tecosystems

Linux on the Desktop: The Time Is…Soon

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Just shy of three years ago, on November 10th, 2003, Sam Docknevich of IBM’s Global Services delivered a presentation with the bold, even shocking title “The Time is Now for Linux on the Desktop.” Browsing the deck before it was pulled from public availability, I remember thinking that the content was actually fairly straightforward; very unemotional, and conservative in its projects and assumptions. As is perhaps unsurprising, however, the content was not what got written about – the title was.

The message was not new – far from it. Linux advocates had been making that same argument for years, to audiences with varying degrees of interest. What got everyone’s attention were the three simple letters that were emblazoned on his business card. For months rumors had been circulating that IBM was migrating some, all or none of its employees to Linux, and rewriting tens or thousands of huge or small internal Windows based applicatons to make this possible. Internal memos “leaked,” PR swung into action, and eventually the whole thing died down to the point that many if not most of you probably didn’t remember it.

Here we are three years later, and what’s changed? Very little. There’s still a lot of Windows, there are a few more Macs, and while there are some huge Linux desktop implementations across the globe, it’s still a distant third marketshare-wise. The first two points are unsurprising to me, but had you told me three years ago what the adoption would look like today, I would have been at least mildly surprised.

I’d written a paper, you see, following Docknevich’s presentation that made the case that the time for Linux was now – and was in fact now or never given the pending arrival of Longhorn. This, my friends, is why I try to stay away from predictions. The paper, which you can download here [1], said many things, but here’s the important bit from the conclusion:

Irrespective of the validity of predictions of breakout success for Linux on the desktop in 2004, it is impossible not to mark the coming year as a critical juncture for alternative desktops in general. Calling 2004 a make-or-break year would be an overstatement, but not by much. Conditions can hardly be expected to improve; from economic factors to available Linux skills to attitudes towards “good enough” solutions, the opportunity for alternative desktops is very ripe. In fact, Linux desktops in our view have a somewhat limited window to establish themselves as a mainstream enterprise desktop offering. Windows has arguably advanced relatively little since the release of Windows 95, with the primary changes being in reliability and ease of use, and as a result “good enough” Linux clients can fare decently in comparisons. But the pending release of Longhorn has the potential to impact the desktop market substantially, as it represents a nearly total overhaul of the operating system.

As you’ll probably note, there two major predictions I made that the official scorer has put in the books as errors:

  • First, that Linux would see significant interest from major enterprises and limited adoption for certain low-need user constituencies
  • Second, that Longhorn would be delivered in the medium term and reset expectations for operating system features and performance as a result

The latter prediction was off because I failed to heed my instincts that said that it was a Big Dig type endeavor; similarly ambitious, and similarly undeliverable. I simply didn’t believe that an organization of Microsoft’s size could not deliver an operating system in the timeframe promised – whether it was for business or technical reasons. That’s easy to dismiss, because I’m hardly the only one in the industry who expected the folks from Redmond to chuck something out the door before 2006.

But the lack of Linux adoption was not something I would or could have predicted, simply because from a business sense the case is sound. Linux was at the time more secure, cheaper, good enough, and fairly interoperable in Windows environments. There are many reasons that Linux on the desktop has achieved only slow and incremental growth – lack of commitment from major vendors with size and reach, continued inattention from hardware manufacturers, and the sheer inertia of Windows within the enterprise. Ultimately, however, I think the lack of adoption can be summed up by one simple phrase: “it didn’t just work.”

Walk around OSCON, as Paul Cooper did, and you’ll see a ton of Macs. Why? Because they just work. Yes they’re pretty, yes they have all the latest eye candy, but the reason cited over and over by the Mac folks I speak with is that they Just. Work. Contrast that with the experience that Ian – a founder of the Debian project – recently had on his Thinkpad x31 and Linux doesn’t fare all that well. Alex, a Mac user, thought I was nuts for jumping through the hoops I did to get Linux up and running on my x60 (though it’s running like a champ at the moment). As Ian puts it in a comment,

For the most part, everything just works. Unfortunately, it’s the “for the most part” that’s the problem here, and it’s the few remaining little things that don’t always work—wireless, power management, 3D, etc.—that make for a supremely frustrating experience.

