RH recommends using Windows?

[Lauri Jutila]

What a day: Novell acquiring SUSE and Szulik telling home users to stick
with Windoze. :)

It might seem like a crazy move to say such a thing in a public for CEO
of a Linux company, but he has other very good points. And as someone
else already said on the list, the article title is kind of misleading.
It would be the same as if Larry Ellison of Oracle would say that SMEs
should probably use Open Source DB for development and testing, but use
their products for "real" projects.

Szulik is a smart fellow, at least that's the impression that I have. He
has led Red Hat to where they are now, posting first profitable quarter
recently, and it really (face it) is *the* Linux vendor in terms of
market share among enterprise.

> But because of its diverseness, Windows 98/ME and XP made it to the
> corporate desktop because it was easy to use at home, and people thought,
> "Hey, I'll use this at work."

It's actually the other way around. People get to used a system at work
and depending on their experiences, bring the same system to home.
That's why Szulik is telling folks that "enterprise Linux desktop is
ripe". I agree with him. With proper tools, proper applications, proper
administration, proper education, an enterprise (whether S/M/L/XL) can
reap great benefits from using Linux on the desktop. It's already
happening and why do you think that Novell has acquired Ximian and
recently SUSE? Exactly, to push Linux on their customers' desktops.

Believe me, Linux will be home desktop OS in next two-three years.
Dual-boot systems have ever-growing penetration, Linux-only workstations
are gaining ground. What we now really need is few daring software
companies that release their popular apps on Linux, too. That'll give
the momentum and the critical mass for large scale Linux penetration.

Windows is already losing market share on business desktops, especially
on high-end, development, and specialized computing.

Somebody asked why OSS community hasn't created a desktop environment
that is as user-friendly as e.g. OSX. The main reason is that desktop
environments such as GNOME & KDE are mainly developed by geeks, techs,
engineers, et al. They develop software, applications and tools which
satisfy their needs, not the average Joe's. Ximian kind of pioneered the
average-users-desktop. I'm eagerly waiting what they and Novell will
cook up next.

Regards,

-- 
Lauri Jutila
Chief Linux Fellow, Reforge
lists at reforge.fi
http://www.reforge.fi