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Red Hat Returns To the Linux Desktop

Posted by timothy on from the sequels-can-be-good dept.

CWmike writes "Red Hat used to be in the desktop business along with all the other Linux distributors. Then, they left. Now, however, Red Hat is switching from Xen to KVM for virtualization. As part of that switchover, Red Hat will be using not only KVM, but the SolidICE/SPICE desktop virtualization and management software suite to introduce a new server-based desktop virtualization system. Does this mean that Red Hat will be getting back into the Linux desktop business? That's the question I posed to Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens, in a phone call after the Red Hat/KVM press conference, and he told me that, 'Yes. Red Hat will indeed be pushing the Linux desktop again.'"

1 of 192 comments (clear)

  1. The meaning of the article is unclear by Galois2 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The article seems to conflate "desktop" and "desktop virtualization."

    RH has been on the desktop since the beginning. They offered Red Hat Linux 1.0 in 1995, all the way up through RHL 9 in 2003. They followed that with 10 bleeding-edge releases of Fedora and five main releases of RH Enterprise Linux. All 100% open, including their own work on utilities, Gnome/KDE, and kernel development. They have done more for linux on the desktop than just about any other company. And now we all reap the benefit, even if we use another distribution like Ubuntu.

    So it is nonsense to say RH "returns" to the desktop. They never left.

    Now, the article goes on to talk a lot about desktop *virtualization.* That's a totally different topic. Maybe the article should have been titled RH returns to desktop virtualization.