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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.""
I fear that for linux to enter a business market on the desktop, there's still quite a long way to go in terms of user friendlyness. On all other fronts, linux equals or wins against MS, but on the desktop, GUI is the only thing that really matters :
- stability ? XP is stable enough for the desktop
- security ? XP with no services is secure enough behind a corporate firewall
- CPU efficiency ? When running Office and Outlook as sole applications on a 2GHz PC, you've got to go pretty ballistic to get inefifcient.
- open source ? You really thing any desktop user gives a flying donkey ?
- commandline unix underpinnings ? see 2 remarks above
all that matters is how well users can become at easy with their machine (in their own adorable shitty, messy and totally disorganized way. Remember that a desktop user does NOT WANT to understand his computer. He just wants the computer to adapt to his personal shitty messy and totally disorganized way of organizing things)
I did the test many times and put a linux box in front of a reasonably willing (although reasonably dumb) subject and frankly, they didn't even figure out how to reset their desktop. Linux just doesn't get it when it comes to dumb-ass desktop users.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
The hidden cost of MS's business desktops has always been the tools. You can't simply buy licenses for XP and call it a day: you need administration tools (SMS), antivirus tools, firewall tools for your mobile users, service pack distribution tools, etc. None of these are bundled with the cost of XP (crummy firewall notwithstanding), and the desktop costs get expensive quickly.
I'll bet RedHat is going to sell this as an alternative to the frustrating patchwork of programs required to administer a network of 50-250 PC's, because that's always been a MS weakness. MS has decent tools like SMS, but they require so much knowledge & work that they don't really pay off until you've got a bare minimum of 100 PC's.
Not that desktop Linux rollouts won't have a learning curve, of course.
What's your damage, Heather?
Americans say , "put your money where your mouth is", and "money talks".
Well now, if your wallet is empty, and you want to continue your business, people get inventive. Linux is the lumber and wood lying around (for free) to make it happen.
The claim that all my tools, spreadsheets, documents are in ms office format, and thus i can't switch overnight is true. But company's should really focus on platform independant formats instead.
number 1 rule was/is still , never have your computing stuff tied into a single ICT company/supplier. Many company's still alive today took the wise decision in the past to just buy the custom made package including its source code. In such a position no software company in the world can stall your business.
Robert
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