Business Linux desktop announcements are continuing to come fast and furious at LinuxWorld here, the latest coming from Xandros Inc. with its unveiling of the “Xandros Business Desktop Operating System”.
Xandros Enters Linux Business Deskop Market
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I am not comfortable trusting my business to a company with such a shakey finacial track record (ie: Xandros). I can’t guarantee they will be around tomorrow to support me like say SuSE, Lindows or Redhat.
are you confusing xandros for corel perhaps?
i can’t find any reference to a fincial problems for xandros.
It’s not true – ppl are often bashing xandros for having
financial issues which aren’t true.
wait for the business edition – i am sure it’ll quite rock!
Enough already. What about operating systems?
Possession of source isn’t that attractive to businesses. What are they supposed to do if Xandros goes under? Run out and hire a squadron of programmers? (Disregarding the fact that Xandros supplies source of every GPL’d program it includes.)
Software is a tool, like a truck. Better to lease the trucks and find a good repair shop instad of going into the truck maintenance business. Ditto software.
I wish Xandros well. I hope they can grab some marketshare before Red Hat gets back in the desktop market.
I’ve never purchased XP Pro. So, I don’t really know how much it costs (especially for large scale deployment). How would Xandros’ $129 price compare to XP Pro? I’m speaking primarily in terms of volume. To me, it seems kind of pricey.
If I were in charge of IT, I would definitely run *nix on the server side. But, on the client side, I would have a hard time justifying the $129. At that price, what would be the advantage of running Linux over Windows? I’m making the assumption that XP Pro can be bought in volume for about that price.
Software is a tool, like a truck. Better to lease the trucks and find a good repair shop instad of going into the truck maintenance business. Ditto software.
If you lease a truck, more than likely you would have a maintainance agreement as part of the contract. It is in the truck leasing companies business to maintain the trucks so that after 12-18months when they sell them the resale value holds.
I wish Xandros well. I hope they can grab some marketshare before Red Hat gets back in the desktop market.
Red Hat is already in the desktop market, they just aren’t in the home user market.
Why do people here have to lie? if it isn’t people lying that SUN hates opensource it is people claiming that Red Hat isn’t working on the desktop (corporate) market.
It’s as cheap as chips. Australian RRP prices are similar to US MSRPs, so here is a comparison:
Xandros Business Edition, which includes the OS and StarOffice [full office suite] = roughly AU$180.
Microsoft Windows 2000 License = $497
Microsoft Office XP License = $649 [I think]
Even if those figures aren’t 100% correct, the savings could be immense, depending on implementation and training costs.
And if you only have a small workgroup, Business Edition lets you run a PDC very, very easily (at least it was in 1.1} without having to buy either a server & OS (eg RHEL or Win2K) or another computer.
The Xandros BDOS… an antidote to the infamous Microsoft BSOD?
I had the opportunity to install Xandros 2 at a meeting I attended last night. I was really impressed. It is the absolutely closest I have seen to “ready for the desktop” as far as Linux systems go.
I can easy imagine someone with little computer experience being able to install and configure this for home use. On the business side of things, with a few additions it would serve well in some places.
Keep in mind that I’m very pro-linux and open-source. I’m just trying to be objective and look at things from the perspective of a person who is only concerned about the bottom line. Also, I’m specifically asking about cost of Xandros vs. Microsoft. I think that in the near future we will be asking Suse vs. Microsoft vs. everyone else. And, that will be very interesting. I can only imagine the seamless integration for services that work out of the box that Novell/Suse will offer. But, that’s another story. I just think that Xandros for the business user at $89 a seat seems pricey. Face it, XP Pro on the desktop is a nice product. I use it everyday on my laptop and like it. But, I digress, …. back to the point.
Well, I wouldn’t include MS Office in the comparison. Again, if I were in charge of purchasing, I wouldn’t invest in MS Office. I would go ahead and use either openoffice or staroffice. And, for the server side, I would not go with Microsoft unless I had a service that I had to run that required Microsoft. So, I wouldn’t purchase 2000 for the desktops. So, if I desired Microsoft on the desktop, I would buy XP Pro. That is the product I would pit against Xandros.
If I could purchase 100 desktop licenses of XP Pro for around $129 ($12,900) vs. 100 Xandros at $89 ($8,900) and my company was actually large enough to require that many desktop licenses, then my point is that I don’t think $4,000 would weigh into the decision that much.
I don’t know what Microsoft would charge for 100 desktop licenses. That’s something I was hoping someone here would know.
From a pure feature standpoint of a business user, I just don’t know that I would get out of using Xandros over Microsoft.
I posted a perfectly relevent reply and it gotmoderated down… But the replys to my reply wasnt. Is OSnews really that pro Xandros?
Anyway, I write software for a livin so for me being able to fix a problem is important, being able to keep a system alive when the original coder has forgotten about it is important. I have never written software (or a contract) that didnt give the buyer 100% of the rights over the software and source. At least Xandros could start a “legacy” program where they promise to release source (or better yet, the whole VCS database) of no longer supported software. Maybe even write a contract with the customers that promises a release of all there source to FSF if they go “B”.
Xandros provides the source for their GPL components at their FTP site. Anything beyond that, especially regarding the proprietary elements that are at the heart of the distribution, is entirely at their discretion, as it is with any company.
Of cause its up to them. Still it would be nice it they look at what they could do to get the community (and some more companies) on there side. I dont like Linux cause it is better then Windows at everything (because at most pure desktop stuff it is a _lot_ worse), but because I feel that I am in control. You take that control away and there is nothing left. No reson to run Linux on the desktop but fancy looks. No super office app, No real DVD support, No games, No good hardware support (on x86, compared to MS).
You give me one good reason to run Linux but control (Open source) or a Unix fetish…
This is the real danger with SCO, not the money but the threat of loss of control.
I’ve read the early reviews here, plus the reviews written by Jim Lynch at ExtremeTech and also Joe Barr. Jim liked Xandros 2.0 and Joe didn’t like it all that well. I’m pretty satisfied with it myself, at least for its target market – those who are typically used to running Windows desktop software, and are looking for a solid, stable Linux alternative that has a reasonable degree of interoperability.
When I installed and reviewed Xandros 1.0, I was pretty favorable toward it then, but my two criticisms were that the software was relatively old, even as it was being introduced and the boot manager automatically overwrote the Master Boot Record (MBR) unless you did some manual tweaking to prevent the boot loader from changing the boot record every time Xandros gets booted.
Xandros 2.0 is now based on the testing Debian download mirror, so it comes, right off the bat, with a pretty current KDE 3.1.4 desktop. If you don’t like KDE, forget about Xandros, but if you DO like KDE, this is one of the smoothest and most current commercial implementations available right now.
The boot loader issue has been solved, the desktop either installs or upgrades in under a half hour, and it is ready to use immediately. The typical consumer will not, in any way, be intimidated by this software.
Others have written about the Xandros File Manager, so I’ll leave that part alone.
I found the overall installation to be about as simple and smooth as it could possibly be, a good, solid running system when I was done, with the choice of using Xandros’ update and support mechanisms, or to modify it to my own heart’s content using public Debian mirror sites.
For real geeks, I could see some wanting to start with something else, but I could also make a case that even some geeks might want to start with Xandros 2.0, simple because it leaves you with a working system, yet it’s easy to tweak and change to your heart’s content.
I think this is a winner.