Trying to read between the lines, here are my lazy sunday morning guesses at what might be going on here:
1. The Xilinx team are pushing back on the increasing number of things they have to support. Silver lining, maybe this means they're being asked to work on a new product that will require redistribution of headcount (like maybe another NPU )
1.1. Their Linux expertise is lacking / stretched across multiple teams (this is the impression I got from following the work in github.com/amd/xdna-driver over the last year or two). Maybe this is the outcome of a 'these are the things i'm doing now, so if you want me to do something new then tell me which of these things I can drop' type conversation & where the pushback is coming from (maybe we'll get some fedora support in that repo though ) .
2. Marketing have been pushing for something that helps them 'fight the AI fight', and it may be that they've now been given the mandate so the division is in the midst of the typical top-down mythical man-day reallocation wave. Xilinx have probably been told that priorities are shifting towards integrating more of the Xilinx inference tech with more mainstream AMD products, possibly at the expense of their existing roadmap. Xilinx have tenured employees who know what they're doing and don't want to retrain/change, so this is a side-effect of the pushback.
3. This is a straight-up monetisation strategy. Marketing ran a project and concluded thta it's just not worth supporting that lower tier for free. It may be that even though have a majority Windows userbase, the [commercially serious | higher stakes | CICD pipeline based] development actually happens on Linux, and this is them closing that loop. Not quite a Docker Desktop situation, but maybe not that dissimilar - they're saying that most professional/commercial users are Linux users, and the days of unlimited free commercial use on the smaller devices are over. Maybe the margins on those lower end devices aren't good enough to justify the amount of support overhead, and pay-to-play will filter out the noise and ensure they're talking to users who are already bought-in. Or, maybe somebody just needs an earnings blip on a slide somewhere, and this is them milking their startup/smb customers.
My guess is it's all of the above.
What I suspect is more likely (given the couple of comments saying "you have to pay to run it on a server") -- Some higher-up in AMD's marketing department has the misconception that Linux isn't a real desktop operating system but is only run on servers. Therefore, all their Linux users are probably companies running Vivaldi on a server, likely using a LLM to do designs. And they should be paying for that.
None of that makes any sense because they still support linux, just not on the free tier.
They aren't saving themselves any time or effort because linux is still supported for paying users.
Yeah, apart from there is more to supporting a product than just compiling a binary.
Case in point, the HN post you're commenting on is a link to their support forum. Search for _anything_ there, and this the pinned article that appears on top of every results page (from feb 2024):
> Is your Operating System supported by ISE/Vivado tools? Assistance and support won’t be provided for software and IP installed on unsupported OS!
> Note: Technical Support and assistance will be provided ONLY for Software and IP installed on supported Operating System!
> It is strongly suggested to check if the OS you are working with, is one of the supported operating system for ISE/Vivado tools!
*There have been many questions where users are trying to install or run into issues with using an unsupported OS for ISE/Vivado tools.*
> Assistance and support won’t be provided for issues observed on unsupported operating system!
> For the list of supported OSs for ISE 14.7, please check page #7 of UG631: https://docs.xilinx.com/v/u/en-US/irn
Platform support != customer support. Search that forum and you'll see. I imagine their paying customers are rejoicing at this decision.