Linked by David Adams on Fri 18th Apr 2008 16:26 UTC, submitted by sjvn
"Recently, both Novell and Red Hat went on record as dismissing the idea that the consumer Linux desktop is going to be taking off anytime soon. It's not? Has anyone told Asus and Xandros? Everex and gOS? How about Dell and Ubuntu? They're all doing great with consumer Linux desktops." The enterprise Linux leaders are not the ones making strides on the desktop. Does that mean that the Linux desktop has no future, or just that they've let their business focus let them drop the ball on that segment of the market?
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Member since:
2006-11-21
Ubuntu Linux is a loss-leader for Canonical. It is a free product that catches people's attention and may build revenue for them on other things such as support and their proprietary products 'Landscape' and 'Launchpad'.
Without Ubuntu nobody would have heard of Canonical so it is clearly crucial to their strategy as marketing for their revenue generating services.
That does not mean that the 'consumer desktop' is economically viable for Canonical and it probably never will.
Red Hat and Novell contributes to very similar free products called Fedora and OpenSuSE. Since both of these companies have found their niches actually selling Linux distributions, they can't really give proper support for the free versions. Still, Fedora and OpenSuSE aren't bad 'consumer desktops', there is just no money for Red Hat or Novell in it.
The future of Linux as a strong and viable product for Linux distributors is in enterprise products and associated services.
The future of Linux as a consumer desktop is either as a loss leader for a distributor or as a way of shaving off money for the hardware manufacturers. Both these strategies are fine and may carry Linux as a consumer desktop forwards.