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Red Hat Develops Online Desktop

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the hope-your-isp-is-reliable dept.

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.'"

4 of 119 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What about when you are offline? by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Competing with Microsoft? by Bogtha · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
  3. Doesn't seem to slow them down any... by Kadin2048 · · Score: 5, Funny

    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!

    --
    "Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
  4. Emerging markets... by MatrixCubed · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...