“Okay, I’m playing with your head today, but I expect to write that headline for real sometime in 2003. We’re seeing an explosion in the number of Linux distributions meant specifically for desktop users, and not all of them are going to survive.” Read the editorial at NewsForge.
Linux ‘Desktop War’ Claims First Corporate Victim
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
It is a no-brainer that Red Hat will prevail above all other distros in both the desktop and workstation markets. They are big, they have IBM and Sun next to them selling PCs with their distros on corporate users (read my recent Sun article), they have the resources and Red Hat 8.0 is only the beginning of the things they want to change to make their way in to the desktop experience. I have no doubt in my mind that RH has the resources to jump ahead of all these distros.
No2 I see SuSE or Lindows. Then, I see Mandrake and Lycoris respectively.
Yes, everyone hates Lindows, but they SELL. And yes, they do well, as I hear. Especially their OEM deals are going well too.
However, I see Lindows and Lycoris (and _maybe_ Xandros) prevailing in a different market than the one SuSE and Red Hat are battling into. In essense, Lycoris and Lindows are nothing but “advanced internet/home appliances”. The fact that these companies DO NOT have a developer community to create new applications specific for these platforms, but they merely include the dev tools (that almost noone uses on these distros) just because it is necessary to compile by hand some times, it only shows that these two OSes are not your traditional desktop OS forces. They are not as Windows or Apple or even RH/SuSE. Think of them as… embedded specialized products for mass markets for simple things, mostly browsing…
On the other hand, SuSE will have to battle hard to win the No1 place over Red Hat, but I don’t see their demise. They have enough server-only products to go ahead with if the desktop market fail them.
The big questionmark here is Mandrake. They want to be in the worksstation/corporate market, but their OS is extremely desktop-oriented and this is exactly the market they currently have some success, and even in this market, they do not perform as good as they used to in the past (they seemed to have stopped innovating as they did in 1999, and the others have cought up).
Other smaller Linux vendors might try to get a share on the desktop market, but I don’t see them going very far.
So, we will see what’s going to happen, but these are my thoughts on the subject.
It looks to me like RedHat also has a more global view compare to the others. Get in the enterprise through the strong point of Linux, the server market, and then try to sell an integrate solution with Linux on the desktop.
If it Linux succeed very well in the desktop/enterprise market, then maybe the home market could follow in a more distant future.
red hat will rule because it’s one of the few distros that really works well from server to corporate desktop
mandrake makes a nice desktop but i wouldn’t trust it on the server, debian and slack are great on the server, but i wouldn’t use them for a corporate desktop…it requires too much setup
to be quite honest…redhat download edition is honestly all that a company would need to run a decent network with
-bytes256
Most of you know that I tend to take an application-centric approach to viewing operating systems and distros. And from that end, since they all pretty much run the same applications, there’s really not much difference between them.
Some have a great ‘click-and-run’ interface while having shitty font support, while others boost major stability but are harder to use. It seems that there are some good points and bad points to all of them, but since they all run the same apps (AFAIK), I guess in the long term, it doesn’t really matter which one you go with.
Yes, Redhat will probably come out tops. I think Lindows will definitely do better than Suse. They are actually serious about making money, which is good, and they obviously give a lot of thought to both useability and beauty. Most importantly, the Lindows people seem to realise the importance on marketing, something the other linux companies don’t seem to take seriously.
But hey, with Windows dominating 98 percent of the market, there’s a big enough pie to go around! No linux distro is going to die because of the “linux desktop war”. Actually, there’s no war, because there is virtually no linux desktop yet. Some distros will die, but only because, the companies that do them are incompetent – business-wise.
Eugenia that was a good post. Especially the alternate distro stuff. That could change though as they get a bit of cash and possibly commercial support. It would be nice if 2 distros in this segment gained mind share.
I think SuSE has done an awesome job though. Fonts were not as good as Redhat in the beginning but uding the online update the fonts have improved to the point where they match Redhat. They also include more multimedia stuff and will be doing the cross over thing soon. SuSE is poised I believe to catch up to RH I believe.
They’d probably survive not really just survive but increase in numbers because of the new gui installer that’s being developed on and also knoppix.
but… yeah redhat would survive because of popularity and fame.
one is the consumer segment where I see Lindows coming into its own due to their marketing strength that unfortunately is sorely lacking in most other Linux distros. They may also be helped once Walmart officially enters the low end PC business using Lindows as the OS. Xandros which technically seem to have the best in class solution for this segment lacks the resources for the long haul and would probably be sold by its VC owners to anyone/existing distros who has cash. Lycoris may unfortunately slowly fade unless able to mount a strong tech challenge. Mandrake is already losing market and mind share and would exit to focus on Server.
