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IBM and Its Thoughts on Desktop Linux
Knuckles writes: "According to c|net, IBM will give desktop Linux a thumbs up at the Desktop Linux Conference in Boston on Monday. Sam Docknevich of IBM's Global Services group will give a speech titled, "The Time is Now for Linux on the Desktop." It seems that IBM will not go for the multi-purpose desktop, though, but for machines performing narrowly defined functions (kiosks etc.). However, basic office workstation seem to be included in this definition, according to C|Net" And in a classic case of the right-hand not knowing what the left-hand is doing, Realistic_Dragon adds: "IBM was leading the words of Red Hat's CEO in comments to the UK government last year saying that '...open source was not ready for the desktop'.
And it pisses me off when I walk through an office/computer retailer and all the monitors have their screensavers frozen with a dialog asking for a password. What's the point of displaying a computer if all the customer can see is a bloody screensaver?
So, does this mean we will start seeing IBM workstations with linux on them? I personaly cant wait to get a thinpad without having to pay micro$oft 20% of the cost :P
That's the main question, I think. I'm pretty computer literature, work as a web developer/designer/programmer and all that, but I've always been a Windows user. Recently, when it came time to reformat my notebook, I decided to just try out Linux because I was curious. I went with Suse. It installed fine, but it was a pain in the ass to get it to recognize my screen size (1600 x 1050), it refused to see my wifi card, and the touchpad wouldn't work. Fair, enough, I can deal with all that because it's a notebook after all, the drivers aren't at all standard. But the actual user experince... well, honestly, yuck. The main thing that made me get rid of it was just how crappy everything looked. Widgets were clunky, interface fonts were either too large or too small, everything was jagged, and the web looked simply terrible. I installed Firebird to see if that'd make browsing a little nicer but no luck. Fonts were huge, tiny, and looked like placeholders instead of something any sort of attention to detail had been put towards. Then I tried upgrading the software. It came with Open Office 1.0; I wanted 1.1. But it didn't look like it was going to happen until I felt up to compiling my own binaries. If someone as tech savvy as me isn't willing to do that, I can guarantee my parents sure as hell won't be up to it. End result: I got rid of Linux after a day. It wasn't worth the huge amount of effort required to do anythign with and it was ugly and clunky enough that it got in the way of everyday use. I realize all of these can be improved and I'm sure in the future they will be. When that happens, maybe I'll give Linux another try. But for now, it isn't anywhere near ready for the average user's desktop.
This seems like a pretty sound analysis - Linux is ready for the desktop in many areas. However it's still not ready as an integrated multi-task appliance in the same way that windows is.
I like to use my PC for lots of stuff, it's still tricky for me to do some things on Linux, lots of programs still don't interact well (cutting and pasting being the first thing that springs to mind, cue flames.....) but for certain tasks it's excellent (web services) and for many it's perfectly adequate (office / multimedia).
More people using linux to do some jobs will start to want to do other little jobs on it too. Whether we like IBM this week or not, this can only be good for user- and developer- share and linux profile.
Stemmo
I will go back to linux on the desktop when Novell releases their desktop linux (they already own all of my favorite pieces).
And, oh yeah, NO MORE X WINDOWS!!!
Apple did at least one thing right.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
Imagine if someone like IBM marketed their own Linux desktop distribution. I'd say they have the power to standardize some of the things that make Linux so confusing for new adopters (multiple desktop managers, shells, KDE vs Gnome, etc). Think Lindows, except not a toy, and with a huge company backing it. Home users are not going to adopt Linux in its current very chaotic state. These options are nice for nerds, but your mom doesn't really want to search through fifty open source apps while installing to see which one she likes the best to write a one page document for work.
A reputable company like IBM could give Linux some serious pull on the desktop (they already have in the server world).
In this interview (posted on Slashdot a few weeks ago) Linus says he is most interesting in desktop Linux. He says servers are not very interesting. He says Linux on the desktop is the only part he cares about. Just look at the article I linked to and read the question about Linux and the Desktop.
