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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."
I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think
I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community
at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source
based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing
as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying
technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to
back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult
for, we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our
server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing
fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of
several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high
that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which
were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of
serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in
VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't
believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go
just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code
that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the
system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to
increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3
machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say
the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't
even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was
supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The
3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that
they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise"
environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had
experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted,
Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in
their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full
fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that
the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled
filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that
since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with
some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour,
we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't
a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines
instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server
pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the
Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my
clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the
free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the
old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have
also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that
we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks
of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the
same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to
compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming,
but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows
98/NT/2K are your only choices.
thank you.
Well done!
Subtle tones of expertiese color the overall message with a venier of authenticity. You went over the top with the "Consultant for F500 Companies" though. Nobody buys that.
I'll give it a 9.5 for effort, but only a 7 for originality.
Great troll!!!
--
You sure got a purty mouth...
hmmn brilliant, The problem is not that windows "owns" the desktop its a matter of userbase. a lot of people who use computers aren't as knowledgable as most /. readers. Your ignorance to the fact that Linux is a superior operating system in all spectrums of performance, security and above all else stability. Leaves me puzzling why you even commented. I would much rather use a Linux desktop then XP anyday. Now I think XP and 2k are the better of the Windows line of operating systems but like anything from Microsoft its usually half done when you get it SP1 and soon to be SP2 did not and I suspect won't fix half the problems and security issues still to be found. So in one sense by marketshare yes Windows has a higher stake then *nix (including os X in that statement) but in the category of what its worth any *nix distro that has a name for itself is worth 3x the price you paid for your current operating system.
You have been sig'd
This is good news to me. Now all you linux advocates(mostly made up of 15-19 year olds) can face the facts that linux isn't as wonderful as you think/wish it was for average desktop use.
Redhat was one of the biggest Linux companies actually allowing the average consumer to switch from Windows to Redhat with their easy windowish install of linux and an install that actually would find and setup all my hardware for thos eof us not inclined to use a command line. Red Hat had an even better desktop chance now that the big Macromedia apps were running on linux. The time is now, and yet they are shrinking back into a corner where they should be coming out strong....
Ave Molech Setting
I agree, however I would go out on a limb and say that Linux installations require a little more knowledge than other operating systems. Look at Mac OS X, it's about as foolproof of an installation as you can get.
And yes, as a web surfing station, Linux performs just fine. However, when you start getting into things like digital photography, how easy is Linux compared to Windows? What's my mom going to touch up her photos in, gimp? Is there an "installer wizard" for it? I'd *love* to see her try and install a printer under Linux ;)
"vi? What?!"
Chris -- http://www.bitter.net/
Linux just isn't as fast, either. Things like UI speed matter more to me than filesystem fragmentation issues; you can schedule a defrag, but you can't schedule UI responsiveness.
Considering how sucky Linux drivers are (doesn't matter whose fault that is, BTW, end users only care for results) it's amazing that ANYbody gets Linux to run satisfactorily. Lord knows I've tried too many times to count, and Libranet's the closest thing to a decent Windows replacement -- for Windows 95, that is, if only its performance were as good.
Szulik is right; Linux won't meet 90% of people's needs.
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Ummm, you've used Mac, haven't you :)
Install an app? Hmm, many of them you simply drag it into the "Applications" directory. Delete? Drag it into the trash. Move it? Rename it? Guess what? Same sort of thing.
Not all apps, but certainly many of them. Directories with readable names? Yep.
Useable base system? Yep.
Anti-Aliased, easy to organize fonts? Yep. In a directory called Fonts.
Sounds a lot like what you're advocating. And no, Linux isn't there, and will never get there. It isn't supposed to get there.
I just bought OSX and I'm having a lil trouble getting it to run on my new P4 system. Perhaps you can help me out?
Didn't think so..... Oh well, back to Windows I guess.
-]Phreak Out[-
Yep, this MSCE is looking mighty smart sticking with Windows.
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