Strange new worlds

By Lucy Sherriff

Depending on who you talk to, 40 to 75 per cent of the world’s web servers are Linux-based. That is some serious market penetration. But even in organisations running Linux on their servers the operating system is on just 20 per cent of desktops.
Despite its success in the back office, Linux has not yet made such an impact on the desktop. Does it matter?
Unsurprisingly, Chris Kenyon, Canonical’s vice-president of OEM services, thinks it does. And, he argues, in the form of Ubuntu at least Linux is making it on the desktop – “just in different locales and at different speeds”.
Nature v. inertia
“Showing very significant adoption on the devices that people use for everyday computing is important and is achievable,” he says.
Linux is increasingly part of the fabric of everyday life in organisations. There are no licence costs and it is inherently much more secure. So why isn’t it running on more machines?
A decade ago, it was because it wasn’t really ready as a consumer product. But according to Ovum analyst Laurent Lachal, Linux is now much more robust and user-friendly. The problem is accessing the market.
“Desktop Linux is stuck in a Catch-22 situation. To reach the market on a large scale, you need a good channel. And lack of channels is a big issue for Linux. The moment this is resolved, it has a fighting chance,” Lachal says.
Inertia has a lot to do with it. People like to use the operating system the machine is loaded with and early industry attempts to get Linux pre-installed on boxes didn’t work out too well.
Lure of the east
“Poor pre-installations of Linux on netbooks showed that putting Linux on brand new hardware in an ecosystem is a real engineering challenge. And one which, when done poorly, results in a bad experience for users,” Kenyon says.
He adds that the company has almost 30 engineers out in Taipei working on OEM relationships, training and partnerships with Dell, HP, Acer and Lenovo.
“The change over the last three years is staggering,” Kenyon says. “We will pre-load well over 10 million PCs with Ubuntu this year and we are more than doubling users every year in India and China.”
He rattles off a list of deployments: 10,000 PCs running Ubuntu at the University of Delhi, 5,000 desktops in the Tamil Nadu Health Services and 220,000 desktops in the state education system in Spain’s Andalucia region.
Ubuntu is also making inroads into high-tech firms. Google, for instance, runs all its engineering and development on Ubuntu, and Texas Instruments and Qualcomm also use the platform for development work.
Futuristic vision
Desktop Linux at work may also be getting a boost from an unexpected quarter: the iPhone and all its emerging form-factor friends. Many of the large tech developers are using Ubuntu as their device development platform, even if they are targeting Android, Kenyon adds.
“The desktop of the future isn’t going to look like a desktop, or even a traditional clamshell. But Ubuntu is already on those convergence devices, like the Motorola Atrix.”
Lachal takes a more measured view, but concedes that the fragmentation of the desktop is a positive thing for Linux, and for open source in general.
“It isn’t just about the PC any more. The biggest device battle is still being fought and Linux has a real chance here,” he says.
“The trouble is that IT on the desktop moves at a glacial pace. I have a machine here that is running Office 2003, for example. Although Microsoft is losing some of its grip, it is a slow process.”
“If it is there, people will use it”
Other factors working in Linux’s favour are virtualisation and the availability of dual-boot machines. It means more people can try test the water without too much risk, Lachal says.
Clearly, Linux is not going to push Microsoft off the desktop and into oblivion in the next six months (rest easy, Mr Ballmer). It is more likely to continue what it has been doing: gradually gaining ground, winning over detractors as it becomes more user-friendly, and taking advantage of cloud computing and new form factors.
Kenyon remains upbeat. “Most people use the operating system that their PC came with,” he says. “This is why the work we do at Canonical is so important. We want to see a majority of the world’s PCs certified and eventually pre-installed with Ubuntu.”
Lachal goes along with that. “If it is there, people will use it,” he says.

I largely agree with what is being said in this article. Point is that if the various distros want Linux to be on the desktop, they have to make more customization, in order to make the first experience of a user more friently, cause there are some very nice tricks developed by some people that you’ re learning them after a period of use. For example for distros (like opensuse) there are some very cool free fonts, why not use them instead of the default ones? or a better icon set? or adding a dock (like docky or cairo dock) preinstalled and ready to run right from the first boot?

Or another problem (but it is going to be solved in a way): OK there is very nice the central package management, but please why all this different names on the packages among distros? isn’t it possible all distros having the exact same name on a package (more likely the one that his developer is giving) and leaving all this confusion behind? It’s not really a big deal but why not?

Also a unified GUI for all package managers, so that it could be possible for anyone to change among distros without much pain (how am i going to install a program here?) Kpackagekit is a good option accually, but it should be a little fancier (like ubuntu software center) hiding the hell of all those libraries and giving an icon for the app you want to install etc. And no i don’t want ONE package manager: that could be silly and please if i want to create a new distro, with my own package manager –because it would be more kool than anyone other– there is no reason why i must be stopped .

And finally a unified control panel for system administration. There are many good utilities, but they are here and there. Yast is a perfect example (with some minor additions) of what a unified control panel could offer to someone. OK maybe a new user won’t use this Yast-like thing, but a more advanced user surely will want to setup some things differently (an additional service or configuring a second or third sound card etc).

Exept from the second one, in my point of view there is not so difficult to do this things (the second requires some people to agree in something and in this life, that takes time). And to be honest, i am not missing a damn thing from all the previous statements, but that is because i am using Linux for a period of time and have learn how the system works. Still that doesn’t have to be easy for an average or newb user. I know that this kind of user would not install by himself a different OS easilly, but that is not nesseserilly an excuse.

And don’t forget one thing: Maybe this is the open source world we are talking about, but that doesn’t seem that it couldn’t have some rules to follow (at least between the major distros) in order to make things easier on the user side. Yes it is community based and surelly all must contribute something (a translation, some lines of code that do some magic or even artwork or anything else that could be helpfull to someone else) that’s why it’s called community, but we must not fool ourselves: None of the big open source projects (like KDE, GNOME, Firefox, Apache, MySQL etc — and please don’t start if it is GPL3 or LGPL3, if you don’t like the lisence, don’t use them, and think if it was better when you didn’t know a shit about what the desktop was doing behind the scenes in other OSe’s) are from some funny guys that they do not have a better thing to do than writing code. These are paid people and they produce the 75-80% of the open source code today. Of course there are many good projects that “funny” people do, but i think the point is well taken.

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