Michael Dolan Dot Com

Saturday, September 24th, 2005

Linux on the Desktop

Three things that irk me about people writing about Linux on the Desktop (LoD):

1) Those who write about it and appear to have never ventured outside 1 distribution (RHEL WS is not a desktop OS but rather a business Workstation OS):

Red Hat does a pretty good job with their automated patching system that patches everything from Firefox to the OS kernel (with a reboot), but their annual Enterprise support fees makes the cost of buying a copy Windows look cheap.

Take a look at Ubuntu, Mandriva, or Linspire and your story may change. Take a look - harm free.

2) It’s only about TCO: No, it’s not just about TCO - the State of Massachusetts is coming around to this - take a look below.

2) Those who assume “there are no applications like on Windows” - arguably true, but what did it take to make Linux ready to kill off UNIX and Windows Server? IBM invested a billion dollars in Linux, HP probably invested the same, Dell is making consider investements, and of course the open source community kept chugging along at a pace MSFT and Sun couldn’t keep up with.

Now, for the desktop to “happen” we will need similar investements - in GUIs, in ISV development, and in hardware/gaming support. It’s surprising to me that today we’re seeing nVidia and ATI battling over who offers the most features in their Linux drivers - they know the early adopters of their technology are the same guys/gals churning out FOSS code! We’ve seen games like Quake and Unreal Tournament take on that same category of gamer. But what’s left are the Adobe’s (w/Macromedia), Canon’s (cameras / printers), Corel’s (who is on the fence with Wordperfect suite on Linux), and all the hardware/gaming companies coming together to create a total solution for LoD. That’s when LoD will take off. It’s not a problem that “KDE and Gnome should merge” - they both have stable, innovative desktop experiences.