Looking At Desktop Linux

Last week, I attended the Linux Desktop Consortium’s first outreach event, a one-day conference in Tyningsboro, Massachusetts.  It was a little like Linux itself – filled with interested people and conversations, very passionate, but a bit disorganized!

Jeremy White, the Consortium’s founder, says it has three goals:

1. To educate users and developers about each others needs and abilities;
   
   

2. To advocate for the Linux desktop in an open and candid way; and
   
   

3. To connect software builders and users in a variety of ways, through web sites, electronic forums, and conferences.

The Consortium is now accepting members.  Individual memberships are free and you can register for membership in any class at its website:  http://www.desktoplinuxconsortium.org/

In spite of its somewhat academic style – I definitely felt like I was back on campus at graduate school – there was a clear sense of what was happening in the desktop Linux space, in both the predictions of gurus like Bruce Perens and analysts like myself and in the announcements of vendors like Novell, SuSE, and IBM – and perhaps, most important, the stories of ordinary customers who are just using Linux at the desktop and are very pleased.

Some glimpses registered:

• Lots of agreement that it’s easier to get Linux desktops into the mainstream outside the North American corporate market, where Microsoft and its Office Suite are so strongly penetrated.  But go to China, India, South America or even Europe, and there’s a very different story.  Many speakers were full of statistics on government decisions in favor of Linux and specific installations in progress.  Some we’ve written of before (like the City of Munich) others, like some in Spain (80,000 in schools and municipal government; expected to go to 320,000) and Brazil (72 citizen walk-in centers with 20 Linux desktops each; ATMs for 2 major banks), were surprises to us.
  
  

• Sam Greenblatt, CA’s Linux man, made an interesting point.  Delta Airlines has 300,000 PC’s, but only 30,000 of them run Office.  That means 90% of them are candidates to run something else.  He wonders how many other companies are like that, rather than the way we assume they are.  Sam thinks eventually, today’s interfaces will go away and we’ll use voice as the interface and entirely different kinds of desktop clients.  CA will have 100% of its developers using Linux by 2006; his will help them look at how Linux is going to integrate with their applications.  He also notes that in a client survey they discovered that Reliability and Cost of Acquisition were much more important (i5%, 89%) than TCO (65%).  CA sees early users as financial services, communications, government, retail, and distribution.
  
  

• Nat Friedman of Ximian (another Novell acquisition), offered a lively presentation, pointing out that the Linux desktop is ready now and that most of the problem is that of a mismatch between what’s there and user expectations, rather than of something being wrong.  Nat noted that there are already about 6.5 million Linux workstations, it’s just that most of them are used in specific market segments such as Engineering, development, and government, rather than for business users.  He expects “lightweight” office users like call center works to come next and knowledge workers, with their strong penetration of PC’s and Office Suites to be last.
  
  

Nat notes that user turn to the Linux desktop for control and choice first, and lower cost, second.  Barriers remain application availability, interoperability (file formats, network protocols, device drivers), and the cost of support (mainly because of the need for better usability and more manageability tools).

• IBM’s Global Services chose this event to commit to a strong Linux desktop position.  Sam Docknevich, the IGS Executive for Linux and Grid Services made a strong pitch for Linux desktops, noting that IBM can provide mini assessments, technical assessments, implementation and support, for customers anywhere around the world.  This will make it a lot easier for big organizations anywhere, government, educational, or corporate, who prefer to deal with another big organization, to make a Linux desktop commitment.  Like others, IBM focuses on lightweight office users – Docknevich called them Transactional Workstations and Basic Office Desktops.  IBM also showed an interested in thin client Linux desktops, serviced from a Portal, as well as “slim” (centrally managed” and “fat” (PC) Linux desktops.  He notes that 14,000 IBM employees are already running a Linux desktop.
  
  

• One SI came and showed how easy (and fast) it was to bring Linux desktops up in the thin client, server-based environment (he demoed at 22 seconds, faster than I can get my PC up and running).  Many schools and businesses that want to control what can occur at the desktop level – as well as control the costs of desktops and support – find this configuration intriguing.  In the commercial world, Sun will be providing a Linux desktop in this configuration.
   

• Sam Hiser, the market lead from OpenOffice.org (the free version of Sun’s StarOffice suite), offered a strong presentation on the newest version of the suite, noting its enhanced stability and flexibility and the addition of Flash and PDF as output options as well as XML filters.  Compatibility with Microsoft Word is now 90%, based on a study of 100 actual Word files, selected from the Internet.  OpenOffice reports that they have had 21 million download and are currently downloading at the rate of 1.5 million copies per month.  One participant in this session, a consultant, mentioned that the University of Southern Mississippi is an OpenOffice user – 20,000 strong.

Points of view, of course, vary widely. 

• Bruce Perens would like to offer a “pure” (non-commercial) model that he calls User Linux, supported by users and their systems vendors (at about a $1-2 per user in each industry segment the vendor wanted certified), where the Linux distribution would be provided “free” (as in the past) and Linux companies would make their money on value-added services.  He suggests that the distribution should use Debian.
  
  

• Clearly, Red Hat and SuSE have moved to provide commercial quality versions of Linux, based on moving to charging for the distribution and maintenance of their software.  You might think of this as a value-added model or you might think of this as a business version of Linux.  We suspect that now that Novell has bought SuSE, they are both likely to move further in this direction and that United Linux, which SuSE was an important sponsor of, may become more important.  
  

 We led a wrap-up session at the end.  There is agreement that the ramp for the Linux desktop is already rising outside the United States.  Bruce Perens thinks that the world-wide rate for Linux desktops will reach 30% by 2006.  I’m not sure I can agree with that, but I can certainly agree that by 2004/5 the ramp will be rising in the U.S. market.   

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