Desktop platforms Toolkit

2004: The year of desktop Linux?

Matthew Broersma ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 22 Dec 2003 16:20 GMT

Novell is new to the Linux game but has jumped in with both feet, buying SuSE and Ximian, which produces enterprise desktop software for Linux. The company is planning to integrate more tightly SuSE's operating system with Ximian's software, and says it will more than double the number of engineers working on the Ximian Desktop, as well as push improvements in the Gnome desktop environment, the OpenOffice.org productivity suite and the Mozilla browser.

Government interest
The new products were paired with encouraging customer wins, with a particular focus on the public sector. SuSE benefited from a high-profile March decision by the City of Munich to replace thousands of its out-of-date Windows desktops with Linux.

UK Public-spending watchdog the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) signed a framework pricing agreement for Sun's Java Desktop, with a series of trials to begin in the New Year. In December, Sun announced a deal under which the China Standard Software (CSSC), a consortium of companies supported by the Chinese government, will use Java Desktop.

China's State Council has mandated that ministries buy Chinese-produced software in the next upgrade cycle, and is pushing local Linux distribution Red Flag. In Spain, the government of the region of Extremadura installed 200,000 Linux desktop PCs, using a distribution that incorporates the regional dialect.

Government adoption could be hastened when distributions such as Red Hat and SuSE achieve several certifications required by many government bodies. Red Hat's enterprise product recently achieved broad certification under the Linux Standards Base, designed to keep Linux from fragmenting, and is near completion of a basic certification under the Common Criteria scheme, something achieved by SuSE in August.

Uphill battle
As yet, this activity is only making a small impact on the overall desktop market, and there is still plenty of scepticism around. At October's UK Tech Summit, for example, a panel of the UK's most influential chief information officers expressed doubt over the use of open-source software for mission-critical applications generally, put off by a perceived lack of accountability.

A September survey by Gartner suggested that Linux desktops would not save money for most enterprises, saying a migration from Windows to Linux would only make sense in cases where the PCs would only be needed for fixed-function or low-function applications, such as data entry, call centre or bank teller automation. "Knowledge workers use PCs to run diverse combinations of applications," says Gartner vice president David Smith. "For those users, migration costs will be very high because all Windows applications must be replaced or rewritten."