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Red Hat Avoids Desktop Linux, Says Too Tough
eldavojohn writes "We recently discussed the Linux Foundation's decision to leave desktop Linux alone but Red Hat is also steering clear of that goal. The reason? It's too tough. From the company blog: 'It's worth pointing out what's missing in the list above: we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future. An explanation: as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers.'"
Free means that you're free to look out for yourself.
As long as they don't inhibit other people from making desktop distros, I see nothing wrong with this.
Perhaps they understand that most folks, like myself, don't care about the OS, they care about the applications.
Well, their main competitor Ubuntu is basically giving away the OS for free. How can RedHat expect to compete with that?
Personally, I find Linux to be great as a server OS doing very specific things for my home network. Webserver, you bet. Fileserver, yep. Firewall, no doubt. Mail server, of course. But on the desktop, I find that Windows (XP) just works without any fuss. I've tried "desktop Linuces" and found them all pretty clunky for the stuff I wanted to do.
Will Canonical's Ubuntu distribution be short lived if they fail to target the enterprise? I don't mean to spread FUD, just wondering. I think Canonical is Europe or South Africa based, perhaps America's economic woes are driving Red Hat away from funding things that, frankly, have no return on investment? Is desktop Linux for the end user merely an economic drain on a company? I certainly hope not but that's kind of how I interpreted Red Hat's blog
My work here is dung.
OK, so I'm thick, I'll confess.
... what the hell do people mean when they say that someone needs to design a "desktop". I've used Linux/FreeBSD as a desktop OS for over a decade. Gnome and KDE both seem fairly robust, with lots of apps and functionality.
But, seriously
WTF is fundamentally missing that it can't be a "desktop"?? Are we talking administration? Apps? Screen savers? Spinning cursor add-ons? iTunes? Virus scanners? Boxed software?
I'm afraid I just don't get what is fundamentally missing here. What is missing from the puzzle for being a "desktop"?
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What is needed on Linux is the same panoply of software that is at the same level of quality as found on MacOS or Windows. What is missing on Linux:
1. The Adobe/Macromedia collection of software â" from Photoshop to Dreamweaver to Flash.
2. A really good video editor (think AVID)
3. A really good audio/music program (think ProTools and Ableton Live)
4. A low level video layer (think quickTime/Quartz / WindowsMedia)
I'm sure there's more. Frankly, NOTHING on Linux rivals the Adobe CS collection. NOTHING on Linux rivals AVID (or even Final Cut Pro). NOTHING on Linux rivals ProTools. Why don't I have a Linux box? Because the above mentioned software packages (and a host of others) are not available on Linux, and the stuff that is similar to it is inferior. If Adobe / AVID / Digidesign / Ableton / etc. ported their stuff over to Linux, I'd get a Linux box in a heartbeat. But until then, I'm going to hang with my MacBookPro, thank you very much.
And since this is The Truth On The Ground, that's why places like RedHat are hesitant to bother with desktop Linux. They could build it, but there's nothing to do there, and thus no money to be made.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
The title the post is in accurate. They are avoiding the "consumer" desktop not desktops altogether. Per the article they are still committed to developing desktops for the corporate market. This is a logical move as corporate environments tends to be a much more controlled (more current hardware and managed upgrade schedules anyone) and profitable to support than the wild west of consumer desktops and clueless users . . .
Hopefully the moderators will correct this very missleading title.
As usual, the /. headline is misleading. TFA more-or-less says that they have no plans to produce a consumer desktop product because they don't see it as a money maker. This basically means that they don't plan on having a boxed desktop product that you can buy at the store like Mandriva. Fedora will continue on as is - something they work on with the community but don't sell.
On the contrary, I think it's Windows that has been taking the desktop market through the back door, for quite a while now. Roughly, without lube.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Um, the year of the linux server was a while back. It's gone past buzzword status and become mainstream practice.
Sorry for a simplistic response on a web forum that's anything but... but here goes.
Right now, Ubuntu provides everything I need in a desktop. The interface is excellent, tons of apps in the repositories that can do pretty much everything I need out of a computer. I'm not sure of all the business and technical nuts and bolts of what that company is doing, but I sincerely hope they keep doing it. I love their product. The distro installs after about 7-8 clicks and 30 minutes. From my experience, everything has been plug and play.
