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Desktop Linux Mass Migration
Rob writes "With many Linux vendors attempting to push the open source operating system as a
desktop alternative to Windows, Computer Business
Review reports on Novell's migration to Linux on the desktop. From the article: 'Changing any mission-critical technology is a daunting task, and despite the growing maturity of Linux as a desktop operating system, it is little wonder that the vast majority of businesses are sticking with Windows.'"
My company (~800 employees) migrated to Linux over the last two years. It was easier for us since before we mostly used Solaris or Irix. The marketing guys still use powerpoint on their laptops, but I think the rest of us get along OK. It took a while for Linux to achieve the stability of my old Sun box, but it's rock solid these days.
We have a windows terminal sever in house in case someone needs to get on Windows for a while. I have never logged into it.
...is explaining why the java-based Linux (and OS X) GroupWise client has reached near parity with the Win32 version in GW 7 (and in terms of caching mode blows it out of the water for its updating speed). I can see where Joe or Jane User would have complained LOUDLY with the 6.5x version.
...well mostly, not.
I've got a Sales/Service/Repair/LAN Gaming shop in a small (>5k population) town. 18 months ago, I began a test. I sold two of my clients (an 80+ year old grandmother and a mid 40's professional) a custom built box w/ Gentoo installed. (Actually, the formula was a gentoo install w/ a dyndns service so that I could remotely update the system and install packages -- with their knowledge and consent, of course).
To this date, I have not had their system back in the shop.
Two months ago, I began selling low to midrange systems running (k)Ubuntu. The systems are built on Asus mobos and AMD Semprons (higher end CPU's available upon request). The distro detects and configures all devices on install... and auto detects just about every USB device I've thrown at it (from input devices (read gamepads) to scanners).
As far as application support. Crossover Office handles the needs for Photoshop, MS Office (not 2k3, yet...), Dreamweaver, Flash MX, iTunes, IE, etc...
And, using (k)Ubuntu, application installation is easier than ever with Synaptic. Open the app, click an application and install. No depencies, no mucking around w/ CLI's, no problem.
I'm also moving quite a few Thinkpad X21's w/ Ubuntu and Crossover office. At an average price of $350 for a preconfigured linux based thinkpad w/ all the snazzy little thinkpad keys working... they move well.
Anyhow... I just wanted to chime in with the obligatory "Hang on, it's getting there" remark.
#SickNotWeak
Sorry - Mac is a niche OS and will remain so regardless of what hardware platform it runs on. No proprietary OS is going to overtake Windows, neither is it going to rein in an OSS OS like Linux.
You might want to read Cringely's latest column on the Mac move as well. It's not as simple as Jobs made it out to be.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
The only trouble with that idea is that the only problem with Windows from a business's point of view is cost. Although Mac might be cheaper than Windows (once you factor in reliability/security) it can't be cheaper than Linux. If they're switching platforms anyway, it would be more reasonable to switch to the cheapest one, right?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Novell's GroupWise is the most complete groupware package I've ever seen from the little I've messed with it. I have used Novell's NetMail extensively and it is the best email system I've ever used.
to bad they aren't free...
Not really the same argument, in my opinion. The same version of Xorg works fine on other distributions, thus the software itself is not a "beta", merely the configuration of it.
Part of the problem with distro's like Debian is that if you want all the same good stuff everyone else has, you'r stuck with "experimental" branches.
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Why not just go MacTel when I buy my next PC in '06 or '07?
Sure, but only if "MacTel" allows Apple to provide a model lineup of the depth and cheapness of WinTel or LinTel.
The plain fact from a corporate purchasing standpoint is that one can get 4 Desktop PCs for the price of one PowerMac. Mac adovcates are saying all the time that the price difference is a myth, but those are real numbers from real POs.
Oranges to Apples comparision? Sure. But Apple doesn't sell the Orange, they only sell a couple different kinds of Apples. (There's iMacs which would require us to throw out perfectly good ADC flat panels, and there's the Mini which isn't performance-competitive with the G4 tower it replaces, and is hardly cheap for what you get by the time you put RAM into it.)
