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Red Hat Desktop Edition
Sivar writes "Red Hat plans to enter the desktop business OS market, The Register reports. Red Hat says that the move is in response to growing frustration with Microsoft which has peaked since the introduction of Microsoft's new licensing scheme. The article states that the desktop offering is due next year and, surprisingly "...the company is considering subscription-based pricing.""
That wouldn't be very surprising since Mandrake Linux has become so popular in a so short time. Anyway, it's also surprising they didn't just buy them, since the company market-value is very small compared to Red Hat's IPO remaining cash.
/ faq )
(have a look at: http://www.mandrakesoft.com/company/investors/bsa
This is going to be intetersting to follow... will Red Hat include Mandrake's tuning such as supermount?
Sorry if I'm missing something here, but last time I checked, I'd been using Red Hat as my desktop o/s quite successfully for the past few years, with packages such as Mozilla and Nautilus are now included - and so going by the last few releases, one does get an inkling that they've already been making a significant effort to bring Red Hat to the desktop.
The announcement suggests therefore that they've decided to do something different about their approach to the desktop market, but doesn't exactly make it clear what, apart from hinting that they might be mixing in some proprietary software with it (such as Star Office 6). Any ideas?
Linux has functionality, all it needs is the quality of say OSX.
Functionality is fine but to beat Windows you have to look professional, nautilus is the most professional looking interface to work with so far, Redhat should fund development of nautilus, bring back Wozniak or whatever his name is who built Nautilus, and finish what they started.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
I'm sat in front of a box that formally had an SBLive!, and still has a Logitech QuickCam Express plugged into it.
;)
Mandrake 8.0 detected both, installed the correct modules, and both worked perfectly well from the very first boot.
The same applied when I removed the SB Live! and re-enabled the onboard Via audio (Don't ask). Kudzu detected the change, removed the emu10k1 module, and loaded up the via82cxx module.
I see no reason why, if Mandrake can do this, the others (E.g. Redhat and SuSe) can't.
Admittedly, all of this is a bit of a kludge, and as we can see, the results differ across distributions. Maybe someone else can do it better?
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Look, Caldera did much the same thing. Now RH is going to do this? I have no problem with them offering subscription services per se' as long as I get a shot at the desktop without support for myself. I hope this doesn't turn into a "corp user only" thing like Open Linux became in practice. Caldera went gunning for the enterprise at the expense of the average user. If Red Hat does this, they'll shoot themselves in the foot too. >
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The up2date server code has not and never will be released to the public and the crippled "satellite version" 1) isn't available yet 2) will cost $30,000 when it is released.
So sure it's easy if you are a) redhat and have access to the code and the giant proprietary oracle db you need for it to work b) wait another 12 months then pony up 30 grand to redhat for a crippled version.
Nah, i'll just use debian for free and donate 1% of what redhat wanted.
This is probably why redhat is standardizing their desktop. It's easier to support a common entity than a million and one different custumized GNOME desktops. So whether or not the admins want to use KDE or GNOME it'll work and function the same way. Smart move by redhat. Even in a free world business sense must prevail.