Did Linux Miss Its Window On the Desktop?
(Sorry about the terrible metaphor.) In fact, there is a serious fight for the desktop, or at least for the single-digit desktop marketshare that Microsoft doesn't have.
No matter how slow Vista sales are, it would be shocking if they weren't good enough to keep this from being the year that Linux steals significant desktop marketshare from Microsoft. Linux is getting great press, but it still has a geekware image problem with business buyers. It does, in fact, give Linux some business cred that Red Hat bought JBoss, got itself listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and posted impressive profits last year in the face of Microsoft's embracing of a rival Linux distro and the unveiling of Oracle as a Linux distro. And Oracle and Microsoft both advanced Linux legitimacy with their actions, whatever their intentions were, while SCO seems to be fading away in its legal threat to Linux. All good for desktop Linux.
One might ask, which desktop Linux? Microsoft promoted SuSE in its deal with Novell. Linspire, which started life with a company and product name that taunted Microsoft, made waves last year by releasing Freespire 1.0, a Linux distro that tweaks free-software purists by mixing together open-source software and licensed proprietary drivers, codecs, and apps.
The OSS OS community faces other issues, like the widening gap between the Free Software Foundation and the Linux core developers, and between those who will stick with GPL2 and those who may embrace GPL3. OSDL is working to bring order to the Linux desktop, but Linux still isn't there with the apps and drivers the market requires. It's not for lack of trying: Linux developers working on wireless network drivers, for example, know that the chipmakers don't make it easy. But the biggest challenge to desktop Linux remains one of perception.
Meanwhile, hopes to see Linux steal seats from Windows could be dimmed by increasing acceptance of Mac OS X, owing, ironically, to the fact that the hardware that runs OS X will also now run Windows.
