Red Hat Avoids Desktop Linux, Says Too Tough

eldavojohn writes "We recently discussed the Linux Foundation's decision to leave desktop Linux alone but Red Hat is also steering clear of that goal. The reason? It's too tough. From the company blog: 'It's worth pointing out what's missing in the list above: we have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future. An explanation: as a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with desktops this is much harder to do than with servers.'"

Fair enough

Free means that you're free to look out for yourself.

As long as they don't inhibit other people from making desktop distros, I see nothing wrong with this.

Is Company Driven Linux Meant for the Desktop?

Free means that you're free to look out for yourself. As long as they don't inhibit other people from making desktop distros, I see nothing wrong with this.

I certainly didn't intend this submission to sound like I was blaming Red Hat for abandoning Linux on the desktop for the single user. I was, instead, hoping this would generate interesting conversation about whether or not desktop Linux is supposed to be delivered by a company. Perhaps it has to come from single developers working together? Red Hat contributes big time (over 10% of all contributions I think) to kernel development so they're already a god to me.

Will Canonical's Ubuntu distribution be short lived if they fail to target the enterprise? I don't mean to spread FUD, just wondering. I think Canonical is Europe or South Africa based, perhaps America's economic woes are driving Red Hat away from funding things that, frankly, have no return on investment? Is desktop Linux for the end user merely an economic drain on a company? I certainly hope not but that's kind of how I interpreted Red Hat's blog ...

Year of the "I Don't Care What's on the Headlines"

Sorry for a simplistic response on a web forum that's anything but... but here goes.

Right now, Ubuntu provides everything I need in a desktop. The interface is excellent, tons of apps in the repositories that can do pretty much everything I need out of a computer. I'm not sure of all the business and technical nuts and bolts of what that company is doing, but I sincerely hope they keep doing it. I love their product. The distro installs after about 7-8 clicks and 30 minutes. From my experience, everything has been plug and play.

Now, I know this is a simplistic approach and my experiences will not be the same as many others' out there. But the cool thing about Linux is it's free, so if something doesn't work, you can just try something else.

Example, I was happily running PCLinuxOS for a few months. Eventually, it gave me a boot error and wouldn't start up. I tried at it for a few days, but eventually gave up and moved on. I had tried Ubuntu before and came back again to where I am now. I'm sure I'll try PCLinuxOS again because there were some things about that distro that I loved, also.

Catch my general drift, here? What happens if your Windows PC has a bust? You either beat your head against the wall until it's fixed (yes, you have to do that with Linux also) or you pay someone who can fix it for you.

With Linux, all you need is hardware, a high speed internet connection (I do NOT recommend trying Linux out without hi-speed internet), and an open mind to explore and try out.

You could probably count me as a mini-mini power user. I am not afraid to wipe a hard drive and install an OS. But on a regular basis, I try to stay away from the command line as much as possible and I can't code anything.

(gosh, this guy isn't a coder and he's posting on Slashdot?!? who let him in?)

My point is that I love what the Linux/FOSS movement provides for me RIGHT NOW. I know there are some greater and global economic/social pressures that might force what we have now off the internet. But as a little person who can't control those things, I hope to the heavens above that what's provided for us currently, continues to be so because I'm very happy with it. Worst case scenario - years from now, I'll still be running my old Ubuntu 7.10 version. I'd bet it will still be just as stable, too.

To answer the parent, I think companies like Ubuntu and Firefox have a strong enough hold on the market that they aren't going to die any time soon. (Hopefully)

Re:Is Company Driven Linux Meant for the Desktop?

Linux is technically ready for the desktop.

From an engineering perspective but not from a marketing perspective. What is the easily communicated value that more than overcomes the network effect of Windows' accumulated user knowledge (already knows how to use Windows and Office), file interoperability (nearly everyone else is using office), informal support (family and friends can often help), ...; and overcomes the switching costs of installing Linux (possibly having to pay someone to do it), learning an entirely different operating system and set of applications, a lack of informal support (family and friends still on Windows), ...

Now a company with support capacity and marketing abilities is needed if we want to see more than a 2% market share

Look at Macintosh. It is unix based, has a better user interface than Linux, more informal support, a major consumer brand name behind it, MS Office is natively available, ... and it is around 5-6%. Once you have sold a person on leaving Windows you also have to sell them on going with Linux rather than Mac OS X. Consumers have options once they leave Windows, you can not assume they will go to Linux. Even if Linux were more competitive with Mac OS X, Apple's market share suggests that Linux can not really improve it's share much.

