was freely available, and had a business model. Redhat had given up on the home market, Suse sold out to Microsoft, and Fedora seemed like a best effort fork that could disappear at any moment. Plus many of us already loved Debian, and were recommending people use Ubuntu as a friendlier Debian. Being "More Recent" Had very little to do with it.