Linux Five Years Away From Mainstream

wellington wrote to mention a ZDNet blurb about a Gartner group study. Gartner indicates that 'mainstream' use of open source in IT environments may be 5 years away. From the article: "Gartner's latest Linux 'hype cycle' report shows that open source is halfway to maturity but warns the biggest test will be whether it can demonstrate the necessary performance and security to function as a data centre server for mission-critical applications. Leading-edge businesses are generally still in the early stages of Linux deployments but Gartner expects increased commercialisation and improved storage and systems management for the operating system by the end of 2005, with Linux being used primarily for WebSphere and infrastructure applications on mainframes and web services on blades and racks."

Comments

5 years is not much to a large enterprise

[RMH101]

researching, designing and implementing (smoothly, including migrating your data to your new environment with no impact to the business) a change to a new operating system *always* takes a long time. here, we're not moving to XP from 2000 as it's not worth it: we're moving to longhorn as and when it emerges. it'd take just as much planning (probably more, in fact) to shift to linux. think upgrade cycles. think win2k going off support as a driver to change. 5 years doesn't seem all that long to me...

Re:Its not the hardware

[MrNemesis]

Most Linux advocates don't just hand their grandma a copy of Linux From Scratch and leave them to it, you know...

My first ever experience with Linux was Mandrake 8.2 Beta. I found the installation of the OS much easier than (my first) windows install two weeks previously; It Just Worked. Once I'd gotten my head around how it handled installing things, it was easy.

These days it's brain-sputteringly simple. Every desktop distro worth its salt has a graphical package installation utility that explains exactly which packages are available, and what they are used for - usualy sorted into relevant categories. Heck, even installing things as complicated (in the Linux world) as kernel modules/drivers is usually simple.

Granted, some pre-alpha drivers require some confugling, but once they go stable and are added to the kernel, it becomes practically impossible not to set things up properly, thanks to the marvell of things like hotplug. Even relatively complicated pieces of software (that no Joe Schmoe would install anyway) such as Apache and MySQL have GUI configurators available. In the realm of pure desktop productivity/leisure software, I've not encountered a single package that didn't just install and give me a nice clickable button in my K/foot/whatever menu.

If there's anything wrong with the way modern desktop distros handle packaging, it's educating the users away from the "download arbitrary .exe from random website, double click to install" mindset. Whilst I agree that a unified packaing system would be great, different distros are tuned for different usage models, so (to me at least) it makes sense that they'll handle things differently. Forcing Linux to adopt the windows method of software installation will create more problems than it'll solve.

FWIW, my girlfriend is entirely happy with the Gentoo/KDE box I've donated to her.

Re:Nuclear Fusion

[einhverfr]

Reading this post and the thread that goes with it makes me wonder if anyone else out there bothers to RTFA...
If you even read the summary here on /. rather than hust the headline you'd see that the article is about linux being 5 years away from mainstream in IT environments. No mention of joe sixpack or your grandma not knowing how to use linux.

Hmmm.... What percentage of web servers run Linux?

What percentage of DMZ hosts run Linux?

What percentage of closed email relays run Linux?

THese are all mainstream IT environments and Linux is quite capable there.

Now, if you are talking large database managers, LDAP infrastructures, etc. there is still a little ways to go. But it is still possible today (just not as mature as the above examples).

Gardner makes one extremely serious error in this study: they underestimate the resources that IBM, SGI, and other traditional big-iron vendors are throwing at Linux. I would not be surprised of, in 5 years, IBM is retiring AIX in favor of Linux.

Just my $0.02

As for the corporate workstation, I think 6-8 years is a good estimate (not a question of whether Linux is ready for the desktop but a question of when people will decide to migrate and how long these migrations take).