Desktop talks from LinuxWorld 2008 Conference

The LinuxWorld 2008 (August 4 - 7) Conference program had plenty of talks that sounded interesting. Unfortunately I only found time to attend two talks, both from the Desktop Linux Track.

The first was from John Walicki, Open Client Architect at IBM who presented "Desktop Linux Architects Speak Out". The second was from Don Hardaway and Craig Van Slyke, professors at John Cook School of Business and Saint Louis University, respectively who entitled their talk "Open Source on the Desktop: Why Not?".

Their were a couple of common themes in both of these talks. First was that Linux is ready for the general desktop. The second was that the desktop effects of Compiz and similar technologies are vital for attracting people to the Linux desktop. Wobbly windows may not be very useful in practice, but putting a presentation on a cube can be effective. Mostly though it's the "wow factor" that gets people's attention.

In many cases, open source applications are just as good as, or better than, their proprietary counterparts. Don and Craig did a study in which they asked university business students to recreate documents and spreadsheets that they had previously done using MS Office. Twenty-eight of 28 students thought that it was just as easy to produce documents of equal quality with OOo Writer. OOo Calc was similarly approved by 26 of the 28 students.

There were areas where John Walicki thought Linux needed improvement. Accessibility, making computers useful for people with disabilities, is an important area, as is power management, making computing greener by using less electricity.

Linux is greener when it comes to keeping old hardware working longer. One big plus is collaboration, getting KDE applications to run seamlessly on GNOME and vice versa, or when multiple distributions adopt a single tool (upstart, PackageKit, etc.). The collaboration enables the tools to become much better, much faster.

John's assessment of the State of Linux Desktop is that it is growing, with hot products that are making rapid changes. Preloads are well established, and Linux is the hottest technology in emerging markets, appliances, and green computing. His forecast is for steady growth.

Don Hardaway and Craig Van Slyke had a different perspective as academics. They study people, and looked at why people choose one technology over another. Don presented the '3 leg stool' model for acceptance of technology. There are the 'tech leg', the 'people leg' and the 'organizational leg'. The open source tech leg gets the most attention, and the organizational leg is getting better, but the people leg has been neglected.

The first thing about getting people to try new technologies is to realize that people resist change. However the perception of risk is relative to their knowledge. Those of us that use open source technology on a regular basis are comfortable with it, but for those who don't know anything about it there is a perceived risk that makes them reluctant to try it. If they learn more about open source the perception of risk is reduced.

There are stages in technology adoption. First people must be aware that it exists. Then something about it must attract their interest. Once that happens they are more willing to evaluate the technology. If the evaluation is favorable, they will try it out.

Many of Don and Craig's students had never heard of Linux. Once they had heard, things like the desktop effects of Compiz got their interest. Some began to evaluate Linux, and some are probably still using it.

To gain the relative advantage, Linux must be better than the competition. Linux costs less and is virus free, but, in the absence of a good image, people will be reluctant to try it. Craig thought gOS had a good image, but the ease-of-use was not there in all cases. Wireless, streaming media and some applications were difficult for him to get going. Craig found the EeePC with Xandros was very easy to use and he got everything going without resorting to the command line. He thinks the Netbooks will give Linux another boost.

So the average user might find sharper graphics appealing, but if things don't work the way they expect or they have to resort to the command-line to get it done, they won't switch. To get more people to switch, a good first step is to hand out live CD/DVDs to people that have never heard of Linux. Explain that they can play around with Linux and then take the disc out of the drive and reboot to whatever was there before. If they realize that Linux can also extend hardware life, they just might be sold.

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In 1999 or so, I got several people interested in Linux accidentally, purely by using the
Enlightenment window manager for random window decorations like the cows theme, or the big
radio knob them, or...

In short, pretty pictures really do affect users.