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OSDL Announces Desktop Initiative

Posted by timothy on from the pleasant-buzzing-noise dept.

rhetoric writes "Earlier today at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in New York, nonprofit Open Source Development Labs announced the creation of a "Desktop Linux Working Group initiative focused on greater use of Linux on desktops throughout the enterprise." A press release is available on OSDL's website, in addition to this Register article." It's all part of their non-secret plan.

5 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. Linux on the desktop by sql*kitten · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sun recently sent me a CD with their Java Desktop on it, which for anyone who doesn't know, is a slickly-packaged Linux distro with a very user friendly interface, Sun's excellent StarOffice suite, Mozilla, etc etc. I've been having a play with it (I use StarOffice on Windows anyway) and I'm quite impressed. It's all nicely integrated with a mostly consistent look and feel, for the end user there's no messing around, anyone who's familiar with Windows and MS Office could pick this up in a day and be productive. As an old-skool Unix user, I'd personally prefer a NeXTSTEP or IRIX desktop, but as a normal Windows user, JDS is impressive.

    That's the way to do Linux on the desktop - it has to be as near as possible seamless. Someone who knows what they're doing has to sit down and make it all work. Bundling together a package here and a package there as Red hat does just isn't going to cut it. If the objective is to actually get Linux on the desktop, then OSDN should throw its lot in with Sun. But it looks like this "initiative" is just bandwagoneering.

  2. Business desktop vs Home desktop by tr0llb4rt0 · · Score: 5, Informative

    Linux is ready for the business desktop.

    Until the hardware manufacturers put as much effort into Linux drivers as they do for Windows drivers then home Linux desktop pc's will be restricted to the geek community.

    That and the old old topic of gaming support. :-D

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  3. Keep in Mind by tres3 · · Score: 5, Informative
    The thing to keep in mind here is that they are most likely shooting for a corporate desktop where the secretaries will have a very limited portfolio of applications. They just need things like email, web, word processing, and a spreadsheet. Linux is an ideal client for that!

    1. It doesn't catch all of the M$ viruses out there.

    2. If it does catch a virus it will only blow away the user's account and not the whole computer.

    3. User email accounts can be time limited to only send x messages per minute. This will further retard the proliferation of nasty email attached worms. (IP_TABLES LIMIT)

    4. Software that is installed in a user's account runs with limited priviledges and is not going to muck up anything outside of the user's account. (It is also out of the reach of other users)

    5. The installation and applications can be custom tailored to an organization so that there is no super-corporation dictating that ALL computers will have Winblows Media Slayer installed.

    6. Trivial little things, like having the default search page be an internal corporate server, can be setup in a CD image so that everything is the way the corporation doing the deploying wants it and not the way some license agreement with Redmond mandates.

    7. Documents will automatically be protected from other users by being protected in seperate home directories.

    8. Usage of company computers would be limited to those people that have accounts on the computers.

    9. ... etc. etc. etc.

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  4. IBM - already doing it by GomezAdams · · Score: 5, Informative

    We're already moving all of our internal desktop users to Linux over the next two years. There will still be dual boot for those that need it but most corporate desktop users not needing another operatng system will run pure Linux for the daily chores of email and document exchange. All my product support work is done in Java, PERL, and scripting so I can be 100% Linux for all my activities now. The default window manager will be Gnome but you can use others as your taste dictates. Most interprise applications have already been ported and the rest will be. The elephant is not only dancing but leading the parade.

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  5. Re:What Linux is still to give me by IamTheRealMike · · Score: 3, Informative
    Also, X crashes much too often

    I'd consider crashing at all a serious problem, aking to a kernel panic in terms of badness. Fortunately X is pretty stable. Crashes in it are normally XVideo related in my experience.

    Also, Desktop and icons must be files, and not stupid complex data-files, which is pretty hard to modify.

    At least in Gnome 2.4 the "virtual" icons on the desktop are overlayed by the file manager and do not actually exist on the filing system (home, start here etc). The desktop is then made up from the files in ~/Desktop