More than meets the eye: Behind the scenes of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (Part 5)

This series takes a look at the people and planning that went into building and releasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10. From the earliest conceptual stages to the launch at Red Hat Summit 2025, we’ll hear firsthand accounts of how RHEL 10 came into being.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

In our previous installment of the story of how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 came to be, the team was putting the finishing touches on this major release. In part 5, we learn about the experience of bringing years of hard work to the Red Hat Summit stage and seeing how the world reacts.

2025 (0 months until Summit 2025)

Brian Stinson, principal software engineer
It’s pretty surreal, to be honest. 3 years of work across thousands of people and you get to go show it off. It’s hard to explain what that feels like. It was just so awesome.

Gunnar Hellekson, vice president and general manager, Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Red Hat Summit is the crescendo.

Shelley Dunne, senior principal program manager
I’ve seen so much celebration on RHEL 10. And it’s probably proportional to the energy that went into RHEL 10.

Major Hayden, senior principal software engineer
On Tuesday [of Red Hat Summit 2025], they announced it at the keynote, which was pretty awesome. I’d never in my professional history had a product that was directly on the keynote stage. That was kind of surreal.

Scott McCarty, senior principal product manager - technical, Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Even with my background of a long time at Red Hat, a lot of different experiences—sales, marketing, product management, engineering—it’s still really hard. I would say it’s the hardest job I’ve ever done.

Hayden
That day was really stressful because I couldn’t figure out, like, ‘How many people are actually going to try this out?’ I wanted a lot of people to try it out, but at the same time, I didn’t want it to get knocked over, so we were kind of stressed about that.

But the initial results were really good. Probably about 75% of people were saying, ‘Wow, this is cool. I would like to use this.’

Mike McGrath, vice president, Core Platforms Engineering
The goal is always to make sure that whenever release day happens, that it is a celebratory tone. We work really hard to make sure that everybody has a chance to celebrate because 3 years to anything is a long time. It is exhausting, but in a good way. It’s the kind of exhaustion you only get after a job well done. And for RHEL 10, the team really pulled it off.

Stinson
The customers that I talked to—at Summit specifically—one of the things that was really nice was to just see the energy that they had about things. Especially at the engineering level, because things are so continuous, it’s like, ‘OK, I know what RHEL 10 is. I’ve been dealing with this for 3 years.’ You get a little bit of that same excitement that you found 3 years ago when we were talking about those features and what do we want RHEL 10 to look like and you get to see that excitement all over again.

McCarty
We came up with great technology in RHEL 10. I love image mode. I love Lightspeed. Customers loved it. I had a guy come up to us and say, ‘This is the best launch since RHEL 7.’ That was unprompted, he just came up to us.

Stef Walter, senior director, Linux Engineering
The operating system is something that you try not to think about until it goes wrong. The operating system should just work, and we work hard to make it that way. So often when we’re on a customer call, something has gone wrong. This time, at Summit, it really felt like customers sat down and were like, ‘Tell us more. Tell us what’s new.’ It was certainly a different kind of customer interaction than we’re typically used to, which was amazing.

Chris Wells, senior director, Product Marketing - RHEL Business Unit
For the most part, the last few Red Hat Summits that I have been to and talking to people on the analyst side, I’d say the analysts are like, ‘Yeah, RHEL’s kind of boring. There’s not a whole lot going on here. Linux is pretty much a settled technology.’ And this year it was interesting because the RHEL story was the lead. 

Dunne
RHEL is doing a phenomenal job of being steady and sturdy, and having a shine on it. We’re delivering what our customers want—not having to worry about RHEL—but also, ‘Oh, that’s cool!” I think that’s the best of both worlds because that's what customers want from RHEL, but it also makes us feel like we’re adding even more value to what they can do.

Stinson
We found a good way to continuously build software. Making sure that we do it upstream first. That we’re still participating in a community fashion. That we build our operating system in a way that’s collaborative both within Red Hat itself but also with the wider community. We want to continue carrying that torch for future releases, and getting better at that.