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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Red Hat provides a pair of Linux desktop developers for AI. 
• A new version of Red Hat Desktop has been refocused on AI. 
• Fedora Hummingbird is an entry-level desktop for AI programmers.

At Red Hat Summit in Atlanta, the technology company unveiled two complementary Linux desktop offerings designed specifically for AI programmers: Red Hat Desktop, featuring the enhanced Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite, and Fedora Hummingbird Linux. 

Also: Why business architects are poised to lead the corporate AI revolution

Here's what you need to know.

Red Hat Desktop

Of course, Red Hat has had a desktop distribution for as long as Red Hat has had a Linux distribution. What's different about the AI-developer edition is that it's based on the Red Hat build of Podman Desktop. Podman is designed to create, manage, and deploy containers on Linux, macOS, and Windows. 

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This Linux desktop is built on Red Hat Hardened Images and Red Hat Trusted Libraries to enhance security. Developers can access these images and libraries from their laptops while connecting to local or remote OpenShift clusters for unit testing.

On the OpenShift cluster, Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces provides an extensible framework that lets you integrate your preferred AI-driven tools directly into your cloud-based IDE. This setup includes a technical preview of the AWS Kiro coding assistant, along with integrations for Microsoft Copilot, Claude CLI, Cline, Continue, Roo, and more. By supporting both proprietary and open-source assistants, Red Hat enables you to use frontier models or not. Thus, you can code with whatever works best for you.

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This version of the Red Hat Desktop also provides isolated AI-agent sandboxing via the open-source Kaiden. In turn, this approach enables you to build and test AI agents on local hardware while preventing mistaken AI actions from screwing up your host operating system. As a result, you can safely build and test AI agents on your PC.

Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite also adds new capabilities, including an AI-driven exploit intelligence to modernize your security across the software supply chain. This feature uses AI to determine if known vulnerabilities in your AI-generated code are relevant to a specific application runtime. This capability gives you the power to prioritize fixes and remediation based on real risk.

Fedora Hummingbird Linux

Fedora Hummingbird Linux, on the other hand, is a free, image-based, rolling-release operating system purpose-built for AI agents and their developers. The distribution bypasses traditional Linux release freezes, delivering upstream updates as soon as they're available from upstream communities.

In his keynote, Gunnar Hellekson, VP and general manager of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), added, "This is a no-cost, 'free as in beer and free as in freedom' operating system. If you want support for the OS, however, Red Hat plans to offer support for Fedora Hummingbird Linux included as part of your RHEL subscription."

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Fedora Hummingbird Linux is hosted within the Fedora Project community and supports anonymous, agent-driven pulls for instantaneous deployment. The distribution removes registration walls that typically slow AI agent experimentation, aligning with Red Hat's description of the "instant-on expectations of the agentic era."

This desktop Linux is delivered through an agent-enhanced, "lights out" AI software factory. AI agents perform much of the maintenance and feature integration with human-in-the-loop oversight. Built on the same automated infrastructure as Red Hat Hardened Images, Fedora Hummingbird Linux ships with languages, runtimes, databases, and tools free of known CVEs and accompanied by full software bills of materials (SBOM).

Understanding the key differences

The two offerings serve distinct, complementary roles in Red Hat's agentic AI strategy: making both services available under a single subscription relationship.

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Red Hat plans to make Fedora Hummingbird Linux a default option across developer-focused cloud providers. Red Hat Desktop will serve as the governed, production-mirroring environment extending down to the developer's laptop. 

Red Hat's hope, of course, is that would-be AI developers will start with Hummingbird and then move on to Red Hat Desktop and the rest of the Red Hat AI family when they get a job creating production AI programs.