Red Hat will no longer support LibreOffice in subsequent RHEL versions

Red Hat will no longer provide the office software package LibreOffice in new versions of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system. The company also says that this means it contributes less to the development of LibreOffice for Fedora.

Red Hat says spend less work on desktop applications such as LibreOffice to instead prioritize ‘refinements’ for RHEL for Workstation users. The company wants to focus on improving WayLand and expanding HDR support. For this reason, the office software package will no longer be supported from the next RHEL version, 10. It is not known when that version will become available. Red Hat will continue to release security patches for the existing versions of LibreOffice in RHEL 7, 8 and 9 in the near future. The team will also make a number of fixes in the upstream so that LibreOffice can be used as Flatpak.

The team further writes that this “limits our ability to maintain LibreOffice in Fedora,” but the company does not elaborate. It is therefore not clear whether LibreOffice will continue to be available for that Linux distro in the future. The team states that anyone is free to take over maintenance of the rpm and Flatpak versions of the open source office package in Fedora, but that this will involve a lot of work.