Enterprise: Red hat, Suse and Sun.
Just some tea leafs in my cup….
The US are not the whole world (but they can be the center of it).
In East Europe, Brasil, India, RH is seldom used because it’s too expensive. But Linux growing is huge and now the only user-friendly distribution really free (as in beer) is Mandrake.
In East Europe, Brasil, India, RH is seldom used because it’s too expensive. But Linux growing is huge and now the only user-friendly distribution really free (as in beer) is Mandrake.
Bullshit…Red Hat is still a free download as it has always been…You don’t even need access to a CD Burner…Red Hat has one of the nicest FTP installs I’ve ever seen…in fact that’s how I installed Red Hat 8.0…(I’ll probably pay for 8.1 or 8.2 when they get a few more bugs worked out)
Bullshit…Red Hat is still a free download as it has always been…You don’t even need access to a CD Burner…
Outside US fast internet access are very expensive, a lot of more expensive than cd-burner.
Moreover RH include “custom” version of most application, they release the sources of course, but if you have problems the standard HOWTO doesn’t work.
Anyway I’ve got nothing against RH and their business (we all know who the enemy is
).
I’m only reporting a matter of fact: in many countries outside the US Mandrake is the #1 distro and it’s growing.
I believe that distros that are used by goverments are almost certain to survive, such as SuSE in German and Mandrake in France. Also LindowsOS will survive because of its name (I believe that more people know of LindowsOS then of Red Hat for example).
Also distros as large as Red Hat are also almost certain to survive.
I believe the first victims might be small for many people unkown distros, I don’t think important distros will dissapear.
//(we all know who the enemy is
).//
Obviously, Microsoft, just because their desktop OS blows the crap out of anything *nix….
Typical Penguinista flame.
Have fun opening that Excel spreadsheet with nested tables. Oh, wait .. you don’t work for a real company, so you’ll never have to worry about that.
“Miles to go before I sleep…”
Obviously, Microsoft, just because their desktop OS blows the crap out of anything *nix….
Typical Penguinista flame.
You said that!
Do you ever noted the smile
?
Predicting the dimise of Linux distros is pointless, of course some will fail – big deal. There are more linux distributions today than there were two years ago and as the market grows there will be even more. Things change -thats life.
Well, yeah. Even though their products suck, go out in the streets. People associate Linux with Red Hat mostly. In fact, when I first heard of Linux (which was two years before actually understanding what it was), I thought it was a product of Red Hat.
Red Hat has the biggest brand name in this industry, which a huge potential to grow. Plus, it is the only software/services-only Linux company to be in the black.
A few month ago I decided to move from Windows to Linux. My goal was to get usable desktop distro which I could use at home. I’ve tried Mandrake, Suse, Gentoo, Debian and RedHat. RedHat was the winner because of siple things combined together. The first is an installiation, you can download entire distro and burn CDs if compare to Suse or Gentoo where installion is possible only via ftp connection. RH has very good font rendering and I don’t have to spent hours of hacking to see readable characters. Debian would be OK, it’s very stable and fast but it’s like from middle ages, too much tunning up to upgrade it if you want really nice desktop. Also I didn’t like their boasted apt when you upgrading to unstable version. It simply didn’t work for me.
Gentoo. An installation which lasts 2 days maybe is OK for geeks but for an ordinary user it’s not good. After installing Gentoo I didn’t want to touch it – what is something goes wrong, yet another two days to install?
Mandrake. A la MS style, just these anyoing screens “register now” and icons “where to buy”, and “how to pay” keeps me away from it.
Suse. The same ftp story as Gentoo. Of course I could buy it but when distro is updated every few month it has no sense paying for each upgrade. And what if they simply shut down their ftp?
After all RH is the winner. I wouldn’t like to spend time trying Bob’s or John’s yet another Linux when their web sites are updated once a year.
BTW I bought RH8 box from Amazon just to support them. I am running it as my primary desktop and it does everything I want as a home user.
Green
Red Hat doesn’t have much of a market share in europe. SUSE on the other hand is massive. The German goverment is about to switch to SUSE as well.