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Linux will have 20% desktop market share by 2008?
unmadindu writes "Siemens Business Systems, after conducting an extensive survey on non technical workers ("secretaries and managers, not IT people") is predicting that the Linux desktop will capture 20% of the market for desktop computers in large enterprises within the next 5 years. Senior program manager Duncan McNutt, who has overseen Siemens's testing of Linux desktops with users and administrators in enterprise settings, believes that the Ximian desktop and application suite, running on either SuSE or Red Hat, requires two days of training, which is the same as what most enterprises budget for a Windows/MS Office version upgrade. Interestingly, they used Ximian Desktop, instead of KDE, because Gnome, particularly Ximian's version, was "different enough" to set user expectations that the experience would be less like Windows. "
right now I have openbox3 with customized gnome-panel open, a transparent aterm and firebird with 4 virtual desktops open, and I tell you, it look prettier and works faster than any other system. especially now with the preempt patches to the 2.6 kernel and the new 2.4 gnome, all linux needs is games.
In addition to this statement from Siemens, I wonder if there is any company that has ever evaluated the time lost in desktop use using Windows 98/2000 on PCs in an enterprise-wide level compared to Linux, in a typical day's work, and that which is lost with linux. To be fair, this comparison ought to be with controlled environment (well set-up systems, users are only Power Users and therefore unable to install applications themselves, etc..).
This would result in something like:
Setup: Intel 500MHz/1GHz Desktop (or laptop)
Cold Boot Up
Login time
starting Lotus Notes/Outlook (viewing emails/starting new messages in Notes is historically long!)
opening word processor 1st time/next time
opening spreadsheet first time/next time
opening presentation tool first time/next time
opening web browser first time/next time
shutting down
rebooting (yes, even in linux this may happen!)
number of rebooting
etc... (applications in Enterprise environment, not home use, hence no video viewer or filesharing software for example. IM is not yet a universally accepted tool in my experience either)
If workers in a 1000-employee company were asked to monitor all these tasks for a whole week, half of them on linux, half of them on Windows, this should return an average that's actually measurable and would start making sense.
Does this exist anywhere?
There is no god
How to gain real marketshare for Linux on the desktop.
Standardize all hardware installation and removal in one place across all distros.
Name changes that non-it people get. Grep makes sense to IT types, but few outside IT are going to know what it means. Similiarly, I shouldn't have to explain that eth0 refers to their Network card and so on.
Improve Wine. You can give me a hundred stories about how with your uber-133t skills you get a certain archaic package to work under a certain distro and that lusers don't need graphics anyways. This is exactly the type of attitude that will keep Linux from the masses. They want to be able to use their programs, and most could care less what OS their using (how many times have you talked to someone who didn't even know which OS they had?). If they can happily use the same programs they used before, they could well not even notice the OS.
Most importantly of all, all versions of MS office must work seamlessly. This is the standard in the business world, and StarOffice, OpenOffice are poor substitutes. They don't want to learn the quirks of these packages, they just want to use MS Office. Nothing is more important for gaining marketshare than this.
Drop the attitude. The attitude that many newbies encounter is more than enough to send them back into bill's not-so loving arms. When someone is trying Linux they far too often run into someone who an elitist that thinks they should not only know *nix inside out, and be a programmer to boot. When joe-sixpack gets told to go RTFM after asking what a tarball is, he's going to get indignant and goes back to what he knows - windows.
Have a resource available to those who come from the Windows world that tells people in plain English what the Linux terminology is for equivalent ms / windows functions. Also have this resource list programs like gimp that can replace their old windows programs. A frequent complaint of those that try switching to Linux is that they can't do what they used to freely do under Windows. Slashdot types will respond, of course they can, they don't know what to use. Well, how would they know what to use?