My point is that Linus, for me, kind of debunks the idea that Linux is intended for the server. Linus clearly says it's not. And now we have IBM giving a thumbs up for Linux on the desktop too. This is cool.
I see a "internet kiosk" in front of my school being hacked for at least a 3 months. Some soft already installed, popup commercial spam, "smart monkeys" (program to generate clicks on the web to earn you money for "login time" with spyware), etc. All under Windows. I've seen a bankomat nearby with error popup. I've seen dull, dead windows desktop on a "commercial bigscreen". I've seen BSOD on railway station screens. I've seen info booth with train schedule rebooting. I've seen SMS boxen on walls frozen, with some Windows requester unable to gain focus. I've seen a shopkeeper rebooting his cash register, booting W98SE. Gosh, I even surfed the net from the bank "account checking" booth after the app died during heavy rain that broke net transmission, leaving me with desktop and basic apps.
If Linux is to crash on that things, I'll gladly give it a try and would like to give it a try. Maybe Linux is not ready for that stuff - we don't know. But what we know: Windows is not ready for them, for sure!
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Wow, lately this is what the linux community sounds like:
linux advocates: we're ready for the desktop!
big corporations: no, not quite yet...
linux advocates: we're ready for the desktop!
big corporations: no, not quite yet...
linux advocates: we're ready for the desktop!
big corporations: no, not quite yet...
linux advocates: we're ready for the desktop!
big corporations: no damnit! Your only good for servers and maybe now kiosks.
What exactly is the holdback anyways? Pretty gui's, drivers, advertising, what?!?
Yeah, my first thought was "He must be new here, with his perfect spellin an' grammur"
Seriously, its the game manufacturers who determine whats ready for the home market, and as long as they only want to support DirectX, then Linux is official banned from my desktop.
Personally I don't see what the problem is. For the last two years I've been working at Hill AirForce Base in Utah and they have a Microsoft ADS network. My RedHat 9.0 laptop intergrated just fine in that environment.
:-)
I was able to get email from exchange, mount the home directory or any network server share and write/read files, access any of my Solaris/Linux servers I managed and so on. Oh, and I submitted my timesheets from OpenOffice 1.1.0. They were in excel format btw
Not ready for the desktop? 99.99999% of all users on the base did the above or less on their computer (unless they were solitare junkies then it was even less).
I have yet to hear a valid argument why Linux isn't ready for the desktop. Sure you can customize the hell outta it compared to Windows. Most people don't customize Windows beyond changing their background and screensaver. You can do that in Linux and be just as happy.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
..IBMs stance on the desktop highlights one of the problems with their "support" of OSS (the other is their IP stance). The last presenation I attended they trotted out the "not ready for the desktop" line. I think they see that Linux helps *them* sell servers but helps *other* people sell PCs. Just look at the little sticker on their portables. Funnily enough, Sun's presentation took exactly the opposite line!
It would not be before time if they change their tune...
-- Free software on every PC on every desk
heck.. i just did a debian installation on my other computer(that was previously pretty slow, now i got 450mhz k6-2 in it). it was quite some time from the last time i had proper linux desktop(i've had installations from time to time but mostly on shitty hardware on which i didn't bother to do too much desktop things apart from irc and mp3). the biggest hurdles i had was the amount of stuff that went so smoothly and easily! i spent some time looking for where i could tell artsd to use alsa for output(didn't compile oss in 2.6.test9, the kernel works beautifully though) and got quite frustrated when i couldn't find where i should tell it it's options(nor could find it with google), and then it turned out i could turn it on in kde control center. there were few other similar issues where i tried to find the old 'hard' way.. only to see that it did it automagically.
it's plenty fast too, and memory conservative(used for few hours without any swap at all and the machine has just 128mb of mem, even though i use 1280*1024 resolution as well, played music, tested out movie playing & etc. why no swap? stupid ezdrive hid the partition with 2.6 kernel.).
