| |||||||||||||
Meeks: Linux on the (consumer) DesktopMeeks: Linux on the (consumer) DesktopPosted Sep 11, 2012 19:21 UTC (Tue) by cyanit (guest, #86671)Parent article: Meeks: Linux on the (consumer) Desktop
The obvious issue is that for most people there is no significant advantage in using Linux instead of Windows on the desktop, and Windows is already highly established.
Regarding cost, Microsoft can just drop the price of OEM copies of Windows to zero or near zero if it becomes a problem.
Despite the article's claims, most modern desktops have an extremely limited range of hardware (i.e. Intel or AMD CPU + chipset, nVidia or AMD GPU and nothing else non-standard) which generally works fine out of box, so that's not the issue.
The reason Linux is popular on servers is that there was no decent cheap server OS before it, and on embedded because there was no established touch-based OS before Android.
Plus, there's the whole fragmentation issue, with multiple desktop environments and distributions which all suck in different ways, and provide incompatible ways to deliver applications.
(Log in to post comments)
Meeks: Linux on the (consumer) Desktop Posted Sep 11, 2012 20:11 UTC (Tue) by ajmacleod (guest, #1729) [Link]
There are very significant advantages to using Linux on the desktop in some cases.
Take for example what used to be called Windows Terminal Server (which still exists though the name keeps changing.) This works not too badly, but the cost is massive. The Windows licensing costs for just five users can be as much as for the server it's running on, and that's before you start considering application licences; if you want to add more users, you have to keep buying more licences and managing them is a complete pain the neck no matter what anyone says.
With Linux, this stuff is (certainly used to be) second nature, and you can keep adding users until performance starts to suffer - no extra costs, the money you save on licences could easily pay for another server or two and you don't have the worry of managing the licences either.
The technology to do this has been in place for ever and works very well (for users on the other end of a WAN, something like (Free)NX solves performance problems) - what's really missing IMHO are tools to easily set this up and then configure and manage (i.e. change, lock down, remotely take control of) the desktops users see.
Meeks: Linux on the (consumer) Desktop (Linux terminal servers) Posted Sep 13, 2012 18:54 UTC (Thu) by faramir (subscriber, #2327) [Link]
Only terminal server installations aren't quite the piece of cake they used to be. People need to watch streaming videos (with sound!) if only to watch videos put out by their HR department for training purposes. LTSP and other projects nominally support this, but my initial investigation are that this isn't any where near as easy as it could be.
|
|||||||||||||