Red Hat Abandons Support of LibreOffice in RPM Format: What Will It Mean for RHEL and Fedora Users?

2023-06-09 08:00:01

Red Hat has announced that it will stop supporting LibreOffice in the RPM format, which is the native format used by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora. However, this does not mean that the users of these distributions will be left without the office suite, although there will be changes.

Matthias Clasen, a Red Hat employee and GNOME developer, explained on the Fedora developer mailing lists that the LibreOffice RPM packages have recently been de-maintained and that the company has no plans to commit resources for this purpose. However, maintenance of current releases of LibreOffice for RHEL 7, 8, and 9 will continue for the life of these releases.

Clasen noted that the Red Hat team responsible for maintaining LibreOffice for RHEL is adjusting its engineering priorities, focusing on issues like Wayland and HDR support, among other improvements. It is also mentioned that Red Hat has laid off hundreds of workers, including the head of the Fedora program, so it is possible that this decision is related to those cuts to some extent.

As for LibreOffice, Red Hat’s decision means that support for RPM packages will be limited to maintaining existing versions, although they will continue to support the project through fixes, especially with regards to Flatpak packages. Ultimately, the future of the LibreOffice distribution in the Red Hat ecosystem seems to lie in Flatpaks, unless the community intervenes, although this is discouraged due to the workload of maintaining all of The Document Foundation’s software. .

It is important to mention that Canonical also maintains LibreOffice in Snap format, although it has not yet promoted it as a replacement for Deb packages due to certain desktop integration limitations. However, the maintenance of LibreOffice in Deb format is more assured, since it involves different parties, from Canonical/Ubuntu to Debian and The Document Foundation.

Regarding the RPM ecosystem, there is no mention of what SUSE and openSUSE will do in relation to LibreOffice, so there are no news of changes at the moment.