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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.'"
"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.'"
Recently I have been bitching about all of the problems with Linux in general (stuff like inconsistencies in the Windows Manager (primarily Gnome), arbitrary differences between distros for some of the most basic of things like configuring the bootloader, etc). However, to be fair Linux as a system has gotten light years better in the last year. In the last few weeks I have been trying all of the updates that have been coming out. I have tried:
Ubuntu 5.0.4
Fedora Core 4
Mandriva Download Edition 10.1
Gentoo 2005.1
OpenSUSE Linux 10 beta
My opinion is:
Linux is ready now for the enterprise desktop, as long as you can run your mission critical apps. This is because most businesses have their own support people.
Linux is ready for the home desktop IF it supports your hardware AND you don't mind having to go to the command line to install apps that are not supplied by your distro.
On the other hand, if your computer has hardware that is NOT supported by your distro then (if you are a noobie like me) you have just entered Linux Hell (tm).
One thing I wonder about, I have noticed that the same open source tools available through multiple distros all seem to work slightly differently. This may just be a version difference (I don't know cause I didn't compare version IDs) but it seems to be very widespread.
What Linux Needs (tm) to really get established at home (in my humble opinion) is a complete end to end installer for apps and drivers. End to end means that you choose an app to install and the installer also installs any dependent libraries WITHOUT asking you where they are on the internet, and compiles the dependencies from source if it isn't available from your distro already compiled, and it handles the architectural switches (x86 vs. amd64 for example), and it ties the new app into the Windows Manager you are using (such as creating the icon to run the app from the WM menu).
Another Thing That Wouldn't Hurt (tm) is a central repository for links to non-OSS packages, especially drivers. Since most distros don't include proprietary drivers, sometimes it is tough to find them. My ATI graphics card is one such example, my Broadcom wireless networking card is another.
As for myself, I like Ubuntu for the community support, Fedora for the consistency of their distro, and Suse for their YAST2 program, although I haven't as yet decided which distro I will be going with.
To sum up though, Linux is very very close to being on par with Windows. Now if we can just get those pesky hardware drivers nailed down...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I'm with you, and I especially love it when the "how-tos" don't cover basics:
1) Where to type stuff in. Sure it's obvious to the Linux guru that "ndiswrapper -i" goes into the terminal and that "192.168.1.1" goes into the IP address field, but if I'm not an expert, I have no clue.
2) They tell you to use a path that's wrong. I've had this one more than once... on the ndiswrapper one, for instance, it tells me to place the Windows driver on my desktop, then use a root terminal to type in "ndiswrapper -i ~/desktop/windows_driver"... that's great, but that uses the desktop belonging to *ROOT* not to me, because it's a root terminal! Again, that's probably obvious to the Linux guru, but it stumped me for a half hour. (And, BTW, if you have to type in a path at all, WRITE A GUI PEOPLE! Why does Knoppix have a GUI (albeit a terrible one) for ndiswrapper but Ubuntu doesn't? Criminy, how irritating.)
3) What to do for common errors. When I tried the above, I got some error like "cp: Failed, file does not exist." Well, I know now in retrospect that it's because I was telling it to look in the wrong desktop folder, but the How-To didn't have any explaination of that error. (And no, I don't know that "cp" means "file copy." And again, if you're looking for reasons why people hate Linux, how about the obvious: If "cp" runs into an error, why doesn't it tell you WHICH FILE has the error? I mean, duh!)
4) Also covering the basics would be nice. I know now that "ndiswrapper" is a program that can "translate" (somehow) Windows networking drivers into Linux drivers, but the how-to didn't tell me that, I had to glean it after the fact.
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