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.

Competing with Microsoft?

[Otter]

"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," Stevens added.

And therefore they're reimplementing the Windows 98 Active Desktop...?

Re:Competing with Microsoft?

[Bogtha]

Maybe the Windows 98 Active Desktop has a chance of being successful now that always-on Internet connections are vastly more common. There was another technology built into Internet Explorer 4.0 that also died from lack of use. It was called "channels", and was very similar to RSS. Yet today, RSS and Atom are wildly popular. Sometimes the technology doesn't need to change if the world does.

What about when you are offline?

[deragon]

Often I use my laptop in the subway. Guess what? No internet access. So how would I perform my work with such a paradigm? What about when you go to your country house, in the woods? To user the desktop metaphor is not dead when offline.

Re:What about when you are offline?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Often I use my laptop in the subway. Guess what? No internet access. So how would I perform my work with such a paradigm?

The mozilla team has already talked about Firefox 3's upcoming support for running online apps while offline, as a sort of hybrid, but still within the browser. Just do a search for "web applications offline' and you'll find dozens of articles including how-to sites from tool providers for making Web apps that will function offline right now.

To user the desktop metaphor is not dead when offline.

I'm not sold on Web applications. I'm not sold on a strategy of bypassing MS by building everything on top of them. I'd rather see cross platform applications with internet capabilities, or hybrid solutions, that still allow me to take advantage of the benefits of the OS. From a practical standpoint, however, my automatic bibliography formatting service allows me to automatically format bibliography references right now using Google Docs, but I can't use the same functionality in Wordpad or in MSWord for that matter; so in some ways online apps are already allowing me to bypass the limitations of Microsoft's OS.

Re:Lemme boot the terminal

[korekrash]

At about 50 cents a gig, I'll stick to speed and security rather than trying to save 500 megs of drive space.

Online services == less freedom

[Wesley Felter]

Storing your own data locally on your own computer and manipulating it with local apps may be "old thinking", but at least it puts you in control. Just when a critical mass of free (as in freedom) software is emerging, Red Hat is talking about services. I suspect it's impossible to make these services free as in freedom.

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 !

Doesn't seem to slow them down any...

[Kadin2048]

suggests to me that online applications would need to have similar or identical security access to locally installed applications. This seems, uh... possibly problematic.

Oh, come on ... Microsoft's been doing that for years!

Emerging markets...

[MatrixCubed]

FTFA: "The Linux desktop market has been limited to single function devices such as cash registers and applications in emerging markets." I've heard this term 'emerging markets' for so long now, you'd think they'd have emerged by now...