Now if a commodity Intel board allows Apple to sell something like a commodity Intel computer, maybe you have a winner on the corporate desktop. But I tend to believe that Apple just chooses not to compete in that space.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
the blame for linux's lack of desktop maturity and lack of driver support for nvidia etc, lies squarely on the pre x.org group, XFree. nvidia were submitting patchs as were ati and they were being ignored. just look at how the whole project stagnated for YEARS, people screaming out for features, developers submitting patchs, wanting cvs commit access, and it was all ignored. the whole linux/gnu/bsd desktop situation would be years ahead if it wasn't for those turkeys
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
On normal office desktop machines, the graphics are just too slow, at least the one I have. I have run SuSE 9.1/9.2, since it became available, at the office and it is perfect except for the graphics.
:D). It was like I got a much faster PC.
I run 1600x1200 on my 21" screen and the graphics are just too slow.
We run all our MS apps via Citrix so I have all the programs I need. Although the Citrix graphics performance are horrible under Linux, I could live with that(and the flaky cut'n'paste between MS apps and Linux, that only works sometimes), if just the graphics speed were OK with Linux apps.
After 2 years on Linux, it was refreshing/less stressful to boot up on Windows again(note that I do not run our windows network
And that bothers me because now I got used to Linux on the desktop, and I would REALLY like to run it, but the graphics just annoys me so much. It is just too slow that makes me think sometimes that I work on a 500MHz machine and not 2.6 GHz.
I don't mean that as a silly statement. Look at OS X - Apple has created a very strong image for their product. It's 'sexy', 'stable', 'lickable', etc. Every John and Jane Computer User knows what Windows is; it's the software which runs computers. But what's Linux? Is it a kernel? An operating system? A series of distributions? A free operating system?
To me, marketing this is the biggest weakness of open source. Now, we all know that marketing has nothing to do with which OS is better, but in a market in which the actual differences between operating systems from the view of an average computer user are growing smaller and smaller, Linux doesn't have the kind of mindshare OS X and Windows do. What Linux really needs is a Steve Jobs, someone who will obsessively proselytize the OS to any and all.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Huh? My FC4 has two clipboards, one is the auto-copy-when-highlighted, paste with a middle click; the other is the ctrl-c to copy, ctrl-x to cut, ctrl-v to paste. They can hold different things at the same time. My released-this-year distro does not have a unified clipboard.
is probably the single most important reason to use Windows,
Outlook 2k3 + Exchange/SBS + ACL is a good business solution (even if it is >2000$)
until Linux can replicate the suites functionality and ease of use (for admin+users alike) our enterprise will be sticking with a Windows thanks
Funny that you mention Exchange for a couple of reasons...
First because MS decided that Exchange 2003 was going to be their new cash cow. So 2k3 is licensed *per client*. Which means if you have 5000 clients you are going to be paying through the nose! $2,000? Hah! That'll run ya ~$200,000 for a few thousands clients or so...
Second because you have OpenXchange (from Novell) which will emulate an Exchange server and talk to Outlook clients. Not to mention Evolution (Novell again) which will talk to an Exchange 2k/2k3 server with their connector software.
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
The first rule of UI design is to never do dangerous operations without first warning the user. It's way too easy for a user to accidentally click the middle mouse button when they're trying to scroll. Depending on what they're doing, and especially if they have no idea what they did to cause it, it can paste do all kinds of damage to their documents. Hopefully the application supports Undo, and they know how to use it.
Middle mouse paste just seems way too dangerous to me for the average user. Why not tie format to the middle mouse button while you're at it.
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I'm using NOW my ATI video card and I just checked the "Logitech" label on my mouse...
I never used "FairUse, ACDSee, GetRight, XFire, Ulead Video", but my Firefox, Opera, OO.org, GAIM, RealPlayer, Adobe Reader -- the applications that I use in Windows run very well on Linux too.
I select an application with ONE click and then click install and it gets installed.
Linux is there for me and for many of my friends.
