Are we finally seeing the year of the Linux desktop?

By Stan Beer
Wednesday, 08 August 2007 12:23

Opinion and Analysis

This past month has seen a flurry activity from a number of players in the Linux desktop space. Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu, Dell, Lenovo and even Intel white box system builders are getting into the act. Is the year of the Linux desktop finally upon us or is this just another flare up generated by the Linuxworld conference in San Francisco?

More than a couple of significant things in desktop Linux have happened in the past couple of weeks in the lead up to and during the Linuxworld conference. Perhaps one of the most significant was Red Hat's announcement of its Global Desktop product for small businesses and local government agencies.

Until now, Red Hat has been a relatively conservative player in the Linux desktop market, preferring to focus primarily on the server side where Linux has well established credibility and a competitive market share. The announcement of Red Hat Global Desktop, which will be available in September, could signal the first steps towards a shift in focus.

While Red Hat has offered desktop clients to enterprise customers, Global Desktop is the first instance of the company reaching out to the much wider small business market through a distribution network of Intel white box system builders. It not yet a move into the consumer space but although Red Hat remains circumspect about consumer desktops here are indications that this may happen sooner rather than later.

"If you are asking if it will be available preloaded on machines from the major desktop OEMs (Dell, Lenovo, HP), the answer is not yet.  Global Desktop is not aimed at general consumers. Its target is small-to-midsize businesses and local government agencies.  It is offered through Intel's channel of system builders because they are best able to serve this target market," a Red Hat spokesperson told iTWire in an email.

"These system builders will sell it to their small-to-midsize business clients and the local government agencies that they serve. Traditionally, the system builder receives an order from one of its clients and then builds a custom machine complete with operating system before shipping it to the customer."

While Red Hat focuses on the small business market, Dell has been busily demonstrating that its limited release of Ubuntu desktops and notebooks for consumers in the US was not simply a toe-dipping exercise. Dell has announced the expansion of its Ubuntu range into the three largest EU countries Germany, England and France, with immediate availability in those countries. In addition, Dell has announced plans to release a range of desktops and notebooks pre-loaded with Suse Linux in China.

Further action on the Linux desktop front is set to take place with the announcement from China's largest PC maker Lenovo that it will offer Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 preloaded on Lenovo notebooks beginning in the fourth quarter. The Suse notebooks - including the ThinkPad T series - will be available to volume and individual customers.

Unlike the case with Dell, where customers must purchase support from Ubuntu producer Canonical, Lenovo customers will be able to receive support for SLED 10 directly from Lenovo. With Linux, whatever the distribution, support is bound to be prerequisite for new users, especially in cases where they need help setting up home networks and finding drivers for peripherals.

Regardless of which flavour of Linux you prefer, the fact is that three of the most popular Linux distributions are now or will be soon be offered on desktops to both consumers and small business users on widely available hardware platforms. If 2007 isn't the year of the Linux desktop, then 2008 must surely be shaping up to take that title.