that and with synergy(synergy2.sf.net) providing cut'n'paste of text and mouse(and keyboard) sharing between my two machines.. it's sweeet(why 2 comps side by side? so that i can complain on irc when the windows machine is doing something it shouldnt be doing).
though, the thing isn't in home use if it's ready for desktop usage(it is), it's if it's ready for being administered by clueless people(heck, come to think of it, clueless people can't administer windows any better either). even users who have only used windows for the past 10 years can _use_ kde or gnome though easily enough, and those who can read can administer linux(and *bsd) boxes enough if they bother to stop think(and rtfm) what they're trying to do when they get stuck(instead of reinstalling).
theres some things that still bother me though, like where do i tell gstreamer that it should use alsa as default output? gstreamers docs suck bigtime and rhythmbox uses it(and apparently it's default output is oss, which as mentioned i don't have compiled in nor want to compile in.. because i got dwarfes in the attic).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You may be right about OSX. You're certainly onto something with IBM's on again, off again support of Linux on their laptops. I've installed Linux on any number of laptops, and if it weren't for the fact that my company's idiotic payroll department insists on using a website that's only compatible with Internet Explorer, I wouldn't have Windows on it at all.
Linux is a viable alternative on laptops. It has support for just about all the hardware, and can be made to support multiple network environments with a little bit of effort. I don't use spreadsheets very much and I don't use word processors at all, but there are several alternatives if I ever do. Generally speaking, it's not terribly difficult to install RedHat on laptops, although Sony's seem to be an exception.
At that time, they contended that you were better off paying for a term server with 8-12 thin clients connected to it; instead of paying ~$1200-2000 per desktop, you would pay ~$5-10k for the server, and ~$200 per thin client.
However, since there really wasnt a significant savings in hardware (most of your savings were due to lower admin costs), hardly anyone jumped on board. Also, around this time the first sub-$1000 computers started coming out.
Linux on the desktop? Hardly. IBM is just recycling the Network PC.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
"How can we use it to make a lot of money, and stick a shiv in microsoft's back?"
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I can believe ...
...
IBM and others can make a general purpose desktop linux aimed at corporations (Sun has done a pretty good attempt already). I hope it will shake things up a little. I'd rather upgrade straight to OS X, but that's just me...
I can't believe
anybody can make a general purpose linux aimed at the home user. It sort of defeats the purpose of linux at the moment and however much you would WANT a linux for the average home user, it would imply a lot of work, dedication and adherance to rules that a lot of programmers aren't interested in - and why should you be, it's your time, your party, your OS.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
By these definitions, a Linux box is more ready for the desktop than a Windows one is. I format a USB drives with a label and my box always mounts in the same spot, no matter what order I connect them. But if I connect USB drives in arbitrary order on XP, they might show up as E:, F: or whatever - all depending on how I connect them.
If I download mp3, vorbis and FLAC files, Linux plays them out-of-the-box. In Windows, downloading winamp or some other player is often a necessity.
If I download WMV, DivX Quicktime and Realplayer movies, I'll need to download DivX codecs, Quicktime and Realplayer in Windows. mplayer handles them all in Linux without a problem.
Burning CD-ROMs in Linux is a drag-and-drop affair. As is ISOs. I haven't figured out how to burn ISOs in XP without downloading/buying something extra. Ripping is equally easy, and without the lame, Windows-specific, shift-key-to-bypass copy protection. Playing is a no-brainer, even with CDDB support.
DVDs play with menus in Xine. Even ones from different regions. Windows seems to require firmware hacks to achieve the same effect.
I've performed all of the above without compiling a kernel. The only thing keeping all of the above from being implemented everywhere are patent encumberances (for mp3) or obnoxious laws (for DeCSS).
But even if all of the above were implemented on every distribution without any command lines, it wouldn't make a bit of difference. Really. All of these are trivial matters. What matters is applications, and Linux needs an application that everyone can't live without - and that has no native equivilent on Windows. Only a combination of a "killer app" and housekeeping tools (CD burning, etc.) is going to convince people to switch.
Ita erat quando hic adveni.
"The average home user cannot use linux."
