IBM Desktop Linux Pledge, One Year Later

Blue writes "It's been more than a year since the bold announcement from IBM that they planned on dumping Windows for Linux throughout the company. InfoWorld is reporting that not all is well with IBM's desktop Linux push. What went wrong?"

Comments

Here's the book, read it for yourself

[Dancin_Santa]

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg246380.htm l

Re:How Disappointing

[Greyfox]

I never saw any ActiveX components in the company. Mind you, I was a contractor and didn't have to access the assorted things that the regulars had to use. However, the internal development platform seems to be either Lotus Notes or Websphere/JSP. A couple of the more necessary apps were implemented in Java and ran just fine on Linux.

Lotus Notes seems to be by far the biggest thorn in everyone's side. While it does run(ish) on Wine, most people who would be adopting Linux early prefer to handle their E-Mail themselves, and no one could ever convince IT to enable the imap servers on the Notes servers.

The thing no one seems to understand about IBM is that they tend to work in 5 year cycles. All the platform planning that's going on now won't be deployed for 4 or 5 more years. That means that the Linux push, which is only a year or two old, still has some time to go before it reaches maturity. Getting a company of 200,000+ people to change course is not a quick process. I would not be surprised to see a huge deployment of Linux company-wide in about 3 years. They'll probably still be running Notes using Wine then, though.

Re:more than insightful

[novakyu]

Case in point: I just wasted three days trying to make Debian work on a BRAND-NEW Dell. I gave up.

Well, if you are trying to do something with a BRAND-NEW computer, about which you know nothing (most likely, you don't know by heart what video card it has, what ethernet card (if not integrated into motherboard, and in that case, the drivers for motherboard) or what sound card it has---and these are basic things), you are going to struggle. For me, the first-time formatting my computers was always a pain (and yes, I was installing "user-friendly" Windows), because I never knew what hardware I had until then...

Actually, do you know what I do when I can't figure out what video card, etc. I have and I don't really want to open up the computer to look up the serial number? I boot up my computer with Knoppix---except for that one time when I was booting my roommate's computer with a gigabit ethernet card ("cutting edge" so to speak), it found all the hardwares correctly, and I just look at the system message (which, as it happens, is more informative than Windows system messages are) so that I can figure out what to do.

Re:more than insightful

[Long-EZ]

parent should have said more ... I like Linux, but, I don't USE it, I play with it.

Not even close. I've been running my small business with Xandros Linux for over two years. I was more productive in year one than I ever was with previous versions of Windows. I just installed Xandros 3.0, and it just keeps getting better.

The Linux learning curve and occasional issues are less hassle than maintaining Windows anti-virus software and still getting the occasional brand new virus. This happened to an IT friend at work (several hundred employees). Or maintaining anti-spyware software and still having all the jacking around to the registry result in an unstable system every 6-12 months, requiring a fresh installation of Windows and all applications. If your OS is secure, you don't need a bunch of crappy bandaid solutions layered on top.

The fact is, there are excellent versions of Linux available right now that are beating Windows in stability, security AND usability, which is quite feat considering hardware and software is Windows compatible by definition. Make your life easier and check for Linux compatibiliy before buying new hardware. When I do that, it's usually easier and faster to install new hardware on Linux. No plug-n-pray, no reboot.

Most PC users only want a browser, email, and maybe word processing and spreadsheet. Most are VERY happy with Mozilla and OpenOffice.

The only issue I've had in using Linux in a very PC-intensive engineering business is QuickBooks. It runs well under CrossOver (Windows emulation), but the user interface is a bit ugly. A native Linux version or better CrossOver support for QuickBooks would be nice.

About the only PC users who can't use Linux are serious gamers. I think they should be playing dedicated game consoles instead of Windows games, but they're free to do what they want. However, we'll all be a lot better off when people stop using Windows and we can finally get away from the nonstop Outlook worms and spam spewed from zombied Windows machines. Owned Windows boxes send over 80% of all spam.

Xandros is based on Debian, but it's very easy to use. You should try it. I couldn't believe how much better it felt to use open source applications. Xandros Networks is an online repository of popular open source software, and most RPM and DEB packages can also be installed. No crappy licensing agreements, copy protection, registration hassles, EULAs, or product key codes. Pretty much, click the install button and a minute later you're running the new application. It's much easier than Windows software installation, and removing software is MUCH MUCH easier than Windows. The Xandros package manager tracks all library dependencies. Compare that with Windows, where uninstalling works right about 30% of the time, and usually leaves a lot of crap in the registry. Besides, how should I know if another application might be using a shared DLL? Can't Windows keep track of that?

Bottom line: If you can't install one of the new GUI Linux desktop operating systems, you should give up on reading Slashdot and go back to something better suited to your skilzs.