Oh hey, Cockpit; I remember when this was started. It was the Red Hat desktop team's skunkworks project to make an actual good server UI after the last few attempts failed; I can't find any evidence of it, but I swear there was this ridiculous project to generate a "Linux API" by automatically combining every other API and adding prefixes and headers. That came down from management since "APIs" were the hotness.
The goal was to make in-roads on Windows Server-like deployments. "Cattle, not pets" was becoming uber-popular, but the thinking on the desktop team was that there was still a wide market for pets. People with toy servers, small businesses that just want a server inside their network, they all deserve UIs that don't require heavy sysadmin-ing.
I think it turned out quite nicely, and it seems it's still going!
The goal was to make in-roads on Windows Server-like deployments. "Cattle, not pets" was becoming uber-popular, but the thinking on the desktop team was that there was still a wide market for pets. People with toy servers, small businesses that just want a server inside their network, they all deserve UIs that don't require heavy sysadmin-ing.
I think it turned out quite nicely, and it seems it's still going!