In short, merely being perfectly usable by grandma does not make Linux the viable alternative to Windows from the perspective of an *average consumer*. Our techno babble means nothing to them. Linux needs far more work to justify the switching costs in their eyes.

Re:Is Company Driven Linux Meant for the Desktop?

The most important lesson from Apple is that you can be successful in many ways (including making lots of money) with a few percent market share. Gauging Linux's success on market share is pointless.

Who cares if most people use Windows? All we need is enough of a Linux community to ensure a thriving and evolving platform for those who find that Windows and/or OS X does not meet their needs. You can easily achieve that with a market share of 0.5%.

Please, no more "World Domination" bullshit.

Re:Is Company Driven Linux Meant for the Desktop?

In short, merely being perfectly usable by grandma does not make Linux the viable alternative to Windows from the perspective of an *average consumer*. Our techno babble means nothing to them. Linux needs far more work to justify the switching costs in their eyes.

Excellent point! This is the real issue - and has been for several years. Forget the "year of the Linux desktop" trolls. The fact that Linux has been "good enough" for quite some time doesn't open the floodgates of users. There's a lot more involved here.

As another AC in this thread noted:

When you know something is possible on Windows and you know something is possible on Linux, the first one means YOU can do it, the second one means YOU can probably do it within 72 hours and with the help of some forum posts.

The underlying issue here is that software and hardware rarely gets targeted at Linux at this point. I'm a long-term Linux desktop user and fan... and I'm still pleasantly surprised when I take a random piece of hardware and it works seamlessly with my desktop (its happening more and more often). I'm shocked whenever a shrinkwrapped app is available for Linux.

Once this last hurdle is overcome, we'll get acceptance. That's when Linux's "good enough" functionality and low cost really shines.

If only one wasn't dependant on the other. Of course - this is the same Catch-22 that's been around as long as the "year of the Linux desktop."

Re:Is Company Driven Linux Meant for the Desktop?

Now a company with support capacity and marketing abilities is needed if we want to see more than a 2% market share

According to W3Counter, Linux passed 2% in January.

If their figures are believable, Linux use has close to doubled in the past nine months.

Smart move

Perhaps they understand that most folks, like myself, don't care about the OS, they care about the applications.

Desktop Linux

Well, their main competitor Ubuntu is basically giving away the OS for free. How can RedHat expect to compete with that?

Personally, I find Linux to be great as a server OS doing very specific things for my home network. Webserver, you bet. Fileserver, yep. Firewall, no doubt. Mail server, of course. But on the desktop, I find that Windows (XP) just works without any fuss. I've tried "desktop Linuces" and found them all pretty clunky for the stuff I wanted to do.

Confused ...

OK, so I'm thick, I'll confess.

But, seriously ... what the hell do people mean when they say that someone needs to design a "desktop". I've used Linux/FreeBSD as a desktop OS for over a decade. Gnome and KDE both seem fairly robust, with lots of apps and functionality.

WTF is fundamentally missing that it can't be a "desktop"?? Are we talking administration? Apps? Screen savers? Spinning cursor add-ons? iTunes? Virus scanners? Boxed software?

I'm afraid I just don't get what is fundamentally missing here. What is missing from the puzzle for being a "desktop"?

Cheers

Me too

I was about to ask that same question. I'm using Linux "on the desktop" right now as I write this, as I have for years. What is it about my desktop that isn't "ready for the desktop"? If anything, my friends using Windows have had to deal with more overall crap, and most of them would acknowledge as much (but not switch, of course).

I suspect that that this "not ready for the desktop" meme that I see constantly being reinforced is just part of the FUD campaign that Microsoft and its stakeholders have waged for years. It doesn't matter that experienced Linux users know it's a load of crap if they can keep their own customers too afraid to try it.

I've also noticed lately that posts like this one get modded down pretty quickly, now that there are companies that perform this service for a fee. Let's see if it happens this time...

Re:Confused ...

WTF is fundamentally missing that it can't be a "desktop"?? Are we talking administration? Apps? Screen savers? Spinning cursor add-ons? iTunes? Virus scanners? Boxed software?

Every time one problem is solved, it's another one.

It used to be "No serious office software". Then OpenOffice came to be.

Then it was "very difficult to configure" (never mind that in businesses, where much of the money is, a dedicated IT department does all the configuring and they sure as hell don't go around like monkeys clicking "Next Next Next" on every PC). Then Ubuntu came to be.

Right now there are a few more - the first two that spring to mind are "very difficult to manage across a large group in a similar easy fashion to Windows - you can't easily click a button and - poof! - an icon for an application will appear on the desktop of everyone belonging to a particular group, you can't easily centrally disable UI functionality on a per-group basis so end users don't see anything that might confuse them." The general answer to that one is "it's not that hard to roll your own" - which is certainly true but few IT departments want to re-invent the wheel. Canonical have a product called "Landscape" which supposedly solves this but it's only available when you pay for support so how good it is I don't know.

The second argument right now is "all the little business applications which handle boring things like payroll and accounts, of which there are myriad, are conspicuous by their absence on Linux".

Once this problem is solved, I imagine something else will come up. I think what it really boils down to is "a migration would provide little benefit and cause a great deal of work which we can't justify". Which is probably the most sound business reason that exists - make no mistake, it will continue to exist for a very long time. Lots of companies stuck with dumb terminals for years, only to migrate to PCs with a terminal emulator for the business application.

And Ubuntu will take over in the long run.

But in the long run, they might get bitten. Canonical's Ubuntu offer is fantastic. The server/desktop solution is essentially the same. The free version is THE enterprise version. In the Red Hat world, you install Fedora to try it. You find a problem and want support, tough. Scrap the OS and reinstall RHEL to get support from the Vendor. With Ubuntu, you just go and pay for support.

And corporations like to keep things simple. Why have two distributions (one for the desktops, one for the servers) when one could do the job? This is where Ubuntu outshines.

I am not too familiar with using Ubuntu on the server side. It lacks support from big ISV such as Rational (IBM) and maybe Oracle. However, since it is Debian derived, I would trust the OS for most server tasks. So while in the past we were more inclined to use RHEL, in my organization we are considering Ubuntu for the server side.

Red Hat is concentrating too much on the short term. Yes, they should not spend too much money marketing a desktop version or polishing it. Canonical barely does any marketing (ever saw an add from Ubuntu?). But Red Hat should have a presence on the desktop to remain in the race in the long term.

I have a lot of respect for Mark Shuttleworth (Canonical owner). He has a long term vision and while part of his goal is too be profitable, he also has a social goal.

The problem is software.

The problem with the viability of desktop Linux, and why everyone is so leery of it, is the lack of consumer software for it. True enough, OpenOffice is an admirable effort, and it is getting very close to parity with MS Office. And Firefox / etc. are fine. But there is more to do on these damn machines than write emails, documents, presentations, and spreadsheets.

What is needed on Linux is the same panoply of software that is at the same level of quality as found on MacOS or Windows. What is missing on Linux:

1. The Adobe/Macromedia collection of software â" from Photoshop to Dreamweaver to Flash.
2. A really good video editor (think AVID)
3. A really good audio/music program (think ProTools and Ableton Live)
4. A low level video layer (think quickTime/Quartz / WindowsMedia)

I'm sure there's more. Frankly, NOTHING on Linux rivals the Adobe CS collection. NOTHING on Linux rivals AVID (or even Final Cut Pro). NOTHING on Linux rivals ProTools. Why don't I have a Linux box? Because the above mentioned software packages (and a host of others) are not available on Linux, and the stuff that is similar to it is inferior. If Adobe / AVID / Digidesign / Ableton / etc. ported their stuff over to Linux, I'd get a Linux box in a heartbeat. But until then, I'm going to hang with my MacBookPro, thank you very much.

And since this is The Truth On The Ground, that's why places like RedHat are hesitant to bother with desktop Linux. They could build it, but there's nothing to do there, and thus no money to be made.

RS

Re:The problem is software.

I couldn't disagree more. How many users do you think, are actually using one of these professional tools?

I think only a few. Most users still use there computer for web browsing, emailing wordprocessing and IM.

Although it would be nice to have those professional applications ported or seriously replaced with Open Source versions, it's definitely not the BIG problem of Linux on the desktop

Post Inaccurate

The title the post is in accurate. They are avoiding the "consumer" desktop not desktops altogether. Per the article they are still committed to developing desktops for the corporate market. This is a logical move as corporate environments tends to be a much more controlled (more current hardware and managed upgrade schedules anyone) and profitable to support than the wild west of consumer desktops and clueless users . . .

Hopefully the moderators will correct this very missleading title.

Re:Whither Fedora?

why do you think Red Hat spun Fedora off, and have set them up as mostly self sufficient? The personal desktop market isn't profitable when you have to compete against an illegal monopoly. Even with Free software as a base.

The year of the Linux desktop isn't going to happen. the year of the Linux mobile, the Linux server, and the Linux hand-held computer, however are fast approaching.

Linux will take the desktop market through the back door. By getting in on every other device first.

Re:Whither Fedora?

Linux will take the desktop market through the back door.

On the contrary, I think it's Windows that has been taking the desktop market through the back door, for quite a while now. Roughly, without lube.

Re:Whither Fedora?

I know you were ranked funny because of how it is worded. But there is truth to it.

Lets go back to before PCs. I/T and business didn't bring them in, the real McCoy "hackers" and engineers did. Then the users got on board, often with their own dime or in at least the department business unit bought them. There was no direction from I/T or senior management. The PC crept in through the back doors. I/T even used to say use the mainframe, we don't support the PCs.

At some point the business and I/T woke up and found these PCs took over the workplace, and finally invested in it. The business was driven by the users.

The Linux desktop is no different, get the home users and it will be dragged into business. The other way around isn't going to work.

If anything, Red Hat aught to produce a home user version that is so easy to install a 5 year old could do it. And leverage the Vista mess and hand me down computers. Sell it for $20 a download. Get it out there as a choice for new laptops.

PCs, DOS and MS-Windows came in the back door, and if X-Windows Linux wants it, that is the way in.

Re:Whither Fedora?

Um, the year of the linux server was a while back. It's gone past buzzword status and become mainstream practice.

Re:Whither Fedora?

Well, M$ is not an illegal monopoly, they are a confirmed monopoly which has been convicted of illegal behavior.

A semantic issue, for sure.

There is nothing inherently illegal with their monopoly, but many of their actions which created a barrier to entry into the market as well as blatantly killing off emerging technologies by leveraging their monopoly in other areas are what is abusive and illegal. It's what they got "busted" for, if you can call what the DoJ did to them "busting".

The Bush era DoJ should have had the cajones to split them up as per the judges decree, but I suspect too many people in the Bush administration have too much cash tied up in M$ to do that.

Re:Whither Fedora?

Be honest with yourself. That's not *really* linux on a phone, at least not in a way that would ever have any influence over a user switching their Desktop OS.
It's just a way manufacturers found to avoid hiring 2 or 3 more programmers.

Re:Whither Fedora?

As usual, the /. headline is misleading. TFA more-or-less says that they have no plans to produce a consumer desktop product because they don't see it as a money maker. This basically means that they don't plan on having a boxed desktop product that you can buy at the store like Mandriva. Fedora will continue on as is - something they work on with the community but don't sell.

Re:hmm.

RedHat has ALWAYS focused on the server/workstation market. They're not focusing on the desktop because the backroom is what they're best at.

It's all about about corp. users

Here's what the article says:

Considering our goals listed above, our desktop product plans for 2008 and 2009 include:

        * Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop. This is our fully supported, commercial product. It is 100 percent compatible with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux server products. Its focus is to provide a desktop environment that is secure and easily managed. And it is upgradeable with the Multi-OS option (which provides virtualization support) or the Workstation option (which provides high-end workstation capabilities).
        * Fedora. This is a Red Hat sponsored, fast-growing, free product. While Red Hat doesn't formally support Fedora, users can turn to a healthy online community to obtain help when they need it.
        * Red Hat Global Desktop (RHGD). Plans for this product were originally announced at the 2007 Summit Conference. It is designed exclusively for small, reseller supplied, deployments in emerging markets (e.g. primarily the BRIC countries), and will be supplied by a number of Intel channel partners.

We originally hoped to deliver RHGD within a few months, and indeed the technology side of the product is complete. There have, however, been a number of business issues that have conspired to delay the product for almost a year. These include hardware and market changes, startup delays with resellers, getting the design and delivery of appropriate services nailed down and, unsurprisingly, some multimedia codec licensing knotholes. Right now we are still working our way through these issues. As mentioned earlier, the desktop business model is tough, so we want to be prepared before delivering a product to the emerging markets.

This means that, as you probably expected, Red Hat is focusing their for-sale desktop on the enterprise market, and letting the consumer market use the free, unsupported Fedora for now. The "tough" comment was about a new low-cost consumer offering outside the U.S.

The headline should be: "Red Hat Delays Low-Cost Consumer Desktop, Says Business Model Is Tough".