Novell Expects Vista to Spur Linux Adoption

It doesn't come easy writes "According to the Register, Novell expects the cost of upgrading to Vista will encourage many companies to turn to Linux instead. From the article: 'Jack Messman, chief executive of networking software vendor Novell says that 2006 will see widespread adoption of Linux on the corporate desktop. According to Messman the catalyst will be the release of Microsoft Windows Vista and the high costs associated with upgrading. Obviously, if they're right Novell hopes that turn will be toward SUSE Linux.'" We touched on this issue late last month, as well.

Comments

I agree with this...

[Praedon]

Its not like Linux has a billion versions for each distro of Linux, they have versions that make sense, and fit the needs of the end user. What if Red Hat had: Red Hat Home Users, Red Hat Professional Home Users, Red Hat For Porn Users, yada yada... People wont know what the hell they are getting!! But besides all that, Im happy to say that the Linux community has made some major breakthroughs lately with such vast compatibility ports to many commercial products used today for those who are "stuck" on Windows Desktops.

Re:I agree with this...

[taylortbb]

This is the thing Open Source advocates often miss (not flaimbait, I advocate OSS and use Linux). When you are a large company delpoying Windows, the price of licenses for 50 000 machines isn't the problem. The problem is how much it costs to support it. These are companies with budgets of millions, billions, of dollars. An administrator doesn't have time to tinker with distributions, and create a system from scratch, there need to be packaged, reliable system from big name vendors which do this with ease. Try being a sysadmin for a week and you'll know what I mean. I want to deploy Linux, but doing requires more time than I, or anyone else, has.

The amount large companies spend on support contracts dwarf what they spend on actual licenses. When your running Windows you can get a contract which will guarantee a support time of under two hours.

The other part is how to manage it and deploy it. Things like ActiveDirectory, which are a pain in the ass, but they provide one complete, integrated location to go to for managing everything. I know you can setup the same thing in Linux but it takes ALOT longer, because you have to do everything manually.

Those two points are what keep companies from adopting Linux. Linux needs reliable support from big names, Novell is stepping up here, but they still aren't IBM. As for the management system, I have no idea, I have yet to find a system that will handle users, desktop lockdown, applications management/deployment/permissions, etc. from one, central, automated location. Even Apple has managed to create a system to do this (I manage an OS 9/OS X/Windows mixed environment).

(NOTE: By automated I mean, I change the desktop lockdown settings and every computer changes instantly. And adding more desktops is as simple as choosing a setting like "Managed by Server: lmanage.internal.company.org")

From TFA...

[SlashChick]

"Jack Messman, chief executive of networking software vendor Novell says that 2006 will see widespread adoption of Linux on the corporate desktop."

Just like 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001...

The real problem is (still) lack of applications and games. My home PC can't switch until Dreamweaver and Photoshop run on Linux. My office PC can't switch until Quickbooks and VersaCheck run on Linux. Honestly, I've seen more Windows->Mac and Linux->Mac migrations than anything else these past few years... and little to no evidence that shows that Linux is gaining popularity on desktop PCs, other than these "wishful thinking" articles from Linux company CEOs.

Something else to think about: The upgrade cost to Vista, for most companies, is effectively $0 because it comes with new PCs. Contrast this with yearly application updates for Photoshop, Quickbooks, anti-virus, anti-spyware, et al. which can run thousands of dollars. Microsoft isn't the only cost center on a typical PC; in fact, I'd say they're one of the smallest costs involved with a typical office PC.

Why Microsoft Wins...

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

The problem with this view is that with big deployments, the Microsoft "price per seat" is always negotiable, especially when you bring a possible Linux migration into the equation. In fact we have seen this: XYZ government or company makes noise about moving to Linux, and Microsoft simply negotiates a lower price. When migration cost is the key issue, Microsoft has the upper hand. However, when other issues such as "open standards" are the issues, Microsoft can't compete. The problem is not selling lower TOC, it'' selling the benefits of "open standards". It's too bad that many Linux "evangelists" frame Linux migration arguments in the context of ideology, because governments and companies are rarely interested in these things, they have budgets to meet and people to serve.

Re:News?

[HermanAB]

Hell's bells - trusted monitor - are you serious? I can't believe what people would put up with.

Re:what makes vista special?

[AlexMax2742]

This article isn't about end users. It's about large corperations who probably buy equipment in bulk.

However, what is so special about this upgrade to Vista compared to when the whole upgrade-o-rama for XP and 2000 respectivly? Since a good portion of Vista features are being backported to XP, this is even less of an incentive to upgrade.

Re:Goodbye C#, Hello C++ and GTK?

[TheRaven64]

Do yourself a favour, and download GNUstep and learn Objective-C. Use a language with real introspection built in, and not some horrible hacked-on incompatible version added by a toolkit. As an added bonus, you get source-compatibility with OS X, so your apps will look and feel like native Mac apps if you put a couple of hours into porting them. There's also been a lot of progress made with the Windows port of GNUstep recently, so you retain Windows compatibility.