Ed Haletky: Desktop Linux Nearly There

Mark Brunelli writes "When Edward Haletky's friend asked him for help setting up a Linux desktop in the year 2000, they found only half of the Web applications needed. Since then, while researching his new book, Deploying Linux on the Desktop, Haletky has seen desktop Linux application availability and usability increase to the point where it's nearly ready for widespread corporate use. Yet Haletky does not think that Linux desktops will be widespread by 2007. In this interview, he explains why." Read on for a snippet from the interview. I know my Linux desktop (several, actually) has served well enough for "corporate use" for the past several years.

"Edward Haletky: 'The current enterprise demand for desktop Linux is growing daily and is very hard to quantify at this time. However, there are two desktop efforts going at the moment. The first is for the home user, and the second is for the enterprise. While these may seem dissimilar, they are in essence the same in most respects. The difference boils down to either the custom enterprise applications or specialized tools to access mail and enterprise databases. But in many aspects: for information sharing and training, a good Web and connection client is all that is necessary. For information generation, a good office suite is needed. Both of these are available on Linux today. There are many things to overcome before Linux will be a primary desktop for most users.'"

Comments

Re:Desktop Linux is not nearly there

[Anonymous Coward]

What is the conceptual difference between mounting and unmounting your floppy, and having to unmount your USB pen drive in Windows? Just the mounting part? Why does your hypothetical person have a problem understanding this, but so many people go through the unmount procedure in Windows? It is because people are not as dumb as most people around here like to make them out to be; people learn to do what they need to do to work their computers. When a company implements a new authentication procedure, or change group policies, or whatever, they tell the workers what they have to do differently now and life goes on. When it comes to Linux, people wring their hands and make condensending comments about how "Joe Sixpack" will never do this or that. If Billy G. comes out and for security reasons changes things to require people to open a command shell and enter in one-time codes before they can run their CD, or surf the web, well guess what, old "Joe Sixpack" will start doing that because he wants to play his CDs or surf the web. In Linux, if there you need to become superuser to do something, people say "Joe Sixpack will never go for that because he wants a point-and-click solution." Those of us who went through the pre-GUI days of DOS, Apple IIe, etc. recall and observed that all the regular folk in the world were quite happy working off the command line, who had to directly deal with drive letters, and who had to edit their COMMAND.COM files to get things to work. I remember when university department secretaries used command line text editors to create LaTex papers for professors. Frankly, I find the attitude, especially around here, that the average person is too ignorant to use or accept Linux very elitist and inappropriate.

I find the installation procedure quite easy these days. How many people have to install Windows? I have found Windows installations to be quite painful at times when the drivers are not working. Most people never worry about installing their OS because it comes pre-installed. That is the same for Linux if you are buying a bunch of them for a company.

after 10-15 years

[XO]

After 10-15 years of farking around with Linux and various things, I have completely given up.

I'm sick of spending hours getting things working after updates. Of spending hours getting new hardware working. (then finding out any support software is void of any useful function, ie cameras, sound hardware, etc)