Now, I know this is a simplistic approach and my experiences will not be the same as many others' out there. But the cool thing about Linux is it's free, so if something doesn't work, you can just try something else.
Example, I was happily running PCLinuxOS for a few months. Eventually, it gave me a boot error and wouldn't start up. I tried at it for a few days, but eventually gave up and moved on. I had tried Ubuntu before and came back again to where I am now. I'm sure I'll try PCLinuxOS again because there were some things about that distro that I loved, also.
Catch my general drift, here? What happens if your Windows PC has a bust? You either beat your head against the wall until it's fixed (yes, you have to do that with Linux also) or you pay someone who can fix it for you.
With Linux, all you need is hardware, a high speed internet connection (I do NOT recommend trying Linux out without hi-speed internet), and an open mind to explore and try out.
You could probably count me as a mini-mini power user. I am not afraid to wipe a hard drive and install an OS. But on a regular basis, I try to stay away from the command line as much as possible and I can't code anything.
(gosh, this guy isn't a coder and he's posting on Slashdot?!? who let him in?)
My point is that I love what the Linux/FOSS movement provides for me RIGHT NOW. I know there are some greater and global economic/social pressures that might force what we have now off the internet. But as a little person who can't control those things, I hope to the heavens above that what's provided for us currently, continues to be so because I'm very happy with it. Worst case scenario - years from now, I'll still be running my old Ubuntu 7.10 version. I'd bet it will still be just as stable, too.
To answer the parent, I think companies like Ubuntu and Firefox have a strong enough hold on the market that they aren't going to die any time soon. (Hopefully)
People don't use operating systems - they use apps. If the apps are there, then people will use whatever OS the computer comes with.
Linux doesn't have the apps - Quicken? Nope. QuickTax? Nope. Photoshop? Nope. Office? Nope (although CrossOver is pretty good these days). Garage Band? Nope. And on and on and on...
However, if you are like me and have very simple needs - coding, browsing, email, Skype - then it's fine. I've been using it on the desktop since 1997, although my main desktop is now a Mac, which is the best of all worlds: commercial apps, Unix, and a beautiful, solid desktop.
So I'm just about 180 from you. I'm make a living as a software developer and use the command line almost exclusively (except for browsing the web). I made the "switch" about two years ago (at home) from Linux to Mac OS and was really happy. I had the best of both worlds. I recently decided to buy a new PC (big mistake) and installed windows vista on it. I did this because I wanted to learn more about win32 development. About a month ago, I decided to try Unbuntu. Everyone is always talking about this new linux distro that is so wonderful. At first I was very impressed. It actually resized my NTFS partition and setup dual boot without a flaw. Then I started fielding questions from my wife about manging pictures and transferring music with our ipod and realized that it's nowhere near ready for mainstream use. I had to rebuild my favorite game (bzflag) from source to get sound working properly, which is my biggest complaint. The core sound system on linux seems to be re-architected once a year.
The reason Linux will fail on the desktop and succeed as a server platform is (in my mind) due to fragmentation and duplicate effort. If you look at the development of the kernel itself, it's IBM, novell, redhat, and a relatively small set of individuals. The changes they are submitting are being filtered through an even smaller set of gatekeepers. This prevents random features from just popping up inside the kernel and it ensures that things that people don't want to work on that should be actually get fixed. Remember if a customer complains about a kernel bug, then IBM or someone who's getting paid will probably have to work on it. You can also look at device drivers. How man drivers do you have for a device? Probably one.
Now look at the UI/Desktop. We have a half-dozen or more media players, window managers, widget sets, etc. And now with Mono everything is being done again but in C#. It's more of a playground than a stable platform. We (as the Linux community) never finished the first 5 media players and now we're building another one. This leads to fragmentation of development effort and to people abandoning projects before they're complete. Sure it's choice, but I'd rather have a choice between 2 good media players rather than 10 unfinished ones. I'm using the media player here as an example, but this pretty much applies to all things on the desktop. Too many people doing the same thing over and over.
I'm not saying it's bad, Linux is a nice environment to simply learn a new language or API, but as far as bringing it up to commercial grade level... probably never.