Red Hat will no longer distribute LibreOffice in future releases 

A few days ago the news broke that Red Hat has decided to stop integrating LibreOffice in RHEL in future versions, this is a consequence of their plan to reduce their work on desktop applications and especially since the LibreOffice package no longer has an active maintainer.

This decision limit Red Hat's commitment to work on LibreOffice packaging for Fedora, as the company stated on the Fedora project mailing list that the LibreOffice RPM (Redhat Package Manager) had been left without anyone in charge. However, the company announces that it will still be possible to use LibreOffice on its distributions from Linux to Flatpak.

For those who are unaware of LibreOffice, you should know that this is a free alternative to the Microsoft Office office suite, which includes a spreadsheet, a database tool, a presentation tool and a word processor.

LibreOffice has support for the main file types used by the corresponding Microsoft Office programs (Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Word), and although LibreOffice and Microsoft Office look alike, each has unique features. LibreOffice can edit mathematical functions and equations such as fractions and exponents.

About the LibreOffice package for RHEL it is mentioned that the extracted files require approximately 300 MB of space, however, prominent Red Hat employee and GNOME developer, Matthias Clasen, reported that LibreOffice RPMs had been "orphaned" and that the company made the decision not to ship more LibreOffice on RHEL in the future and, eventually, to limit the scope of its contribution to Fedora.

“At first glance, this change looks bad. LibreOffice is one of the mainstays of the free software landscape and arguably the type of productivity suite that desktops benefit from,” wrote one reviewer of Red Hat's decision to stop shipping RHEL with LibreOffice.

To explain the company's decision, Clasen noted that the Red Hat Display Systems team (which does most of the required work) is “adjusting” its engineering priorities to focus on other key areas, such as better "Wayland" support and the addition of HDR capabilities - things that Workstation (and Linux in general) users will benefit from.

“In return, we are moving away from the work we were doing on desktop applications and will stop shipping LibreOffice as part of RHEL starting with a future RHEL release,” Clasen tells the community.

It is also worth mentioning that LibreOffice will be maintained and supported on all RHEL versions (and fedora) with security updates as needed.

Also, the "good news" is that technically it doesn't matter much about Red Hat's decision, since there is an official version of LibreOffice Flatpak that is available to general users and is not limited to distribution use.

Flatpak is a package management utility that allows you to distribute, install, and manage software without having to worry about dependencies, runtime, or Linux distribution.

Since you can easily install software regardless of Linux distribution, Flatpak is called a “universal package”. Flatpak uses a container-based approach to isolate applications and their dependencies from the host system. Each application runs in its own environment, with its own set of libraries and dependencies.

LibreOffice Flatpak can fill the gap, so to speak, Clasen added that

"The engineers doing this work will be doing patches to make sure LibreOffice works better as Flatpak, which should be how most people use LibreOffice in the long run."

We will continue to maintain LibreOffice on currently supported versions of RHEL (RHEL 7, 8, and 9) with the necessary CVEs and the like for the lifetime of those versions (as posted on the Red Hat website).

Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can consult the details In the following link.