In an article “Are we finally seeing the year of the Linux desktop?” on itwire.com, I’m sure many ask that now, with so many variants of Linux being touted by vendors, magazines, and advertisements.

Stan Beer, the author thinks that the appearance of the Red Hat (reference to fashion in the title of this piece) Global Desktop will push the idea like no other thus far.

Red Hat has made a very good name for itself in the server arena, and is well respected, with a network of users and staunch supporters. Perhaps this cachet in that sector can translate to a large, stable usage on business desktops, in a way Novell wishes SLED could.

The Global Desktop is going to be offered to large and small businesses at first, with no major introduction as a home product. The big boys, Dell, HP, and Lenovo won’t be offering this at first. The rollout will be from ‘whitebox’ system builders, aimed at the kind of relationships that these vendors enjoy with their customers.

Red Hat also can rely on a group of people, like me, who fondly remember their offerings for the desktop, before the Fedora spinoff, as the first Linux distribution to actually enable work to be done on a machine.

With Red Hat moving into the neighborhood, along with Novell’s SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and the Lenovo entry into the market with laptops featuring Ubuntu, I’d say that this year is not the one - everything fashionable takes a while, ask any runway model - but 2008 looks very promising.

Full story

[tags] Linux, Red Hat Global Desktop, Novell SLED, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Fedora, whitebox supplier, Ubuntu [/tags]