Open Source Blog

I found this article because I saw a google ad for a company boasting about being able to offer "complete remote desktop support for linux". Made me ask myself the same question as the title of this article.

As a net tech myself I laughed out loud, and hard. Most Linux users are actually programmers themselves and would rather figure out how to fix their problem on their own than be humble and place an IT support call.

In reading this article about the great organizations using Linux on the desktop, I laughed out loud, even harder.

Other than the first three entires, school boards and the state of Utah, these are all point of sale machines and systems used by engineers; engineers have always used UNIX so Linux isnt a great leap for them, this is nothing new.

Before I installed Vista x64 myself I thought of bright hopes for Linux on the desktop. I even attempted to install a distribution on one of my spare laptops to start using it ( I was a Windows 2000 die-hard until 2007 and I refused to get another Windows upgrade ).

Then I tried Vista x64. It was fast, clean, attractive, runs almost everything, crash free (so far, after 8 months), and best of all it runs everything out there.

Compared to my Linux desktop experience (I used to use Amiga which was based on UNIX and I've dabbled in many operating systems) which was riddled with things I haven't done in 15 years, changing flat text files to set up settings for applications, having to manually install and build apps from the command line.

Linux on the desktop is never going to happen. I'm sure if you get a great clean red hat or ubuntu build and use it as it came or use the applications you can get from the issuer of the distro, it can be fine and easy to use. But try downloading some "Linux" application and setting it up on one of these distros if it wasnt made for that particular distro. A nightmare. I couldn't even install Adobe Acrobat Reader without delving into the command line and learning commands I've never used. In the end, I gave up and wiped the drive and put Windows back on it.

Novell is doomed. Linux is fantastic for light, clean, cheap secure servers and specialized tasks, and making use of hardware that is too slow to run Microsoft's bloated code base. There's no way Linux is going to be challenging Microsoft in my lifetime for the desktop. Nerds are nerds and they'll use some rinky dink OS or application just so that they can say they can. That doesnt mean jack in the mainstream market.