| Opinion: Vista opens doors for Linux desktops |
by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (Aug. 11, 2005)
It's late, it's lame and installing it won't be cheap, so now is the perfect time for Linux desktop vendors to make a charge at Microsoft.
My friend Mary Jo Foley wants Microsoft to come clean about what will be in Vista. I just want Microsoft to fess up to how they will make it worth having two different versions of the Windows client OS.
Microsoft recently said that the company was working on two different Vistas: one for everyone, which I'll call Vista Vanilla, and the other for enterprises, which I'll name Vista Pro.
The boys from Redmond are also working on two versions of Office 12, but that's a story for another day.
So why two versions? Do you get 10 percent more security in Vista Pro? From where I sit, better security is the only virtue I see left that Microsoft can put in Vista.
They've tossed out the new file system, WinFS; the command line, Monad; and, as Mary Jo notes, it's hard to know what's really left in there anyway.
Or will Microsoft do to Vista what it did to XP: make one version, XP Home, crippleware.
For all practical purposes, the only difference between XP Home and Pro is that Home won't work and play well in NT Domain or W2K/Server 2003 Active Directory trees. That functionality was in Windows 98 and 2000, but Microsoft decided it was worth an extra $100 list to "add" it to Pro.
Thanks guys.
Can we expect more of the same in Vista? It looks like it to me.
I actually sat down and tried to think: What could you possibly add to one version of Vista to make it worth more than another.
I couldn't think of a thing.
Now, when it comes to the Linux desktop, I don't have any such problem.
The Linux desktop, whether it's from the big guys like Novell or Red Hat or from smaller, but interesting players, like Mepis or Xandros, has areas that still clearly need improvement.
Program installation still needs to be cleaner. Linspire really does have the right idea here with its CNR (Click-N-Run) online software department store.
Linux vendors also still need to figure out a way -- short of dynamite -- to get hardware vendors to turn over enough of their APIs so that Linux can support Wi-Fi networking and the like out of the box.
We can also use better front ends to many of Linux's tools.
That last is why, of all the Unix/Linux-based desktop operating systems -- all desktop systems, actually -- I continue to favor Mac OS X.
Yes, with Linux you get far greater control over exactly how your computer does its work than with any other operating system. But, on a day-to-day basis, how many users really need, or want, to tweak their TCP/IP's MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) setting?
I'm both a network and Linux geek, so I can think of lots of situations where I want to play with what my network cards are doing. I'm not most people.
Most people need simple, easy interfaces. "Press a button, fix the network connection" is what folks really need. While Linux desktops are getting better that way, it could still stand improvement.
Vista though . . . well what I think most people want from Vista can be summed up as two things: better security and fewer failures. Oh, and one, not two, versions for a decent price.
The good research people at Gartner told me recently that just over 1 percent of enterprise users are running Linux desktops. That sounds about right.
In a separate forecast, Gartner estimated that only 3.2 percent of non-consumer users will run Linux by 2008. That sounds low to me.
"For most companies, the cost to migrate away from Microsoft Windows is simply too high and outweighs the benefits companies expect they will receive," said Michael Silver, research vice president in Gartner's Client Platforms group. "Most large companies have hundreds, if not thousands, of applications, and the cost to migrate them to run on or be accessible from Linux clients is huge."
True, as far as it goes. What Gartner doesn't tell us is that many of those large companies are still running now-obsolete Windows 2000; that even those companies that are running XP Pro will almost certainly need to replace their hardware to run Vista; and that it looks likely that you'll need to buy new, Vista-capable software for those new computers.
I don't know about you, but the cost to do all that sounds pretty darn huge to me.
And what exactly will you get for that? Darned if we know.
Better security? Like the three, count 'em, three, major IE patches Microsoft had to re-release on Wednesday?
What was that all about anyway?
Microsoft isn't saying how it ended up with corrupted files on the Microsoft Download Center. That sure doesn't make me feel all warm and fuzzy about Microsoft's protection today or tomorrow.
Come on, Linux desktop guys. There's a golden opportunity to take the wind out of Microsoft's sales sails here.
All you need do is to keep making the Linux desktop better. Microsoft is already doing its part to make itself an also-ran.
 About the author: Ziff Davis Internet editor Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has been using and writing about technology and business since the late '80s and thinks he may just have learned something about them along the
way.
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