Time for The VAR Guy to stir up a little controversy, this time in the Linux desktop market. He thinks a small desktop setback at Red Hat could lead to more PC momentum for Ubuntu Linux. Here’s the scoop.
Red Hat yet again has delayed a major Linux desktop release. Sure, Red Hat intends to ship the PC software in January. But repeated delays have given Ubuntu Linux repeated opportunities to further accelerate its desktop momentum.
Admittedly, The VAR Guy is a bit biased when he writes about desktop Linux. He’s running Ubuntu Linux on one of his PCs … and loves it. Plus, The VAR Guy has frequently criticized Red Hat and Novell for their on again/off again/on again interest in desktop Linux.
While Red Hat and Novell battled on the server, Ubuntu Linux filed a small but important niche in the desktop Linux market. Though desktop Linux isn’t ready for all consumers, even our resident blogger managed to safely — and easily — install Ubuntu on his Dell PC.
Now, plenty of other folks are discovering the power and simplicity of Ubuntu. Thousands of Wal-Mart shoppers in recent weeks have purchased $200 Everex PCs running Ubuntu. And the number of PC companies pre-installing Ubuntu on their desktops and notebooks continues to grow. Plus, Dell has quietly sold about 40,000 PCs preloaded with Ubuntu since July.
Sure, Red Hat and Novell have enjoyed some desktop wins of their own lately. But the operating system game tends to be a winner-take-all contest, where the dominant player generates 90 percent market share, and everyone else battles for scraps.
The VAR Guy believes Ubuntu enjoys the early lead in the North American desktop Linux market. Now, if he only had some hard numbers to back up that claim.
Regardless, Red Hat’s desktop software delays could wind up accelerating Ubuntu’s momentum.
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why install difficult red hat without codecs,.when you can have easy ubuntu with everything
Centos follows the same difficult path,..
why make something so simple and secure to install and update,.. when you can create a botch up and expect the customer to continually scavenge and scrabble around looking for repo’s w32codecs etc
It is a battle between ideals and convenience imho. Ubuntu aims to be more convenient for the user, by making it easy to install propietary software, like drivers,codecs and applications like Flash, for instance.
Personally, I need these drivers and these codecs. Without nvidia drivers, I wouldn’t get 3D-accelleration on my laptop, and without propietary intel 3945 microcode, I wouldn’t get wifi access either. Also, a large part of my music collection is in mp3, and I am reluctant to convert it all to ogg/flac, especially since not all PMPs support these formats.
Nevertheless, it is important to remember that open source ideals shouldn’t be thrown by the wayside, as without these ideals, Linux might just as well by Windows or Mac, good OSes in their own right, but closed.
Quite frankly I am tired of tired of being beat over the head with the name “Ubuntu” and all of it’s derivatives. These distro fail 1 of the 4 FOSS freedoms. They will not let me use the software as I want.
Kubuntu 7.0.4 was installed on my computer and after 2 weeks of sudoing all over the place while trying to get my wifi working, I quit and replaceed Kubuntu with PCLinuxOS where in less than 2 mins. my wifi was running perfectly.
No thanks Ubuntus.
@BOB LEE, You should write something with sense.
Your incapability of making the wireless to work has nothing to do with “freedom of using the software” as you want.
In any case the opposite happened with my girlfriend’s laptop. PCLOS was being a nightmare in wifi, changed to Ubuntu and everything is running smoothly.
Don’t get me wrong, most any adoption of Linux in the marketplace is good news. However, I’m also tired of being “beat over the head” with *buntus.
Quite frankly, Ubuntu has never worked on my hardware (desktop and laptop) very well. I’ve always had problems when ever I gave it a try.
Mandriva, on the other hand, has been simply wonderful these last few years.
I also just purchased my new ASUS Eee PC (running a customized version of Xandros). So far so good. I like it very much and am a little relieved that ASUS decided to go without Ubuntu… even though I think they could have chosen better than Xandros.
But, with all that being said, maybe I’m holding the future of the Linux market-share in the palm of my hand. These mini laptops may be just the push the GNU/Linux OS needs to become “mainstream”.
1 - Red Hat and Ubuntu comparison is no good.
2 - I have a question - isnt the hardware support a matter of kernel ? Then why some machines works better with (A) and others with (B) ?
3 - Be tired or not ? 99% of pc users are not command experts and expect easy distro; therefore, ubuntu is a leader in effort to bring more people to unix.
HAWK
Canonical hopes to someday make money in support contracts. It is currently running web advertising like mad (at least I’ve seen a ton of their ads lately) for their server product.
Red Hat has proven it can be successful and they’ve done it without abandoning their open source / free software ideals. Bravo to them. I’m not sure the same is true for Novell.
I think Canonical does a great job making a free desktop distribution… and I know it is greatly loved by a lot of people… BUT… it remains to be seen if they can turn that success (which has only been costing them money) into a working business plan.
