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Desktop Linux Is Dead
digitaldc writes with this quote from PCWorld:
"It kills me to say this: The dream of Linux as a major desktop OS is now pretty much dead. Despite phenomenal security and stability — and amazing strides in usability, performance, and compatibility — Linux simply isn't catching on with desktop users. And if there ever was a chance for desktop Linux to succeed, that ship has long since sunk. ... Ultimately, Linux is doomed on the desktop because of a critical lack of content. And that lack of content owes its existence to two key factors: the fragmentation of the Linux platform, and the fierce ideology of the open-source community at large."
A 1-2% usage rate equals ~three million desktop users in the United States.
In the trollish counting system, there are only three numbers.
Troll means "one." Trolltroll means "two." Trolltrolltroll means "definitely two."
Someone had to do it.
As someone that is current in the process of deploying virtual desktops I beg to differ.
Client terminals had to become powerful enough to connect modern peripherals and device pass-through means that a virtual desktop has no need to compromise. I can plugin my USB camera to my thin client and it'll appear in the VM. I can watch full-screen flash inside the VM on the thin-client with no jittering playback. Hell, even Autocad and Photoshop work marvelously especially through desktop streaming. With remote desktop applications you're usually limited by the precision of your mouse, compression makes detailed work almost impossible, a virtual desktop does not have these limitations.
I don't think workstations are going anywhere anytime soon though. I do however think that Apple is screwing themselves royally by not allowing OS X to be in a virtual environment as many of my Mac users are getting sick of hardware failures leading to their downtime when their Windows and Linux coworkers can just swap machines and reconnect to their VM and be up and running in as long as it takes to plugin the new hardware. Apple has always been weak in the enterprise market. I'm finally seeing pushback much to my delight as a few of my Photoshop jockies are switching to Windows so they can enjoy all the benefits including SSL VPN driven access from offsite without compromising performance.
In short, latency is no longer a problem for 99% of cases. Server virtualization isn't so cut and dry, but desktop virtualization is definitely going to take over as it solves many common corporate problems such as data leaving the building, ensuring regular backups, maintaining a consistent work environment, storage consolidation, and many other problems are non-issues with a virtual desktop. If a particular user needs more disk space I don't need to replace a hard drive, I just allocate more storage to them. With thin-provisioning I don't even have to care if they're using it provided I don't overprovision and run out of disk space but adding another shelf to my tier 1 NetApp storage is easy and takes all of ten minutes to do.