That's funny because I have had the most computer illiterate people sit down at my RH9 box with no windows open and figure out how to browse the web quite effectively with no instruction from me at all.
"Mozilla is not up to the task, sorry. It doesn't even render most webpages properly (including such common ones as YAHOO FINANCE)."
I don't think you can categorically say that without some level of proof. And "render . . . properly seems to be an either/or kind of statment. I argue that there are some things that are irrelevant such as font size so long as it does not effect the browsing experience. The only website I have found to date that doesn't work right at all with Mozilla is www.sprintpcs.com after you log in to manage your account.
I feel quite confident that the web pages that don't work right are those that seemed to ignore web standards completely.
"Openoffice is slow and bloated, as well as difficult to use."
Lets start out with the "slow and bloated" comment first. Define slow. Slow to start? Slow to print? That is completely ambiguous at best and not completely bound in truth as far as my experience goes. I give you that it is slow as Christmas to start. After startup completes I find it to be faster than Word.
Difficult to use? I don't find that to be true. Neither did a friend of mine that wouldn't know the difference between a word processor and a spreadsheet application. He used OpenOffice to write a research paper with no complaints. I even asked him if it worked ok.
"Linux is not ready for the home user."
I do not agree for 100% of home users. I think it is ready for a good portion of them already. With each passing release of kernels and distros that gap closes more.
"At least on Windows, when I uninstall a program, it uninstalls its libraries (for the most part)."
I do not see that uninstalling programs is any more thorough on Windows than Linux. They are both scripted and thus the uninstalls are only as good as the uninstall scripts. I have seen some that did nothing more than delete icons on Windows. About the only thing I can say about Windows uninstalling is that most (not all) software makers make the uninstall program easy to find.
And don't even get me started about dll's that refuse to allow themselves to be removed without doing some registry editing and/or booting to a command prompt only in Windows.
Bottom line is that I have had my RH9 box running since RH9 was release and it has not crashed once. At all. The only time it has been rebooted was due to power outages.
Besides, your conclusion is that home users are prepeared to deal with all of the nasty viruses/worms and all the problems they cause yet they cannot deal with Linux?
And now, two days later, this! LMAO.
This is exactly why Linux will never, I repeat, NEVER make headway in the desktop market in its current state.
The conflict between actual usability and the fanatic ideals of Linux advocates means we'll always have GUIs designed by programmers and non-artists whose primary concern is "the point of Open Source."
"Sufferin' succotash."
You seem to skip over alot of details:
... "A base model 17" eMac, which is perfectly suited to the average productivity worker, is only $799"
"an enterprise customer is probably better off with Apple"
"it seems to me that for the small price difference between an Apple with OSX and a linux desktop"
Um, ok lets see the reasons:
"Standardized, supported hardware with real enterprise support contracts available"
$799 for a Apple won't give you support contracts.
"A large base of consultants to choose from"
What makes you think you can't find that for Linux? After all, it's a operational descendent to UNIX, the age-old enterprised used OS.
"A good desktop and laptop solution. Does IBM support Linux on their laptops this week? Which models?"
Huh? If a business wanted to know of a machine model that could work with linux, they could ask a large linux distribution maker. Most have a database of working hardware. They can refer you to the right place.
Of course, the larger distributions sell enterprise support contracts too. So it seems like it's the distribution maker that is one easy place to go to get a linux setup going.
" The ability to run Microsoft Office, Open Office, and most other open source productivity packages"
MS Office costs more money. Your not going to get that with a $799 Mac. Open Office or other open source packages??? OS X isn't any better than Linux here. And yes you can run MS Office on linux.
"The ability to centrally manage authentication and workstation management using OSX server"
Sound's like you'll need a OS X admin here.
"Compared to the pain of getting a Linux system up and running and then supporting it"
Have you ever set up a linux system? If you have experience in computers, it's not any harder than everything else today. When your talking about using linux in business, you hire people to run the machines and you train people to use them. Not everyone is going to be the same.
