Red Hat Develops Online Desktop

pete314 writes "Red Hat announced this week at their San Diego Red Hat Summit that they are planning to compete with Microsoft on the desktop by building an 'online desktop' that will integrate local data with online services. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens argued that: 'To user the desktop metaphor is dead. We don't believe that recreating a Windows paradigm in an open source model will do anything to advance the productivity in the life of users.'"

Comments

Competingwith Microsoft Google?

[jaavaaguru]

Are they really competing with Microsoft at this point? As far as I can see Google offer replacements for an increasing amount of desktop software at the moment (Word processor, Spreadsheet, Email, Calendar, Photo management, IM, and various browser integrations such as their note-taking plugin for Firefox. That's a bit more than Microsoft has to offer at the moment.

The right step ... will the implementation work ?

[HW_Hack]

This is absolutely the right step for our increasingly connected world - but the devil is in the details as usual.

The desktop isn't dead but its damn stale - what I would envision is a bi-modal operation: if you have wired or wireless access your "desktop" seamlessly includes your "on-line" resources - applications - data files - links - IM buddies - etc. all integrated into your applications - disk volumes, When offline you would have what you have right now. Of course you would need a method to mark certian files as bi-modal so they would reside in a file cache and be available offline - the OS would handle file sync'ing etc. Or a thumb drive could be a file cache

On the flip side where the desktop is really dead (as in "Dead to You" ) --- I could see you carrying a USB thumb drive that launches a mini-linux session and then you connect to the "server in the sky" to access all your docs - email - applications - etc.

Both ideas are step in the right direction for Linux ... just doing "XP the right way" is not a path to success for Linux. The Linux industry is very nimble compared to Microsloth ... lets see what this baby can really do !