You're right. And that's something I still don't quite understand.

I'd really like to know how many workstation licenses Redhat really sells. It's been so long, I didn't even realize that they still had a separate workstation license available for purchase. When you have the same distribution setup for Servers and Workstations, it seems to me that one of those flavors is going to dominate and the other will be eventually be neglected. Who are the users that are buying and using Workstation licenses?

But, when it comes down to it, I still don't see why they would want to package an Office Suite for RHEL. Or, more importantly, why a user would want to use it. RHEL is designed for stability. It's a great server OS that's well supported. Because of this, it's also known to have older versions of libraries and programs. This is okay, because many new features and fixes get backported, but it's still usually an older (stable) version of software that's included. Why would you want to have an older version of an Office Suite? Why would they want to package a newer (and riskier) version that can be installed on a server? It just doesn't make that much sense to me... it's a fundamental dichotomy between what makes a good server OS vs a good workstation OS.

Note: this give and take has been going on with Linux on the server vs Linux on the Desktop for decades. It's probably going to keep going on for decades. The things that one wants for one use case isn't what makes sense for other use cases. This is why we have different distributions, which is a good thing. The part I don't get is why RH would want to merge the two back together. Which is why I see the idea of deprecating workstation applications (as packaged by RHEL) in favor of Flatpak versions of them as a good thing from the RHEL point of view.

>Who are the users that are buying and using Workstation licenses?

Sometimes institutes and businesses that insist on support contracts, and ones from the vendor publishing the software itself. Sometimes there is actual legal red tape requiring them of such, usually its just management doing management things. That requirement immediately cuts down the majority of their options, even if what I would describe as more sensible options exist under such a criteria.

Many companies use RHEL Workstation to run proprietary GUI applications. The application usually runs on RHEL Servers and uses X11 forwarding to show the GUI on the Workstation.

Running the same OS on the client and on the server makes support much simpler. ISVs may not even support more modern OSs like Fedora or Ubuntu.

Those companies don't need an Office Suite as they have Windows machines that can run Microsoft Office. They just need a Linux desktop environment that is easy to use and stays out of the way when accessing the Workstation through VNC.