The list of things Ubuntu did not support on my x60 out of the box included suspend/hibernate (see here), wireless (thank you madwifi.org) and the microphone (sudo killall esd).

This “just works” factor is all the more critical given a trend I’ve come to understand in much more depth over the last several years, which is that while I had expected adoption of desktop Linux to be driven by large enterprise rollouts, I’m no longer sure that’s realistic. To a degree I wouldn’t have believed at the time, technological innovation is being driven by consumer rather than enterprise facing applications. Cell phones, instant messaging, web applications, and VOIP are all examples of technologies that took off amongst individual users well before they did businesses. I can do things with Google Calendar, which I get for free, that I couldn’t do with Microsoft Exchange, which I paid for. Windows and Office are in fact proof of this; businesses enjoy these operating systems because they transcend the office boundary. People use them at home and at work, meaning the role of the consumer – or individual user, if you prefer – is an important one, even in operating system adoption.

So that’s the bad news. What’s the good news? The desktop is getting very, very close to “Just. Works.” The software is light years ahead of where it was two years ago when I first transitioned over to desktop Linux, and even the hardware manufacturers are paying attention; Intel had a team of people down at DebConf, and we’re having ongoing conversations with hardware manufacturers about their Linux opportunities. I am, it would seem, more optimistic than Ian is on this topic; possibly because my hardware’s newer and better supported.

Consider for just a moment what worked when I did launch Ubuntu for the first time: wired network, browsing, office productivity, the volume controls on the Thinkpad, Windows networking, multiple IM networks, bluetooth, sound, video, USB camera/stick/external drives automounting, and so on. More impressive, there are aspects to Ubuntu that are superior to Windows. My iPod, for example, will no longer mount as an iPod in Windows 2000 or Windows XP – it simply appears as a drive. I’ve gone through Apple’s suggested help, and nothing. Linux? Mounts it just fine, and will write to it. While running Windows on my x40, I couldn’t initially figure out why it ran so much slower than Linux did – and then I remembered that I had a sizable chunk of my resources chewed up by Symantec’s anti-virus application, which was unnecessary in Linux.

The point here is not that Linux is perfect; it is not, and won’t be any time soon. But it is improving, and improving at an accelerated rate. The pace of innovation has been ratcheted up several notches, and I’m interested to see whether or not more high profile Doctorow/Pilgrim style switches have any impact on that.

The real question in my mind is not whether or not Linux can Just. Work. I believe that it can and will. What I’m more curious to see is what direction the desktops take in delivering a next generation desktop experience. Will they try to out-Windows Windows, or take an entirely different tack? I’m hoping, obviously, for the latter. More to the point, I think desktop Linux has an advantage in satisfying next generation users that it’s community has not fully perceived yet.

If one accepts that a great deal of application development and delivery will shift to the network – and there is ample evidence to support this from Google to Salesforce – it’s logical to assume that the operating system that best leverages these network applications will be well positioned for success over the longer term.

The best returns for a desktop provider, then, may be for someone who concedes that the desktop is no longer the end all and be all – the network is what’s important now. When I’m somewhere without network connectivity, I barely even think of my machine unless I’m writing. I think that the ultimate opportunity for Linux on the desktop is to forget about the desktop as it exists today. Microsoft can’t because that’s how it makes money, Apple can’t because that’s how they sell hardware. But Linux? Linux has no such shackles, no such Innovator’s Dilemma to cope with. Either way, it’ll be interesting to see how all of this plays out.

[1] Just ignore the CONFIDENTIAL STAMP across the top – I don’t have acccess to Word at the moment so I can’t regenerate the document without it.

6 comments

  1. >For the most part, everything just works.

    Except for our 800 line of business applications that would have to be rewritten. Many of them are written in Visual Basic, Access or other Windows-based languages. There is no way our company could afford to rewrite all these applications from scratch.