A good linux admin will be just as capable as a mac admin. If there are issues with plopping down a machine and it working, your approach may be wrong.
"going Apple seems like a no-brainer in enterprise IT environments."
You're making a big assumption here. You're assuming that running an Apple environment requires no training (or very little). No business guy or worker is going neccesarily to have the knowledge or time to manage an Apple environment in addition to their job. (well we are talking about an enterprise here?). I'm sorry, but Apple isn't the magic computer that everyone can use. You have to hire people to maintain the machines, train people to use them for their jobs, and this includes support contracts (whatever the kind). Enterprise size linux distributors do give businesses what they need (if they didn't why do they offer businesses such??). Frankly it won't be much different than Apple. A $799 machine eMac may be nice number to look at, and a $199 linux machine may be too. But a computer with nice OS isn't a catch-all for business productivity.
Amazing, all this disagreement about 'the home market', while really, the problem is that there is no such just one 'the home market'. Linux is ready as a desktop OS for some of the home markets, and is not ready for others.
Not much effort. To interface with the ADS I setup samba 2.x and purchased crossover office to run outlook (they turned off pop/imap). I could have used the web interface but I wanted folders for archiving my messages from the exchange server.
;-) I did however have a problem with swapping between the floppy and cd/dvd burner. IBM support mentioned it wasn't supported under Linux. So it wasn't a perfect solution. I simply left the cd/dvd burner in the system. Rarely did I need to use a floppy anyway. If someone needed a file I simply put it on a network folder or emailed it to them.
;-)
Since I was running on an IBM Thinkpad I wasn't going to be installing new hardware very often
For a non-laptop installation I had little trouble installing new hardware. Upon power up the Kudzu program would scan for new hardware. If I didn't install junk it usually worked just fine. Recenly for example I built a firewall for home using RedHat 9. I had to install a new 3com nic in the system. Kudzu automatically found the card and configured it for me. Was rather nice actually.
You do bring up a great point. Installing programs under linux isn't as nice as say Wintendo. You either do an rpm install, run config/make or apt-get. You can't click on an icon called setup.exe (or whatever) to run it. At least I don't think you can do that with rpm's. Haven't tried now that I think of it. Nautilus may know how to handle them. Still... you would have to be root for rpm installs. So not a perfect solution I admit. Then again, I recall Microsoft recently saying you don't need perfect code right
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
As someone whose recently moved over to Linux totally I can say 100% for certain that Linux will never be ready for the masses. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. The more I learn the more I have fun geeking around in it. But sweet jesus, I've been trying to get GAIM to compile for the past two weeks off and on. It keeps switching from GTK hating me to GAIM hating me. Been bitching with ZSNES like crazy trying to get it to work at greater than 10fps (1ghz system, mind you). Given up on upgrading to KDE3, using KDE2. Tried other window managers and wasn't happy with them. In the past month I've spent roughly 80 hours mucking with my distro to get everything working well enough to where I can just leave it alone and not mess with it for awhile. Now while I love being able to modify my OS to where it feels just right in virtually every way imaginable (and bash rocks), that is the one and only thing I miss about Windows. Everything worked. You didn't have to worry about dependancy after dependancy after dependancy just to get one stupid program installed and working. Drivers were easy as all hell to install. You didn't have to muck with your freakin' kernel trying to get a half-working driver kinda working. Windows took care of all that crap for you. Not well, but it did. In Linux I'm taking care of the OS. This isn't something that can be fixed with a bigger better RPM thingy or pretty GUI. This is both a great strength and weakness of Li/Unix and OSS in general. Everyone has their opinions on how things should work, and thus you have a billion different ways to do things (and a trillion different dependencies... ugh.) I love the penguin to death but I've been hacking away in bash for the past month trying to get my system working just as well as it once did in Windows. And I'm a very computer literate geek who loves reading source code and actually _reads the fucking manual_. Linux is ready for the average user? Bullshit. To say that is arrogance. No way in hell would I install it for my mom. Poor woman's already had one stroke.