Vendors will wake up eventually and write and compile stuff for Linux -- they just have to smell the profit.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
This is actually great, if they switch completely and "stick to it". One prerequisite, though, is that they should allocate significant R&D resources to fixing the problems with this migration and afterwards. FOSS developers, PLEASE take their patches and merge them in. This trial by fire is invaluable, and may uncover problems that are not obvious to you.
if I had someone to help me when it breaks. I've dallied with Debian and now Gentoo, but each of them has ended up broken (due directly to my own ignorance) to the point where fixing it to make it usable was beyond my knowledge. I'm not a stupid person. I know how to google, and I know that the best answer to a question is a source of information, rather than a set of instructions, but it's not always easy to know what to ask or how to get the responses you need, and even if you do, often you're ignored anyways. I'd love to see a distro step up to address this, maybe with some kind of voluntary mentor/buddy system, where an experienced user 'adopts' a newbie and offers periodic, light email or chat help when needed, till the new user gets sufficiently knowledgeable to fix things herself (at which time, said user could become a mentor for a newer user if they so choose, perpetuating things). This is what keeps me on Windows, and a bit of my soul dies every time I turn the thing on, but I can fix it if it breaks (which, of course, it does).
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
Make sure you have a second source. For everything.
IBM got a second source for CPUs, but not for operating systems (after all, operating systems are commodities, right?) and look what happened - cheap x86 CPUs, expensive Windows. Make sure that every piece of hardware and software can be replaced by a competitors produce easily. If you are using Linux, make sure you can migrate to *BSD or another Linux distribution at any point. Make sure that if your hardware supplier increases their costs, you can go somewhere else. Oh, and one more piece of advice:
The cost of moving from a platform, not moving to it, is part of the purchase price
If you want to avoid vendor lock-in, you need to make sure that whenever you evaluate a piece of hardware or software you add the price of migrating from it to the purchase price. Do not trust your suppliers to have your best interests at heart. If you have already budgeted for migrating away from a platform then you are free to do so at any point.
[1] Above the kernel level, anyway. The system call overhead is so painful that any low level code really hurts.
[2] It's just a shame Apple can't follow their own HIGs in places.
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I agree. Let me tell you of a (small) application I was responsible for about 10 years ago with a major bank.
... [long explanation]"
We wrote some integration stuff - take the data from here, stick it in a file, massage it, then load it into this other database here; cron it so it runs every hour or so - very, very vanilla.
We wrote it in perl.
Then when we came to deploy it, some compliance guy became very concerned: "what's perl? Who supports it? Do we have a licence? What happens when it does wrong? We can't put unsupported software into production you know."
Believe me, compliance is a really, really big issue in banks. Rightly so.
There was no way I was going to get this deployed with those questions hanging over my head.
So I rang my friendly Sun salesman and had the following (somewhat bizzare) conversation:
Me: "You guys use perl in Solaris right?"
Him: "Of course"
Me: "For which we're already licenced right?"
Him: "I hope so - else we shouldn't be shipping those boxes to you"
Me: "So do we have support for perl?"
Him: "Ummm. Maybe not, you should speak to Larry Wall and the perlmonks for that. But why are you worried? How often do you have problems with perl?"
Me: "Hardly ever, but
Me: "Can you sell us a support licence? You just forward our emails to the perl guys, and send back their responses"
Him: "Sure, what do you think will work?"
Me: "How about $5,000, perpetual, one off"
Him: (laughing) "Ok, I'll send you the invoice"
The application got deployed. For $5,000 more than it should have cost, but it did go in, and deliver it's business benefits.
Thankfully, people are much more switched on about open source these days and I haven't ever encountered the problem again.
Quite honestly, all this guff about licencing, accountability, responsibility is just plain, flat out FUD
You can *always* find a way to mitigate and manage your risks, and there are *always* people who will help you do it.
Does the parent poster really believe that MS has a monopoly on trust and accountability? Really?
A convicted monopolist who paraded fabricated evidence in front of the court?
(I think my eyes just popped out of my head)
That isn't far off the mark.
I have been writing to hardware manufacturers pointing out that their hardware is compatible with "the popular GNU/Linux operating system" {may as well talk it up and it is "popular" at least in the sense that it's the People's OS}, and requesting that they add a penguin icon next to their "Windows XP" icon.
One of the responses I received suggested that Microsoft would take exception to this, and might even refuse to accredit the Windows driver if the manufacturer released one for Linux.
What this means Microsoft are paying hardware manufacturers not to support Linux, or at least to pretend not to support Linux.