Category: Mint

moving away from red hat to debian

whbeebe

On Thursday, 22 June, Red Hat Vice President Mike McGrath wrote a convoluted blog post ( https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-stream ), the most important part of the post being:

CentOS Stream will now be the sole repository for public RHEL-related source code releases.
…
Before CentOS Stream, Red Hat pushed public sources for RHEL to git.centos.org. When the CentOS Project shifted to center on CentOS Stream, we maintained these repositories even though CentOS Linux was no longer being built downstream of RHEL. The engagement around CentOS Stream, the engineering levels of investment, and the new priorities we’re addressing for customers and partners now make maintaining separate, redundant, repositories inefficient. The latest source code will still be available via CentOS Stream.

Red Hat customers and partners can access RHEL sources via the customer and partner portals, in accordance with their subscription agreement.

In other words, the source code to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) will no longer be posted for download and rebuilding unless you have a commercial agreement with Red Hat. I’ve read Red Hat’s reasons for this, and rather than quote any more, I will simply say that I agree with Red Hat’s reasons.

If you want Red Hat, then you should purchase Red Hat, or else use a Red Hat provided free ISO for personal use. But CentOS, and later Alma and Rocky Linux, took the RHEL sources, removed all the Red Hat branding, added their branding back in, built it, and then put the binaries out for free download. I didn’t particularly care for CentOS (I still remember all the CentOS drama before Red Hat purchased CentOS in 2014), Alma nor Rocky because simply recompiling the released source added no value. The only RHEL cloner that added any value is (it pains me to say) Oracle, with its Oracle Linux. They added some key features, the most important being Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, which used up-to-date kernel sources (far more up-to-date than provided by Red Hat) and additional enterprise hardware support unavailable with standard RHEL. Oracle, in my limited testing, was a better RHEL than RHEL.

I’m in full support of Red Hat protecting its business. I just don’t care for how Red Hat has behaved with regards to CentOS. Red Hat has become (along with Canonical and Ubuntu) an unreliable partner. I’m in full agreement with why Red Hat did what they did. I just don’t care for how Red Hat did what they did.

Which brings me to another realization: corporate Linux (Red Hat and Canonical in particular) has become untrustworthy for my uses. Rather than going all emotional and dramatic, I’m simply moving over to Debian, or if Debian derived, as far from Canonical derived as possible. When I take stock of all the Linux computers around my home all but one is running Debian; there’s Debian itself, Linux Mint (downstream from Ubuntu), Raspberry Pi OS (downstream from Debian) and LMDE 5 (Linux Mint Debian Edition, downstream from Debian). The one machine that doesn’t run Debian, runs Fedora.

What makes the Debian ecosystem of operating systems palatable to me are the flatpaks of major applications such as LibreOffice. Base Debian is more than adequate for my needs and application flatpaks are up-to-date releases not coupled with a distribution’s release. My needs are software development with a side of image processing and word processing. Between the power and stability of Debian, combined with flatpaks (and even AppImages), I have all I really need to continue on with Linux.

And this is the last time I intend to write about this particular contretemps.

how to install libreoffice flatpak

whbeebe2 Comments

A reader of the last post asked this question:

So, since the flatpak install isn’t found on libreoffice.org, where does one find it? Who puts it together? Does it update “automatically”?

For that matter, why is it that it seems most of the software doesn’t keep up with upgrades in Ubuntu Software? Admittedly, I’m on Ubuntu 20.04, but that’s mainly because I allowed Ubuntu to decide how to install and it didn’t create a partition large enough to upgrade to 22.04. Thank you very much.

Flatpak is now pretty widespread. I’m going to answer the installation question by showing how to install it with Linux Mint, Fedora, and then from the web directly. Here’s how a flatpak installable application looks with Linux Mint’s Software Manager.

As you can see for the LibreOffice entry, there’s a drop-down right beneath the illustration to select how the application is packaged. For Linux Mint applications there are only two; system package or Flatpak (Flathub). System package will be DEB (Debian) packages. If you want to switch from system to flatpak, then you can use the Software Manger to remove the existing system packages installation, then select flatpak, and install the flatpak version.

For another distribution, I’ll show you how Fedora (Fedora 38 in this instance) handles all this. I’m running Fedora 38 as a QEMU virtual machine on my Linux Mint system.

Although I’m showing Inkscape in this example, it’s the same everywhere. It, too, offers two selections, either system package RPM or flatpak.

Finally, the question that was originally asked was how to download it from the LibreOffice website. The answer is you don’t. Instead, you are given a link from the main (landing) page of the LibreOffice website with a download menu. Click “Download”, scroll down to “LibreOffice as Flatpak,” then click to go to a full page describing how to get the flatpak version. There is a direct link to Flathub where you can finally install it: here’s the link: https://flathub.org/apps/org.libreoffice.LibreOffice .

Flatpak is pretty ubiquitous these days. After experiencing this one example, I’m now fully comfortable with using flatpak for just about everything.

Update

As for why Ubuntu doesn’t keep up with the latest updates, it both does and doesn’t. If you choose an LTS release such as 20.04 or 22.04 (April on even numbered years) then you’ll be stuck with whatever that LTS first shipped with. If you install any other Ubuntu release on their six month cadence, then you’ll get more up-to-date pakage releases.

Personally, I’ve long since fallen away from Ubuntu because of a number of their take-it-or-leave-it decisions that rubbed me the wrong way. The latest is the decision by Ubuntu to use Snap instead of Flatpak for everything, and to remove Flatpak from a default installation. You can easily install Flatpak and continue installing from Flatpak, but the native support for Flatpak that you find in other distributions, such as Linux Mint and Fedora, won’t be there. Before you ask, Linux Mint intends to continue using Flatpak, even though it’s downstream from Ubuntu. I personally hope that Linux Mint will make the final migration to Debian, as I feel their LMDR (Linux Mint Debian Release) is as good as anything based on Ubuntu.