Where is the difficulty? The challenge? There isn't any! A few clicks of a mouse, and I have a new program installed. It is that easy, for me. And my uses for Linux are pretty much Average Joe uses.
Desktop Linux fits two kinds of users very well. The first kind are like your parents. Once it is set up, they don't mess with it. There's maybe seven icons that get clicked all the time and thats it. You did luck out with the garden design software.
The second type mess with the system constantly but are comfortable doing things like editing text files and resolving dependencies. Whatever comes up technically gets handled.
There is a third type of user thats still a problem. These users want to continually add and remove software and hardware from the machine. The thing is, they don't know a thing about computers and don't want to know. Such users can usually get about two years out of a Windows install before they have someone straighten out the mess the machine is in. Sure the machine is likely hosed by then but they got some varied service out of it before bunging up the registry or the dlls. A MacOS (Classic) install will sometimes last longer under such use although OS X hasn't been out long enough for me to see the full range of brain damage it's users can inflict. I've even seen them buy whole new systems because it is easier than backing up data and reinstalling. These people aren't necessarily gamers.
Those users tend to HATE Linux. Linux will either totally rebuff such users or they'll do everything as root one time too many and completely hose the system. Lindows and Mandrake attempt to cater to them but screw it up by either having them run as root all time (yes, the option is there to create a regular user account. These users WON'T do it.) or being overly flaky. When I used it, Mandrake was crashy enough to make think I was running Windows 98 again.
Others have pointed out that work needs to be done on hardware detection/configuration and software installs. I think it will get there but those are the two things that really screw Linux as a consumer OS.
The average user looks at all this great free software out there and think "this is GREAT!!" but then are faced with the reality of having to compile most of their own software. This isn't a big deal for the technically literate but for the newbie it can be quite a problem. Linux software developers need to come together and define a common standard for binary software distribution and then start offering both source and precompiled binaries of their software. If this simple step happens, I think we'll see a much quicker and widespread adoption of desktop Linux.
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
IBM sell a product called WebSphere Portal Server. It's reasonably inexpensive for the Enterprise Portal space, they have been getting fairly competitive on software pricing recently.
p t1.htm
But here's the hidden little feature. As a sample portlet included with the server are server-side portlets that read and write Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents.
They don't do it perfectly, not yet, and IBM is not doing a lot to publicize them. And they certainly won't be competing with a full-featured word processor or spreadsheet application.
But take a large corporate customer, who's users need to be able to read, change and create Office documents, but the vast majority only needing the base functionality, why would you be buying each of them an Office license when you can get it for free with your $20,000 Intranet Portal.
As Tim Thatcher, program director for IBM WebSphere Portal emphasises, these productivity components are not a stand-in for Microsoft Office. "We're targeting the users who don't need all the features of Word or WordPro," says Thatcher. "Businesses realise it's not cost-effective to deliver a full-functioned desktop to every user. On a manufacturing floor, for example, a factory worker in the breakroom can jot a letter off the kiosk using the built-in portal applications."
http://www.eos-solutions.com.au/news_sept/news_se
WORKSFORME -- and I spend a fair bit of time in front of Mozilla at home, and a fair bit more at work supporting users on RH9-based corporate workstations.
Don't even get me started on printing. Good god, setting up a printer can be hell at the best of times in Linux.
I just set up Fedora Core 1 on a roommate's box. I logged in as root, and there was an icon that launched a graphical print setup program. I told it about her printer (using a few drop-down boxes), it asked if I wanted to print a test page and it Just Worked.
Granted, 6 months ago it was much, much more of a hassle.
Debian's aptitude does that perfectly; "deborphan" likewise performs that function.
Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut??
If they built it as low maitnance and as reliable as my fridge (The compressor is welded shut) I would love it. Too bad they can't make one that will last for 15-20 years and needs no service except dusting off the radiator once in a while.
The truth shall set you free!
Look what they did to OS/2. Anyone who thinks that IBM is the right outfit to promote Linux is fooling themselves or engaging in wishful thinking at best. IBM would fsck up a wet dream in that regard. Oh, hell, I don't know. Maybe something will come of this, but I'll believe it when I see it.
