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Red Hat CEO Questions Relevance of Desktop Linux
snydeq writes "Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst questioned the relevance of Linux on the desktop, citing several financial and interoperability hurdles to business adoption at a panel on end-users and Linux last night at the OSBC. 'First of all, I don't know how to make money on it,' Whitehurst said, adding that he was uncertain how relevant the desktop itself will be in five years given advances in cloud-based and smartphone computing, as well as VDI. 'The concept of a desktop is kind of ridiculous in this day and age. I'd rather think about skating to where the puck is going to be than where it is now.' Despite increasing awareness that desktop Linux is ready for widespread mainstream adoption, fellow panelists questioned the practicality of switching to Linux, noting that even some Linux developers prefer Macs to Linux. 'There's a desire [to use desktop Linux],' one panelist said, 'but practicality sets in. There are significant barriers to switching.'"
Didn't I just read something about Redhat moving back into the desktop?
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/24/1721248
Simply because some CEO can't sell his product in a market flooded with free (and equally good) alternatives (like ubuntu, debian, puppy linux, soon android, and other), the desktop distro is going to disappear? Really?
Or is he talking about the desktop computer? Well, I'll put his name on the pile of people proclaiming the doom of the desktop. While laptops are almost everywhere, they haven't replaced the desktop in the workplace. In fact, at the firm i used to work for, they bought everyone laptops for a round of buys, but then switched back to towers.
Also, I shudder to imagine how slow and botched a thin client rollout would have been. It seemed like every day one server or another was going down for something. I know that's not how you run your shop, but I can't imagine my old 150 person firm was unique.
Cloud computing and the client-server architecture in general is definitely decreasing the significance of the desktop and will continue to do so, but there will likely remain some niches where it makes sense to have significant desktop performance.
One example that comes to mind is doing development work, including both traditional programming and CAD work as well as graphics design. To be responsive to the user it seems those would want to keep most of the processing near the end user. Similarly, anything dealing with sensitive information must tread lightly when dealing with the cloud or any other server which is not under direct and immediate control.
Let me know when a mobile phone can serve as a CAD workstation, video editing workstation, or other high performance need. We have plenty of those around here where I work. Also need to mention dual wide screen monitors in imaging departments like radiology (they rotate them vertically for x-rays, etc.) It's more likely that thin clients will become the norm again before mobile devices replace desktops. We have a lot of Citrix thin clients here and that number is growing steadily...
I decided to take the plunge and finally learn C with the ultimate goal of moving on to Objective C to build apps for my MacBook. Mac users seem to actually pay for this little app or that little app... that's not as much the case for Windows, and absolutely not the case for *nix.
It may not be a better dev environment, but people will actually pay a couple bucks for what I write if it works well. That alone's enough incentive for me.
This makes me think that... if I don't know how to make money from orange juice, should I tell people that drinking it is stupid?
Well, no - but maybe it means you tell people you don't think it's worth being in the orange juice business...
As for preferring Macs over Linux - I've been down that road and I came back. In the end OS X just didn't make me happy. Replacing my Mac laptop with a Linux one has been delightful. It just feels right.
Bow-ties are cool.
I use Linux on my laptop, but even I have to agree.
What I want is a $50 add-on that will:
1. Fully and legally support bytecode interpreter and hinting for fonts. Bonus points for including decent fonts as well.
2. Support all major audio and video codecs. I shouldn't have to break any laws to get support for my digital media. Bonus points for not having to buy another codec pack when I upgrade my OS.
3. Support multi-monitor automatically when I connect a monitor (like Mac or Windows).
4. Work well on laptops. I should not see error messages about my hard drive failing to soft-reset every time I wake my laptop up from sleep.
People have been predicting the death of the desktop computer almost since it was invented. Thin clients attached to powerful servers (or the newest buzzword "the cloud") have been touted as the future of computing for decades.
The simple fact is that even if these things worked flawlessly and without latency (they don't), the consumer just doesn't want to give up that kind of control to a central entity. We like to have our own applications on our own box, and we don't trust some big company to keep our stuff safe and private. The desktop hardware may continue to shrink, but it will still be the desktop. The death of the desktop has been 5 years away for the past 30 years, and I don't see that changing anytime soon.
Lenovo 3000 N500 - Ubuntu 8.10 - 0 issues
Lenovo 3000 N500 #2 - Gentoo 2008.1 - some issues (WTF, IT'S GENTOO)
Dell Inspiron e1505 - Ubuntu 8.10 - 0 issues
Acer Extensa 4220 - Ubuntu 8.10 - 0 issues
Acer Extensa 4620 - Ubuntu 8.10 - 0 issues
HP 6710b - Ubuntu 8.10 - 0 issues
HP 6730b - Ubuntu 8.10 - 0 issues
IBM Thinkpad X41 Tablet - Ubuntu 8.10 - Some issues, mostly related to the tablet functionality.
Did you have a point, or were you just assuming that your (or your "friend's") one experience made a trend?
The preceding comment is my own, and in no way construes an opinon of the Emperor of Mankind.
Linux lost me on the desktop 8 years ago when OSX came out. Most of the "switchers" I knew didn't go from windows to Mac in those days, they went from Linux to Mac. Especially developers. With OSX, we had our unix stack for *AMP development plus something Linux didn't: commercial applications. The fact we could still run MS Office, Photoshop, and other such programs made it easy to switch. Plus the hardware just worked. There were no driver issues, especially with laptops, etc..
When computers stopped being something I toyed with on the side to my main source of income, my priority shifted because my time became worth something. I no longer had time to try to recompile a driver for my sound card 6 different ways depending on the Linux Flavour of the moment. In fact, I found Linux to be annoying as hell because it's a kernel, not an operating system. All the different distros but libraries and such in different directories based on whatever their reasonings were. So if you were working on a Redhat box one day and tried to test on a debain or slackware box the next, nothing would work.
That's why I left the Linux world for FreeBSD on the server side and the reason why I dumped both Windows and Linux desktop for MacOSX back in 2001.
What the Linux community still doesn't understand is that it's all about the apps. Now with Intel Macs, I run XP via parallels. I have one 24" iMac sitting on my desk that does it all. (I'm still using my older 12.1" powerbook as my laptop).
Last year when we were first starting up this operation, we bought barebones machines and slapped linux on them for developers. After, they were more than enough to run Eclipse for Java development. Well they all got frustrated with this or that and ended up bringing in XP discs and installing on their machines. (Which was a problem for a variety of reasons). So we replaced the barebones boxes with MacMinis that came with parallels and a copy of XP pro already installed. Everyone's been a lot happier.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Actually, put the right spin on it, and Canonical/Ubuntu is the best example of Open Source success: guy harnesses F/OSS stuff to get rich, pays the community back by putting his money where his mouth is.
that Canonical is doing what he's been trying to do for years.
What would that be, bring Linux to a <1% market share? I'd say Canonical is doing pretty much exactly the same as Red Hat. Back in its day RHL was pretty much *the* desktop distro (sorry, debian), building a name for themselves, getting certifications and so on. The only reason RHEL got anywhere is because half the geeks had already played with RHL. When they finally had enough legs to stand on in the business world alone, they dropped RHL and went with RHEL exclusive. Canonical definately wouldn't mind breaking into that known profitable market along with RHEL and SLES, and Ubuntu is the promotion package. If they carve out a market for Ubuntu LTS and drop Ubuntu in favor of a Fedora "testbed", the likeness would be complete. I hope things will be different this time around, but there's been a few too many "Year of the Linux desktop" for me to be very convinced.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
First, I am not in the IT industry. I run small law firm.
My entire buisness, two offices, 30 computers, routers, servers, all Linux (PClos 2009 is my flavor). Not a single copy of anything else in my office, all running free or open source software legally. I save over $250,000 a year and climbing over what I would have needed to pay for the equivalent (and most is not equivalent). Since I started my biz about 4 years ago, that could be seen as something around $1 million dollars. In real money, that is something likly closer to $400,000 in cash, because I likly simply would have had to do without most of the stuff I take for granted (e.g. loading up a backup mail server on an old computer, rather than forking out $2,000+ for new one ). Thus, my buisness likly would be much smaller.
The savings is even greater on the desktop. Somewhere in neighborhood of $1,000 per seat or more. Hardware alone, as I live in a country with expensive outdated hardware, is 50% over walking in to a store to buy a new computer because I run Linux.
I would likly not be able to afford to be in biz without Linux.
Making money comes in two basic forms. You either raise the price, or reduce your cost. I am making more money using linux and OS, because I reduced my cost. I can afford not to raise prices on clients, I get more clients, and make more money.
Not my problem the old guard IT industry can not figure out how to make money with Linux, because I am sure I am not the only small buisness out there that is making money on Open Source.
Living in Chile
have they not fixed that yet?
I suffered from the same on my Vaio. I could here it doing it, spinning down and up again every few seconds. There were workarounds but I recall the Ubuntu guys saying "not our problem" yet at the same time other distros and OSs were fine.
I use ubuntu for my desktop at work. All my servers run either Solaris or Linux.
That said, I've never had my home gaming XP machine refuse to boot windows or have the sound not work after any upgrade (system or driver).
This year alone, my ubuntu desktop X has refused to startx 2 times after various updates, and hda-intel alsa sound has not worked for months after an update. I finally had to purge alsa and install oss by hand to make it work.
I might be in the minority, and this could purely be anecdotal, but linux distro's on the desktop still are not ready imo.
I suppose if no one updated drivers or their system ever, it would be nice and stable:), but that isn't very realistic.
I suppose if no one updated drivers or their system ever, it would be nice and stable:), but that isn't very realistic.
I set my mother up on Fedora 5 several years ago. Before that she was using Windows. With Windows set up do auto update, I was guaranteed to have a phone call about once every couple of months because something stopped working. Now that she is on Fedora, I manually do the updates about once a year when I go home to visit. I have not had one phone call asking for help because something stopped working. Obviously, I wouldn't wait that long to update a Windows box, but I feel confident that she won't be hacked with the Fedora box. The reduced workload was well worth it for me.
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.