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Ubuntu On The Business Desktop
rchapman wrote to mention a Mad Penguin story about a consultant who installed Ubuntu on his work PC, and managed to use it for over a month before his boss even noticed. From the article: "This is not a typical review, because you've read enough of those. Instead, lets pretend I'm a typical worker, who just happens to have a soft spot for Open Source software. I want to use Linux, but I have a job to do. The price of Freedom should not be my salary. I don't have time to fiddle, all I care is whether or not it can do what I want, right now. So what do I want out of my system?"
How'd he get it on the domain?
I've been using Suse OSS 10 at home and like it a little better- more robust repositories slightly more stable.
I will say that when the next desktop o/s upgrade occurs at my company it may not be as hard as I thought to put Linux on the candidate list because the number of non-IT employees that are switching to Linux at home on their own (without any evangelizing by me) is pretty high. This will certainly make it an easier sell if I want to consider Linux on the desktop at work rather than the PIA-Du Jour from Redmond.
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I run multiple machines at work - some native and some on VMWare. Either my Windows XP machine or my SuSE 10 machine can basically do anything that *I* want. RDP is easy with SuSE - none of the problems mentioned in this article. Kerberos and AD authentication was not very problematic - just go into YAST and the kerberos setup, then edit the config file. Windows administration - just RDP to a Windows desktop and use almost any tool from there. A few apps here and there that are Windows only - Citrix. So for it would work fairly well. I also have no problems at home or work with viruses, spyware, etc - mainly because I don't run as an administrative user.
The problem that prevents Linux from being used where I work is (1) with an Enterprise License Agreement for MS versus one for Redhat/Novell - the cost is about the same (**costwise - not sure who has better support). Number (2) and the main issue is that we have many departments that have 'must have' applications that are Windows only. We're not talking one or two applications - but probably about 60 of them. We can run a few on Citrix or some other platform - but that adds up very quickly. Our view of Linux not being ready for the desktop is -only- related to applications. I don't think our users would care about any of the other stuff. IT is going to set it up - so they don't care how hard it is to install drivers, software and hardware. They only care how it is to use. However, the first time you tell them they can't have their business critical application - it's all over (*a lot of these apps were written in-house, but I'm not responsible for the dev team...one of the other critical apps is our point of sale system...which is Windows only).
My guess is that as more and more stuff becomes web enabled, you'll see more and more people migrating to Linux. I think when most people talk about being enabled for the desktop and how 'difficult' Linux is to setup for the 'typical' user they never consider that the 'typical' user never sets up anything in a corporate environment.
Since then I got a new PC (a real one this time), on which I'm running Ubuntu. I've converted at least 3 other people in the department to Ubuntu (from MS Windows -- there are a couple other Linux users around, too).
Sure there have been some issues. Exchange? Printing? Networking? Sound? Nah -- the biggest problem I've had is that LaTeX/dvips/etc were configured to use A4 paper rather than letter.
Back when I was coping with my old machine (450 MHz, some pittance of RAM), a new PC arrived in the department. It was either for me or for a grad student who needed to run Mathematica. The Chair called the IT department and asked if my old warhorse could handle this (of course I was running Mathematica under Debian, but...). He was told that this box could run Windows XP or Mathematica, but not both. The grad student got the machine and I had to wait another couple of months. Sigh.