Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

IBM Germany Leaving Vista for Linux

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the that-just-seems-strange dept.

UltimaGuy writes "During a presentation on IBM's involvement with Open Source, Andreas Pleschek from IBM in Stuttgart, Germany, who heads open source and Linux technical sales across North East Europe for IBM made a very interesting statement..."Andreas Pleschek also told that IBM has cancelled their contract with Microsoft as of October this year. That means that IBM will not use Windows Vista for their desktops. Beginning from July, IBM employees will begin using IBM Workplace on their new, Red Hat-based platform. Not all at once - some will keep using their present Windows versions for a while. But none will upgrade to Vista." "

10 of 351 comments (clear)

  1. f1rst p0azt by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    f1rst p0azt

  2. Old news, already on Digg by shodson · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Hmm, this was interesting news when I read about it on Digg.com YESTERDAY! Wake up /.

    1. Re:Old news, already on Digg by SomeGuyTyping · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      I really wish I could be cool like you

      --
      My posts are definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
    2. Re:Old news, already on Digg by Tweekster · · Score: 0, Offtopic

      OMG, you mean it was posted somewhere else within 24 hours prior.... OMG it might as well be a year ago now.

      --
      The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
    3. Re:Old news, already on Digg by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      I wish you Digg fan boys would just die already. Honestly, if we wanted to read news written by retards, followed by comments written by retards we would go to Digg. Obviously, a ton of people here don't read Digg so how about you fuck off and stay at Digg if it's so much better.

      P.S. For every decent story on the front page of Digg there are thousands upon thousands of horrific ones. Also, the site is programmed like shit, slow to load and the comments are painful to read. By admitting you read Digg you are simultaneously admitting your own stupidity.

  3. Ridiculous by HappyUserPerson · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    IBM is a consulting company - they provide hardware and software to support other company's infrastructure. The idea that they will convert their clients and potential clients to GNU/Linux is a kind of ridiculous in a market dominated by Windows.

    Which means that they'll lose market share to consulting companies who didn't make it a corporate policy to be ignorant of new market-dominating technology.

    IBM has made a lot of contributions to Linux, but they certainly have not positioned it to credibly compete head-to-head with Windows. Of course, IBM got out of the end-to-end software engineering business, so they're not in the position to do that.

    It is worth noting that (according to the article) that this misguided policy may be only regional; which is a good thing for IBM -- limit the damage.

  4. Leveno implications? by mccalli · · Score: 1, Offtopic
    I wonder - does this imply that Leveno's machines will now be in Linux-supporting default configurations?

    I realise the PC business is being sold, but I imagine IBM internally uses IBM-style PCs and I hazard that this might well continue on to Leveno PCs. If they're all moving to Linux, then the hardware must support that.

    Cheers,
    Ian

  5. But... by night_flyer · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I thought that IBM sold their desktop unit, so who's machines are they putting Linux on?

    --


    Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
    Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
  6. Re:Vista? by Synic · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    it isn't always just the fact that you can't play the game on linux, as with cedega you can usually get the more popular and older titles to run under it... the problem is that video driver support is terrible under linux still, especially with ATI cards. This means that if you can get the game to play without graphical glitches at all it will still be about 15-20 frames per second slower than the windows counterpart. This is a huge deal because if you're only getting like 30fps in a game such as FEAR or Call of Duty 2 with all the nice details then you will HAVE to turn the graphical detail down a bunch to get back those 15-20 fps you lost from running via reverse engineering on Linux OpenGL drivers. It should also be noted that since most developers are still using DirectX 9.0, OpenGL has not been heavily invested in acceleration for consumer class cards (unlike workstation cards) and so you can say that this is also part of the reason the Linux drivers are slower than their Windows counterpart (along with the fact that they just don't tune/optimize the Linux driver as much-- Cedega I'm sure is not in the forefront of their mind either-- or release as often).

    If you are into games like World of Warcraft, such as the 6 million people worldwide that they boast, then maybe you'd rather have 40-50 fps in areas with many players/monsters/effects than 10-15fps (which is fairly difficult to play with in combat, especially PvP)...

    Strategy or RTS games like Civilization IV or LOTR:Battle for Middle Earth 2 are not FPS/action type games but they still have far less problems being run on a Windows machine due to the aforementioned compatibility/driver issues, and gamers would still prefer to run them on an OS/driver platform that can max out their graphics subsystem.

    I'm not knocking consoles, they're cool for what they are... but (exclusive platform) titles on the PC offer differing gameplay experiences that you will be hard pressed to find on the console, or are vastly superior due to the input systems available. For example, Half-Life 2 is just plain easier to learn to play for most PC gamers on a mouse and keyboard than going to an arcade in Japan and relearning how to play using a weird joystick setup.

    Demanding that people play less games or play your system of choice is not the way to win anyone over to your viewpoint.

  7. Re:Redhat? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    RedHat (aka microsoft linux), SuSe, blabla..they're all crap..freebsd and slack are will take you all the way...