I have to wonder who Canonical is really competing with with their server product. I’m guessing their biggest competition in that space isn’t Red Hat… but Debian… and I actually think Debian has a better product.
Perhaps Mr. Shuttleworth can continue to fund Canonical well into the future because if it fails to find a reasonable source of income to support itself, it doesn’t matter how many people are going to download their free desktop edition.
Red Hat abandoned the commercial desktop space quite a while ago and they did it in an effort to execute successfully. They pulled it off. While they may periodically make statements about wanting to seriously re-enter the desktop space, I really don’t think they are serious. They’ve had an enterprise desktop product for some time now but it isn’t trying to go after home users.
Anyone who thinks that Linux distro makers should focus on trying to become better than Microsoft Windows with hardware and multimedia support on mass media computers should just forget about it. Linux needs to find a way to be good enough… and focus on its strengths… which happen to be the command line, programming languages… and freedom. It is never going to out Windows Windows nor out Mac the Mac. That isn’t to say that Linux has to suck… but it needs to focus on its strengths rather than playing into the competitors strengths. The whole compis, beryl, compis-fusion thing, while it looks pretty… has been a big distraction with very little tangible benefit. Hey, I love to play with it too… but I’d much rather do something productive when I can refrain from leaving long comments on tech sites.
@R3:
“I have a question - isnt the hardware support a matter of kernel ? Then why some machines works better with (A) and others with (B) ?”
There are usually several different factors. First (and probably most important), not all distros ship with the same kernel. Depending on the hardware, the latest stable kernels will usually work better and include more drivers than older kernels. Second, different distros ship with different tools to detect hardware. Some of those tools are better than others, again depending on the hardware. For example, I have never had a problem with Network Manager finding my wireless cards but others have better luck using wicd and other tools.
Distros have the un-enviable task of trying to find a balance of tools, applications, and kernel version that works the best for their target. Thankfully, if one distro doesn’t work right, there is probably another one that will. It does mean some distro-hunting (pretty fun stuff to me), but it’s out there.
Enjoy!
@Scott Dowdle, Well what you say is partly true. Red Hat has done well in the server market. But the future of operating systems does not lay with the server market or with the command line. It seems that you want linux on servers and Windows on desktops. Red Hat’s desktop offering was not for the everyday computer user and thats why it failed. They want to put out another desktop os and I believe they know what they are doing. You don’t think there is any money in the desktop market? There is if you know where to look? I do believe these companies know where to look.
What do u guys really think, that improving the Linux community is adding several hundred thousand of basic computer users that only knows(most clearly “Only cares”) MS-office or Adding 10 computer Users that even want to learn something bigger than Office Package.?
think about the Answer to this Q, and you will get the Idea about “Red hat” Vs “Ubuntu”.
*** GNU/Linux is not about how to criticize Windows best, its much thicker. Check your Attitude ****
@Eddie Wilson, I wasn’t saying that Linux doesn’t belong on the desktop. I’ve been using it since before Windows 95 came out. My point is that Linux distro makers need to, “Think Differenter”. I didn’t invent that phrase… saw it on the back of someone’s Linux laptop at a Linux trade show.
Linux needs a killer app and I think the command line is that… and can be that for a good deal of people. We just need better training materials… on how it can be useful for more people.
There was a product, that I can’t remember the name of at the moment, that was tool for a hybrid environment… that provides command line interaction with a number of desktop apps and functions. It seems pretty amazing but I don’t think it has quite caught on yet. Vague enough for you?
I have used 17 Linux distros since 2001 and have found that Ubuntu and Kubuntu are the best I have ever used. The installations went quickly and easily.. the software repositories are large enough that I don’t have to compile anything.. I’ve never had anything crash nor have I had any major problems. Kudos to the Ubuntu/Kubuntu developers, you folks are awesome!
Ian MacGregor
Mr Var Guy…you are so 80’s. You have no clue.
The CLEAR winner in ENTERPRISE desktops is none other than SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.
@R3: “Be tired or not ? 99% of pc users are not command experts and expect easy distro; therefore, ubuntu is a leader in effort to bring more people to unix.”
First of all, it’s Linux, not Unix. There is a huge difference and apparently you can’t see it.
Second, if people are not “command experts” they need to stay far away from Ubuntu or any other *buntu for that matter. Everything you need to setup requires some sort of ’sudo …’ command in a terminal or a file hacked. If they want a more-or-less command-less experience, they need PCLinuxOS, Suse, or Mandriva. Compared to those 3, Ubuntu is rather arcane when it comes to user setup and maintenance.
@Ian MacGregor: You can thank Debian, then, and not Ubuntu. Ubuntu is nothing more than Debian rehashed and presented in an easy to install format with a full working GUI. If you install Debian, which is a much more involved installation process, you’ll get the same thing minus the heavy handed system scripts. The Debian community is largely responsible for the size of the repository, though.
As far as the command line, the Mac community has embraced it, even though the original idea of the Mac was to do away with such nonsense. I think Windows users, once accustomed to command line computing, will also love it. It certainly has its advantages.
There are two Linux distribution methods for desktops. There is one for the personal computer market, that consists of individual users who buy their own hardware and who have been introduced to Linux by friends or magazines
The other is for the organization market, where machines are obtained and have pre-installed OS and software by the organization.
Of the two, the organization market is the most cost effective to distro support service sellers, as they can enjoy multiple desktop deployments across one organization, dealing with one point of contact and a periodic known payment.
Such an organization needs a worldwide support channel, employing on the ground technicians and engineers.
On the other hand, the personal desktop market offers a distro company a large user base and the free word of mouth advertising that comes with it. With many individual users, support can be centralised, free and offered over electronic media, negating the costs associated with on the ground staff. As the user base grows, support services can be offered by 3rd party businesses, much like the many MS oriented PC shops do today, without any cost penalty for the distro supplier.
Both of these exist in my area. Novell and RedHat have offices with support and sales staff. Many MS PC shops now support user installed Linux machines, and a few will install Linux on request.
As prices of Linux effective hardware falls and Vista effective hardware grows, some are even pre-installing Ubuntu.
Looking at the number of machines in both markets, gives some indication of the size of each, and the organization market is definitely an order of magnitude larger. This is where the big PC makers like DELL, HP, Lenovo et al, make their money often by leasing hardware, whereas the PC shops more than likely build, badge and sell their own clones.
At the moment, RedHat and Novell are firmly entrenched in the organization desktop market as they make their money from selling support on a business user oriented product.
Ubuntu is firmly entrenched in the personal user market as they are creating a user base market from an ease of use general purpose product.
RedHat and Novell users may use that product at work, but what they use at home is the market that Ubuntu is exploiting so that they will take it to work to do all those things that Novell and RedHat doesn’t.
By the time there is demand from organizations for paid support on a Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu can easily sell 3rd parties an approved support agency agreement instead of having to pay for their own on the ground staff.
Programmers are human beings too!
Ubuntu is not just for noobs I’m a hardcore C++ guy
It has the best forums and the best repos…. you can customise it any way you want.
i think redhat have to release it global desktop approach to win the bet of desktop PC…
Ubuntu is overrated. It’s not that it’s bad. It’s just that it isn’t any better than many other distros. As someone already pointed out, Ubuntu is just a repackaged Debian. It isn’t even as independent a distro as Redhat or Suse, both of whom no longer have their ancestors to rely upon.
But one bad aspect about Ubuntu is that it changes some aspects of Debian, and doesn’t document those changes very well. One example is this UpStart thing. Very poorly documented. You can easily find info on how to modify Debian’s startup process in just about any way, and that info is still pertinent to the latest version. Not so with Ubuntu.
The other bad thing is that there are way too many “Ubuntu fanbois” in (and moderating) the forums, so it’s almost impossible to find accurate info without wading through tons of useless advocacy, and unhelpful “noise”. And the moderators are next to useless. They never update the info on the forums. So as one example, if you do a search to find out how to modify Ubuntu’s startup process, you’ll find lots of outdated and unworkable “solutions” that mention editing an inittab file, which fail under the latest Ubuntu, due to the changes incurred by UpStart.
Ubuntu is heading in the wrong direction. Its developers don’t seem to read its forums. They don’t seem to be writing docs. The forums are inundated with fanbois, and run by such, and filled with outdated info and/or useless noise. Ubuntu has gotten “too big”, and would have already collasped under its own weight if it weren’t for the fact that it relies upon Debian for the bulk of its existence. If Ubuntu were a more independent distro, it probably would already be in significant decline.
@RSMITH
Sorry for mistaken unix to linux .. yet I dont buy your story 
Yeah
I have tried almost every distro that is out there. Yes, I know that there are hundreds of them, yet you have to believe me. Yes, I did try BSD, PCLinuxOS, Mandriva, or Suse but YET IM USING UBUNTU !
This Ubuntu HATred can go on and on forever and there is no point to argue on priorities. Id rather compare OS to food. Some preffer big chunk o meat on fire and are happy with it, the others enjoy classical cuisine, while some of us end up vegetarian.
PS: Debian has a great community. Dare to argue ! And it does matter a lot !
Hawk
@Scott Dowdle. First of all, stick that command line - killer app up your … you know what. Everyone who can possibly use the command line is already using it. Command line is just a text area in a humanly oriented user interface. Get it. It is just for one dimensional idiots-geniuses-sociopaths. The rest of us are using it because we are forced to (and got used to it) due to the inadequacies of the user interfaces available on Linux or any other platforms.
I’ve said this same thing long time ago. Just check it:
http://blog-of-gentoo.blogspot.com/2007/05/ubuntu-is-superos.html