As an OS/2 and Linux user I must say - I praise IBM for the innovations and for being the rock in this Redmond infested waters. But I also fear them for their lack of a tehnical ideology. IBM goes whereever the money leads them, even though they have the strangth to lead the money to themselves.
They are trying to kill of all of their own softwareplatforms - OS/390 is almost gone, they are still trying with OS/2 (That one has really put up a fight) and AIX is next.
Whenever you hear the words "Strategic Platform" you know that IBM just have sentenced a platform to death.
Also that is why I'm glad-glad-glad-glad-glad-glad-glad (I wonder if he is glad!) that Novell picked ud the pride and joy of european Linux (SuSE AG) - and not IBM.
I am happy that IBM supports Linux, but I do not trust them one inch.
Live long and prosper...
I like IBM. I think they make great servers and great laptops. I just bought one of their T-series laptops. Their laptops work a lot better with Linux than most other major manufacturers that I've seen, but that's not enough. Pretty much all of the hardware on their laptops work under Linux, but marginally. The Winmodems they include are a real bitch to set up and may not even work fully, and the wireless MiniPCI cards they include either do not have drivers out for Linux or require a lot of work and/or binary-only modules to be useful. I also haven't seen anything released regarding their hard drive protection system, which is based mostly in software. ACPI support, of course, is not totally there in the 2.6 kernel, but it's making a lot of progress.
IBM, put your money where your mouth is. Intel might not give much of a shit about Linux on the desktop, but you say you do. Use your power to get Intel to develop Linux/BSD drivers or even release specs to all of the hardware they release as soon as they release it (e.g. Centrino). Release all of the specs to the hardware you include, fund drivers, do whatever it takes to get everything you release fully supported in open-source operating systems.
It's come a long way in terms of having a decent office suite, playing video and Flash, etc. But the hardware support still needs help, and that's not going to come entirely from community efforts. It needs better OEM support in the form of drivers, and better support in the OS for separating the drivers and the kernel, so the drivers are commodity software that are as easy to install as in Windows.
My hardware isn't exotic, but to even start my SuSE install, I had to buy and install an IDE hard drive because SuSE wouldn't even regognize the drives in my on-board RAID existed. It's not that it couldn't access them. It couldn't even see them.
Once I set up a somewhat complicated dual OS, dual drive boot, it recognized my sound card and printer okay, but it wouldn't recognize the on-board LAN and I could not find an easily installable driver for that anywhere.
Between hardware mods and hunting down info on the www and usenet only to find out that drivers for my balky hardware didn't exist, it took me the better part of a day to install SuSE.
And without networking, it's a pretty useless installation.
Now, the reason Windows XP works flawlessly with my hardware is because Windows is fully supported by the OEM's, who have provided drivers for their hardware. Granted, those are 32-bit drivers and the AMD64 version of Windows is lacking in driver support too.
The difference is that Microsoft is taking time to debug and let drivers trickle in and isn't rushing an incomplete release of their AMD64 version to market for $119.95. SuSE did. Can you imagine the day when someone would point out Microsoft as being more responsible and less buggy than SuSE? It's come.
The Linux community is making a yeoman's effort to support all the hardware Windows does, but without OEM support (i.e. drivers), it's not easy, and without the hardware support, it's hard to have broad-based market penetration.
It doesn't help that SuSE, with a reputation for being easy to install, puts out a crappy, high-priced distro. I feel WAY more ripped-off and abused by SuSE than I ever have by Microsoft. Did you ever expect to hear someone say that either?
Maybe in a corporate environment with standardized hardware that has been pre-screened for Linux compatibility, desktop Linux has an immediate future. But that's not going to get Linux widely adopted in the SOHO market. People look at Linux and think horror stories like mine are the norm, not the exception to the norm, and that's because these stories are still way too common.
IMO, the Linux community and the OEMs have some serious improvements to their cooperation to execute before desktop Linux is ready for prime-time.
-- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic