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

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I got FIRST POST, WHORES!

We tried rolling out Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to laugh when I read about all of these countries that are
supposedly leaving Windows and converting to Linux. Do these people
even have a clue as to what they are in for?
Do they even realize the immense amount of retraining required to move
to Linux?
Do they realize that the chances of their vertical in house
applications working is nil?
Do they understand that much of their hardware will not be supported?
Converting to Linux was a disaster for my company.

I know I'll be modded 'troll' for this, but its the truth.

I suspect that the answer to all of these questions and many more will
be no because Linux looks like a great alternative, until one looks
closer and sees all of the holes and troublesome problems that Linux
introduces.

For my company, we would have had to replace over 2000 Brother
Multifunction printers with some model that worked with Linux. The
problem was that we could not find any equivilant.
We tried using the commercial version of Sun Openoffice and found it
buggy and totally incompatabile with Office. We tried sending
documents to our clients and they did not work too well.
It seems that Openoffice, even the pay for version has troubles being
read by Microsoft Office.

Another area that we had massive problems in was with video cards.
We were using ATI cards in our systems and it seems that Linux support
for ATI is pretty poor.

In conclusion, we have decided not to switch to Linux for the simple
reason that Linux does not offer us anything but headaches.
We don't want to downgrade out hardware to use Linux.
We don't wish to look like fools sends documents to clients and
suppliers that they cannot read.

Linux may be fine for some people, but it was a disaster for us.

Maria Quansett

Real world vs. fanboy fantasies

[Mike Bourna]

The Register is smoking crack, and has probably misunderstood or deliberately misinterpreted Novell. The licence costs per se of upgrading to Vista (or any new version of most other proprietary operator systems) are neglible. If you're already running a Windows operation, it's absurd to consider switching to an inferior LinuxOS infrastructure instead of upgrading to Vista, or simply keeping the old Windows version you're already running.

I am what most people would consider a highly trained technical professional. Unlike most people who spout off at this site, I have the certificates to prove this, and furthermore they're issued by the biggest software company in existence.

I know how to tell facts from marketing fluff. Now, here are the facts as they're found by SEVERAL INDEPENDENT RESEARCH INSTITUTES:

Expenses for file-server workloads under Windows, compared to LinuxOS:

• Staffing expenses were 33.5% better.
  
• Training costs were 32.3% better.
  

They compared Microsofts IIS to the Linux 7.0 webserver. For Windows, the cost was only:

• $40.25 per megabit of throughput per second.
  
• $1.79 per peak request per second.
  

Application development and support costs for Windows compared to an opensores solution like J2EE:

• 28.2% less for large enterprises.
  
• 25.0% less for medium organizations.
  

A full Windows installation, compared to installing Linux, on an Enterprise Server boxen:

• Is nearly three hours faster.
  
• Requires 77% fewer steps.
  

Compared to the best known opensores webserver "Red Hat", Microsoft IIS:

• Has 276% better peak performance for static transactions.
  
• Has 63% better peak performance for dynamic content.
  

These are hard numbers and 100% FACTS! There are several more where these came from.

Who do you think we professionals trust more?
Reliable companies with tried and tested products, or that bedroom coder Thorwaldes who publicly admits that he is in fact A HACKER???

--
Copyright (c) 2004 Mike Bouma, MCSE, MCDST, MS Office Specialist, widely respected Amigan

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2
or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation;
with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover
Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled "GNU
Free Documentation License".

win2k support

[Dink Paisy]

I agree that the discontinuation of Windows 2000 support is likely to have a much bigger impact on Linux migration. Also note that for most enterprises, the big costs will be installation and retraining, not licensing costs. So depending upon how Windows Vista looks in those departments, it could drive more people to Linux or it could make people who are currently looking at Linux stay with Windows.

If there are significant changes that are seen as positive, Windows Vista could well solidify Microsoft's hold on the corporate desktop. And a quick glance at the Office 12 screenshots ought to disprove the people who think that Microsoft isn't innovative. Although I'll withold judgement on whether this particular innovation is good or bad until I've actually used it. Which is likely what corporations will do when considering Windows Vista versus Linux, as well.

Re:That may be true

[FlamingLaird]

What killed Novell in the first place was it's inability to intigrate with PCs running Windows. Everyone wanted an Exchange server - so they installed a domain controller - And once they had an NT domain in place there wasn't a whole lot of reason to keep the extra network login box around.

NDS is to this day a better network managment system than Active Directory despite being basically abandoned what, five years ago?

What I keep waiting to see from Novell is a linux based desktop solution given away for free... and a competativly priced server product (Novell on a linux core instead of dos? Yum) and network management system based around NDS.

The only thing that would hold them back then is the same thing that killed them in the first place - You have to have an NT domain in place to effectivly use Exchange (at least for larger installations) - Perhaps it's time to bring Groupwise back with a Thunderbird front end? What's the status of the calandar app in the Mozilla suite anyway?

Re:what makes vista special?

[JPriest]

All the agruements are the same as the ones for XP mostly. "Who would want to use that fisher price version of win2k?" I say to myself...