It seems that each distribution has found a niche: Red Hat and Ubuntu are the leaders in their markets, and SUSE is a comfortable runner-up. However, history has shown us that businesses are not content to stay still too long or play second fiddle. So, what will Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu have to do in the new year to gain new ground?
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Member since:2005-07-06
I believe Red Hat will release the 'Global Desktop' next year in which they should have been developing this all along.
I'm at a loss with this global and online desktop thing. It just strikes me as another fad for the sake of another fad. Either you have something to go against Mac and Windows or you don't.
Member since:2007-12-08
I'm at a loss with this global and online desktop thing. It just strikes me as another fad for the sake of another fad. Either you have something to go against Mac and Windows or you don't.
It is not an online app, the way I understand it more like the SLED version of their Enterprise desktop offering.
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2007/global_desktop.html
The biggest difference in running a Linux distro (in 6 months the Linux distro is still running good). The Windows machine will have spyware/malware, running poorly all clogged up with junk and will need to be wiped and reloaded.
What is ironic is these companies are sitting on a goldmine if they would market their product to a wider range. In the Enterprise I can do everything at work running Fedora 8, Evolution Exchange connector (email), Krdc for remote desktop, FireFox, OpenOffice, Evince PDF, MPlayer, Xine, VLC, Real Player, Flash, I mean you name it and it works perfectly. I have RHEL5.1 Enterprise Server on my laptop and I can perform all of my administration from it. It is just good business sense, no viruses, SELinux (default), IPTables, SETFACL on file systems, Windows does not even compete in the same league for being locked down.
Member since:
2007-12-08
I believe Red Hat will release the 'Global Desktop' next year in which they should have been developing this all along.
I am not sure about Novell, it would be nice if they really marketed SuSE SLED preinstalled on Dell's, Hp's and other OEM machines.
Ubuntu already has a preinstalled config from Dell and they have taken the desktop market to heart. I tried out Ubuntu but I am not familar with Debian based distro's. I felt out of place with it installed, since really the only distro I am familiar with is Red Hat since the 6.0 days to now Fedora 8 I may try it again in the future however at work we use Red Hat and I have Red Hat Server 5.1 installed on my laptop right now.
I really have become to like Fedora, yes it is ever changing and quickly but it seems to have some really cool stuff in it and most of it or some of it ends up in the RHEL release. The community of Fedora is growing and I forsee larger foundation of users with it. But like I always stated with OpenSource the 'option' is very powerful if someone wants to go one way with their choice of distro they can and come back to the one they left. I really like the fact more distro's pop up and new ideas bring an entire fresh breath to the movement instead of focusing on ONE such as in Microsoft Windows world.
I would really like to see Red Hat PUSH and MARKET a desktop distro and make is widely known. Plus, revamp their website, I have to use the RHN on a regular basis and it is painfully slow and just hard to use. The product descriptions are vague and one would think they are not really interested in pushing their products. Oh well, nothing is not perfect but from a technology company one would expect a better site, FASTER and have bandwidth capable of handling the request made on it.
Linux Distro (x) will make more headway just by the sheer number of people converting over, which enables the desktop distro's to grab hold of the market share little by little. Overall I am not sure what the stats are but the overall user base is growing, and MS cannot fight this user base, because it is not a static model, this is how attrition battles are won and lost. I am currently testing the Red Hat Cluster Suite at work, and I have to say some of the graphical tools they have evolved are really nice. Some people vow against them but when they work as well as the ones for Production in RHEL releases I have to say having X-windows is not such a bad option on install anymore...