Red Hat: no desktop products coming

Posted Apr 17, 2008 16:49 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
In reply to: Red Hat: no desktop products coming by elanthis
Parent article: Red Hat: no desktop products coming

I agree with you to an extent. For the most part your average mainstream Linux distro is
really easy to use, performs well, and just works. What Linux distros are missing are the
same old things that people have been bitching about for a while... and that isn't going to
change anytime soon:

1) Legal video/audio codecs OR as an alternative the mainstreaming of patent unencumbered
video/audio codecs AND mainstream sites that provide a buttload of content in the patent
unencumbered formats

2) A major increase in FOSS desktop applications and a maturing of many of the existing apps:
CAD, Educational titles for children, a consumer friendly GUI desktop database, etc, etc. OR
as an alternative porting of commercial applications from those other OSes including such
things that add access to online services that are currently Windows/Mac only... like iTunes
for iTMS (the number one retailer of music). Linux has to work with more/all of the online
services that people are using.

3) Games - either FOSS and/or commercial - Of course the availability of FOSS ATI and/or
nVidia drivers would help that and some of that is in the works.

4) More OEMs selling Linux preloaded in retail and online outlets and advertising to show that
they are serious

While all of those things are in the works on way or another... it will be a while before (or
if) a perfect storm type scenario were to happen that would make a consumer Linux desktop
profitable. In the mean time... those who want Linux on the desktop and are very happy with
it in its current condition... have little barriers... so it isn't the end of the world if Red
Hat has decided to continue supporting desktop development (via RHEL for the business desktop
and Fedora for the geek desktop) but has decided it doesn't want to throw away money in the
consumer desktop market.

People keep pointing to Ubuntu as the current/next big thing... but in my mind, Red Hat has
been there and done that already... like 7 years ago... and having tens of millions of
non-paying desktop users was more of a drag on their business model... and is currently a drag
on Ubuntu's business model. Until Ubuntu... err... sorry... make that Canonical... until
Canonical can actually make a profit and do so over several quarters... newsflash, Desktop
Linux has not arrived via Ubuntu.

until until Canonical can actually make a profit

Posted Apr 17, 2008 18:37 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (guest, #24648) [Link] (2 responses)

...until Canonical can actually make a profit...

I don't suppose that, with enough money to buy a $20 million joyride to the International Space Station, Mark Shuttleworth and his company are in imminent danger of running out of money anytime soon¹. Not that I don't admire what he's doing for Linux--I do appreciate his Linux advocacy efforts with Canonical and Ubuntu.

¹ (Slightly off-topic) I'm reminded of a quote from Orson Welles' movie Citizen Kane:

I did lose a million dollars last year. I expect to lose a million dollars this year. I expect to lose a million dollars next year. You know, Mr. Thatcher, at the rate of a million dollars a year, I'll have to close this place in... 60 years!

until until Canonical can actually make a profit

Posted Apr 17, 2008 18:55 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] (1 responses)

Exactly... Red Hat too could piss away money... but you see, the are trying to make money, not
lose it.  My point was that Red Hat's point was valid... that no one has really made any money
selling Desktop Linux because the market isn't ready yet... and that until someone does (the
example I gave was the seeming contenter Ubuntu/Canonical) it looks like Desktop Linux as a
commercial product... isn't doable.

Desktop Linux as a free product, now that has been doable for a long, long time now.

until until Canonical can actually make a profit

Posted Apr 17, 2008 21:20 UTC (Thu) by wtogami (subscriber, #32325) [Link]

> the are trying to make money, not lose it.  My point was that 
> Red Hat's point was valid... that no one has really made any
> money selling Desktop Linux because the market isn't ready yet

I think this is a misrepresentation or misunderstanding of what Red Hat's blog post said.  It
was business sustainability reasons for Red Hat to choose not to create a "traditional desktop
product for the consumer market".  The blog post said nothing about linux desktop being "not
ready yet".

Red Hat: no desktop products coming

Posted Apr 18, 2008 4:08 UTC (Fri) by jd (guest, #26381) [Link]

I agree with your points, especially with respect to games and codecs. Possibly more with
games. The console wars are vicious with all sides trying to shave off whatever costs they can
to maximize both sales and profits. If top-end game engines would run better under Linux,
proprietary possibly custom-modded embedded OS' would be less attractive. They cost money to
maintain, money I'm sure the vendors would prefer to be profit.

That ideally requires Linux to provide even better real-time guarantees, better low-latency
performance at the same time, to have an alternative GUI that has the necessary performance
requirements whilst being highly compact, to have truly hot parallel performance on something
like the Cell processor, to support any weird hardware used on consoles (such as cartridges),
and to have some easy way of porting existing code which, because it won't be inteded to be
portable, will be ugly.

If a distro provider could satisfy even 3 or 4 of those 5 and approached a console vendor with
a sackfull of cash and a viable strategy, Linux would gain more games in a week than it has in
the past 16 years.

Red Hat: no desktop products coming

Posted Apr 19, 2008 4:18 UTC (Sat) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link]

"" OR as an alternative porting of commercial applications from those other OSes including
such things that add access to online services that are currently Windows/Mac only... like
iTunes for iTMS (the number one retailer of music)... ""

Porting ? why ?... with virtualization, it could be possible to join KVM, with qemu or
virtualbox running a tailored version of ReactOS, all from the official Linux kernel tree...
and so Linux could have native support for a lot of windows applications... and believe me it
can support much more applications than most people would think possible...

Better it could mean a whole new grand opportunity for "commercial" companys like codeweavers
with its crossover techs and others that could pop up, making also a profit opportunity for
the distros that would bundle them.

I believe that with time most if not all of the most relevant applications  can be supported
natively. Why it hasn't been done yet ?...  i don't now!... politics!?... but in 4 posts in
this thread among all the griefs, i seem the only guy that could have done already some money
out of Linux desktop !?... what is wrong with me!??...