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Novell Still Runs Windows
daria42 writes "Despite Novell's internal migration to Suse and OpenOffice.org, the company admitted today that up to 3000 of its 5000 workers still had dual-boot installations with Microsoft Windows. These users are likely to be migrated to pure Linux boot systems in the next year or so." From the article: "Hovsepian's remarks indicate Novell will have at most a few months' experience as a complete Linux and open source desktop shop behind it when, according to the vendor's predictions, the software starts taking off in the mainstream." Update: 04/11 13:25 GMT by J : At the closing OSCON session, August 5, 2005, Miguel de Icaza talked about Novell's progress. My notes read: "novell's moving 5500 employees from windows to linux. first stage, office->openoffice, is complete. second stage, windows->linux, is 50% complete, proj. 80% by Nov."
I always wonder how you should manage the office of Linux computers without AD and policies.
Is this proof that regardless how evangelic you are about linux, Windows is still a necessary evil in a commercial desktop environment? Switching to Open Office only gets you so far. After that your choices for replacement software become more and more limited. I think this is fairly obvious and although I'm a huge fan of Linux on servers, I still don't think it's ready for the mainstream desktop market regardless of the never-ending promises that "this is the year". My companies systems are all run on Linux (Debian) but I don't have ONE desktop which I could fully kick windows off.