  2. This is one of the two reasons I still use XP on my T42. Having minor things that need tweaking is one thing – but not having wireless on a laptop? Mobility is the reason I bought this thing – there’s no way I want to be shackled to a wired connection.

    The frustrating things is that is the only major thing that didn’t work – sleep worked fine once I set the preference correctly. Oh, and I needed to do a few tweaks to really get font rendering where it should be.

    But the other, main reason I don’t switch? I have no compelling reason to. What will a Linux desktop give me that XP does not? Firefox? Thunderbird? Open Office? Nope, got those. AVG is lightweight enough that I don’t see a significant hit to performance. OK, I don’t get to play with shell scripting… but I don’t care. And I’m not political about my desktop… In fact, I lose a few things… Quickbooks, printing to my Canon printer (no Linux drivers… Bad Canon, bad!).

    To get pas the audience that like to geek and/or that cares about the political philosophy of operating systems, Linux needs to give those of us willing to try it out some reason to switch. Even if it just worked, switching still takes an act of will – we have to decide it’s worth it. As much as I’d like to, I can’t come up with that reason at the present time.

  3. mgm- worth taking a look at mainsoft and or emulators? thought the point is well made.

  4. What I told LWE, Stephen, is that the year of the Linux desktop is whenever year your organization is able to move their data across. This requires both mature apps on the Linux side (present for some organizations/individuals for years now, but not yet for others), and on the Windows (or OS/X) side, data that allows you to migrate. I used that platform, then, to push for open data standards *now*- so that whenever the software side is ready (might be now, might be a decade, depending on your needs) you can move. I really think that’s the key to most migrations, and the biggest reason why many places haven’t moved even their lowest-level desktops away from Windows yet.

  5. where i work, the entire estate of 1000+ applications is windows based. don’t even suggest that we develop emulation or persuade vendors to port. Just. Won’t. Happen. we have enough resources tied up staying where we are.

    i read that lenovo are bundling SLES 10. it works, out of the box. that’s what we get with wintel. it will help adoption, but unless your apps are available, linux is a no-go.

    if the industry moves to .net, and Mono keeps up with M$, then that may help adoption in the application space. But don’t bet on that any time soon.

    this is just an example, but it’s bound to be common experience with the penetration of windows.

  6. mgm: i don’t think anybody talking Linux on the desktop would argue that case. there are and will continue to be scenarios in which Linux is simple unable to play; even IBM has a number of Windows only applications internally that they have to refit.

    but while i would never tell an organization to rewrite or phase out technologies that are doing what they intended to do, i would inquire as to whether having a single platform strategy is likely to be beneficial over the long term, and if not whether future investments should be more agnostic in their design.

    rick: good points all around, and if XP works for you i’d be the first to say: great, keep using it. but i would say that there are compelling reasons to use Linux in some situations. i, for example, use it because it’s possible to tweak the desktop in precisely the manner i want. for some of my friends, however, the compelling use case would be security – they’re innundated by trojans and spyware that Linux is at least currently immune to.

    the point is that everyone’s got different needs and wants. for some it might be security, for others it might be eye candy, for others it might be application availability, and still others all of the above.

    my contention is not that Linux is or can be anytime soon all things to all people. what it can be, however, is a decent choice for an increasing number of users – and that’s definitely new.

    Dan: given that it’s VB rather than .NET, i’m not sure emulation – mainsoft or otherwise – is a terrific option. good thought, thought.

    Luis: agreed. data portability is one of the impediments to me switching friends and family away from Windows. they’d be fine with it in most respects, and i’m sure as hell sick of patching and cleaning their machines, but it would take forever to get the data they need over.

    rmc: it certainly is, and in a case like yours as with mgm above i’d concur that migration makes little sense. as above, however, i’d question that level of dependence more carefully if i was in your spot, however. it’s not that you should switch from Windows – if it works well for you, then continue using it. but to not have the ability to seems to be slightly problematic from where i sit.

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