Linux not ready for mass market
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Linux is gaining ground with companies but Windows will continue to dominate consumer PCs in the near future. That is the non-contentious conclusion of the latest IDC research.
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After years of speculation, there are many who believe that Linux is about to become a major platform for advanced mobile devices. And, not surprisingly given Linux's history, there are those who strongly disagree.
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The world's largest PC manufacturer, Hewlett-Packard, has announced it will start selling Linux-based PCs aimed at the consumer market. For now, the HP Linux models will only be available in Australia, with prices starting at $AU600 (just under $500 USD). The machines will use AMD Athlon 64 X2 dual-core processors and come equipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Desktop.
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Businesses should delay switching to Linux until IT managers can give a better business case for adoption, says research. And although Linux is still seeing double figure growth, following support by IBM, HP
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(InfoWorld) - If you're looking for a new Linux-equipped Dell laptop or desktop from the PC vendor, you may be waiting a while. Despite obvious support for the idea last week from thousands of visitors on its new customer suggestion Web site, IdeaStorm, the company said it's not yet building machines with Linux pre-loaded for the consumer and business markets. Last Friday night, Dell posted a note on the IdeaStorm Web site saying it was listening to thousands of users who had posted messages asking for Linux on its machines by moving forward to certify three of its corporate hardware lines -- OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks, and Dell Precision workstations -- for use with Novell SUSE Linux. The company said Tuesday that the note was just about certifying the hardware for being ready to work with Novell SUSE Linux, not an announcement that the computers would be loaded and sold with the operating system in the near future. "Our point of view is that we are listening to our Linux customers," said Jeremy Bolen, a Dell spokesman. He noted that the company already offers factory-installed Linux on some specific Dell Precision workstations for high-end corporate users but is not currently installing the OS on its other laptop or desktop machines. "However, I won't rule out the option of expanding the pre-installation program at a future date," Bolen said. Dell is continuing to talk with the makers of other Linux distributions about certifying the hardware for those Linux distributions, he said. "When you talk about an operating system, if Dell is going to install it and test it, it takes a lot of work" before getting it ready for the marketplace, including having training and support in place. Dell spokeswoman Caroline Dietz said that the company's first post last Friday about certifying machines for Novell SUSE Linux on the IdeaStorm site is only the beginning of such posts by the vendor. "This is an ongoing process," Dietz said. "We're constantly monitoring this and constantly updating this. This first post doesn't mean that this is all we're doing." The IdeaStorm Web site, where customers and other IT enthusiasts can offer recommendations about future Dell products and configurations that they'd want to buy, was started on Feb. 16 by CEO Michael Dell. He is looking for ways to re-energize the company's sales and financial performance after several disappointing quarters.
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(InfoWorld) - As Red Hat prepares to launch the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating system on Wednesday, the question is again being asked whether a robust and feature-laden operating system is really needed for some computing situations. Makers of "software appliances" are using the launch as an opportunity to predict that the days of the monolithic OS are numbered. They say the future lies in a modular system in which software runs with only enough lines of OS code to make it work. Some see promise in the appliance alternative to the OS, while skeptics think large enterprises will still need a general-purpose OS. The same questions arose recently around the launch of Microsoft's Windows Vista. A trio of Gartner analysts published a report in 2006 that said the increasing complexity of Windows makes it "unsustainable." Gartner predicted Windows will be broken up into modular components. The same could be said for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5), said Billy Marshall, CEO and cofounder of rPath Inc., a software appliance platform vendor. As new features are added to it, RHEL 5 has become just as unwieldy as Windows, Marshall said. "It's bigger and more bloated." OS vendors add all sorts of functionality in the event some enterprise may want it, and the addition of these features is one of the reasons why both Microsoft and Red Hat have encountered delays bringing their products to market, he said. Installing an OS could use as much as 1.82G bytes of space on a hard drive, he said. A software appliance with only the code to run one application would use just 300M bytes, he said. "The general-purpose OS model is breaking," Marshall said. Another software appliance vendor, Ingres Corp., on Feb. 27 launched a database management software appliance it calls "Icebreaker" to compete against IBM Corp.'s DB2 and Oracle Corp.'s database software. Software appliances may have a place in some niche environments in which a customer needs to run just a few pieces of software, said Jay Lyman, an analyst with The 451 Group. But a larger business would probably still need the various programs that are bundled into an OS, he said. It might be possible to run an enterprise infrastructure without an OS, Lyman said. "But then again, you've already got people [in your IT department] running the OS, and it's a pretty critical part of the infrastructure." Rather than seeing OSes fading, "I think we're seeing the trends going the other way," said Adam Jollans, director of worldwide strategy for Linux and open source at IBM. At a time when IT administrators want to get more out of their existing hardware, isolating software applications and running them only with small pieces of code seems counterproductive, Jollans said. "Many more people want to run multiple applications and do many different things. ... so I think we need the generic operating system to support all the different things people want to do," he said.
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Travelers on the road from proprietary to open source software won&#39;t be driving on an Interstate. Enterprise open source deployments are still uncommon enough that companies
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Welcome to a new on-line column here at LinuxJournal.com, "Linux Products Insider".  I'm James Gray, Products Editor at Linux Journal.  After the spam has been deencrusted and hucksters repelled, I'll use this space to update you on the latest and greatest products and services that I find using my secret channels.  This week, I had the chance to take part in a press conference with Mark Shuttleworth, Founder of Ubuntu.  Read on to learn why Shuttleworth's is so fired up about the new Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" (available this week), as well as why he thinks Ubuntu is so darned successful.  read more
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More PCs run the alternative OS, but many will end up with a pirated version of Windows, report says. Linux may be shipping on a growing number of PCs sold in the emerging markets of Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe.
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Three manufacturers are preloading Linux onto PCs that cost less than $200--and retailers can't keep them in stock.
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Blog: It's true that open source applications and infrastructure don't necessarily play well together today, as Microsoft suggests.  But it's also true that more than enough integration is in place for current market demand.
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That's the question that occurs to me as I read this piece in Roughly Drafted. It's about how Apple is kicking Microsoft's butt at the high end of the desktop market, and how Microsoft seems to be bumbling its way out of desktop hegemony anyway. Linux is mentioned only twice in this long piece, but the harbingery of the references are significant. Here's the enclosing quote: Combined with the dominance of the iPod over devices using Microsoft's PlaysForSure, the imminent goring of Windows Mobile by the iPhone, and the shift of support across the industry from Windows to Linux in servers, the days of Microsoft's monopolistic grip on the desktop are winding down.  Apple doesn't have to take a majority share of the desktop market to win, it only needs to take the most valuable segments of the market.  Once that happens, Microsoft will be forced to choose whether it wants to battle Mac OS X for control of the slick consumer desktop, or repurpose Windows as a cheaper, mass market alternative to Linux in corporate sales.  And, at some point, consumer sales as well.
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With Novell concentrating on Linux more and more, many NetWare consumers might be facing dilemmas on where to move on for future needs.
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The combined worldwide market for desktops, servers and packaged software running on Linux is forecast to grow at a 2003-2008 compound annual growth rate of 25.9 percent worldwide, reaching $35.7 billion by 2008.
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Purchasing a permanent license to its pioneering OS is a shrewd move.
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SEATTLE - Linux, the fast-growing alternative to Windows and other operating systems, will become a $35 billion market by 2008, technology research firm IDC said Wednesday.
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The debate about using Linux as a desktop OS has been going on for years. With each kernel revision and every new distribution release, we hear that Linux has become a feasible alternative.