[PLUG] Linux on the desktop (was: rationalizing .Mac web pages)

[Magnus Hedemark <chrish@trilug.org>]

On Thu, 26 Feb 2004, Paul wrote:

> I was told that Linux just passed Mac in percentage of desktop users.

I'd like to know how anyone could get numbers on Linux desktop use.  If 
Apple were cooperative, it wouldn't be hard to pull Mac numbers.

I don't know of any Macs at $WORK, where I support about 500 users.  I 
know of several dozen Linux machines, most of them desktops.  I can hardly 
walk to the men's room without someone else approaching me asking if I can 
upgrade their Windows desktop to Linux.

In the corporate environment, I think the things that are holding back 
Linux adoption (IMHO anyway) include:
* Office suite.  OOo doesn't score too well on interoperability with MS 
Office, which is pretty much a requirement.  Lots of complaints from users 
about ease of use, performance, and UI consistancy.
* Groupware.  I know the KDE camp has some neat stuff going on here so 
this may change.
* Applications.  I work for a company that does E911 location services.  
As you might imagine, we use a lot of software for mapping.  The options 
on Linux are pretty slim here.  This seems to be true for a lot of 
application types.  There are a lot of half finished projects, and about a 
zillion finished IRC clients.  Clue: We don't need any more IRC clients.
* Network filesystem.  NFS (<v4) should go the way of telnet.  
Unfortunately it is the defacto standard.  AFS sounds good in theory but 
is a nightmare in practice.  There are some other options, mostly academic 
experiments, but nothing stands out as a good way to mount remote 
filesystems in a secure fashion.

In a lot of other areas, Linux beats the snot out of Windows and even 
Macs (on the corporate front, anyway).  I've put a system in place to 
automate the deployment and patching of all of my Linux systems, and it 
should scale well.  Deploying a Linux desktop takes about an hour of real 
time, but about five to ten minutes of real work (most of that is staging 
the hardware) while the rest is passive time waiting for the automatic 
kickstart process to complete, and the post-install script that automates 
the customization of the box.  

Deploying a Windows desktop, however, can 
take an hour or more of real work plus another hour of downloading the 
base image.  Deploying software packages on Windows is really a messy 
process and many apps cannot be pushed as they need to be installed in the 
context of the end user or have some other odd requirements that require 
manual intervention.

Thanks also to gr for shaming me into brushing up on my shell 
scripting-fu. ;-)  It could be argued that Windows has VBScript but I have 
yet to see any sysadmins effectively employing its use.

___________________________________________________________________________
Philadelphia Linux Users Group         --        http://www.phillylinux.org
Announcements - http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-announce
General Discussion  --   http://lists.phillylinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug