Red Hat's CEO Suggests Windows For Home Users

Selecter was one of many readers to point out a ZDNet story in which "the CEO of Red Hat now says that Linux is not ready for the desktop, but may be ready in a few more years. Curious - I'm wondering if this is the start of a corporate only retrenchment of Linux, or just a bump in the road to Linux having a wider desktop share?" Apropos that, Gwobl writes "Jim Lynch, over at ExtremeTech, weighs in on the fate of the Linux desktop, now that Red Hat has apparently turned its attention to the enterprise and Novell is buying SUSE (to go with Outlook clone Ximian, which it also owns). Lynch's take: Cheer them on! The Linux world needs these strong champions. And don't overlook Novell's networking roots. Time was, Big Red defined networking."

Comments

Re:Fsck You RedHat!

[forevermore]

I don't get it. Why is everyone complaining that redhat has dropped support for their non-enterprise distro? All they did was, well, drop support for it as in tech support, which you had to pay for anyway. All of the same quality we've come to expect from them as far as packages go will still be there like it was before, if not better, through Fedora (which is now part of RedHat instead of being a separate group).

Other than the lack of official pay-for tech support (which my guess is most home users didn't use), this is a good thing. Not only do we get RedHat's people working on packages, but we get the experience and time of the Fedora people, too. This will mean more packages, better packages, and more releases more often.

In exchange, RedHat will get some better packages for their enterprise distros, which will give them a stronger foothold in the enterprice market, which is a good thing for Linux fanatics everywhere.

The quality of the non-enterprise redhat release will not get worse, and we will presumably still see updates for the "old" redhat branches get pushed through Fedora, so those of us using 7.3, 8 or 9 in production environments will still get our openssh, bind, sendmail, whatever patches when we need them.

RTFA (Or at least the actual headline)

[DaveAtFraud]

The slashdot posting should be modded -1, flamebait. The actual quote from Szulik is, "I would say that for the consumer market place, Windows probably continues to be the right product line," he said. "I would argue that from the device-driver standpoint and perhaps some of the other traditional functionality, for that classic consumer purchaser, it is my view that (Linux) technology needs to mature a little bit more." You will note that the posting says nothing about "home users" while the headline of the ZDNet article clearly says "home users."

Another quote from later in the article: "We think that the enterprise desktop market place is much more strategic and has buyers whose needs we can exceed." The consumer market wants their computers to work with their digital cameras, GPSs, MP3 players, favorite games, etc. and, like it or not, Linux isn't there. Some of the lack of support is due to a "chicken and egg problem" of no one asks for such support so its not there and because its not there, no one asks for it. When some large companies tell their suppliers that they're out of the bidding because they don't support Linux, you'll see support for high-end stuff that rapidly filters down to support for "consumer" level stuff.