Desktop Linux: The Final Frontier?

Jerry Carr is well aware of the persistent refrain surrounding Linux on the desktop. “The year of the Linux desktop has been here for a while,” acknowledges Carr, who is the marketing manager at Canonical Ltd., the company that sponsors the Ubuntu distribution of Linux. The London-based Canonical has been promoting its Linux distributions for both servers and desktops since its founding in 2004; Carr says desktop Linux is no longer the exclusive domain of computer hobbyists. “Cost right now is a primary driver for organizations deploying Linux on the desktop,” he says.

In addition to cheaper upfront costs than Windows, Linux desktops also have comparatively little malware and spyware, making the operating system particularly attractive to small companies with few IT resources, Carr says.

While desktop Linux barely records a blip when compared with the installed base of Windows, there is a discernible, albeit small, market shift under way. According to statistics gathered by Web analytics company W3Counter, Linux desktops claimed slightly more than 2 percent market share in March 2008. (By comparison, various versions of Windows had more than 90 percent market share.) While 2 percent isn’t a large swath in and of itself, consider that in May 2007, Linux desktops had only a 1.26 percent share. So there is a certain amount of momentum in terms of Linux desktop deployments.

WHERE THE SYNERGIES LIE
Scott Crenshaw, vice president of the platform business at Red Hat Inc., a provider of Linux and open source software based in Raleigh, N.C., has seen a marked upturn in interest for desktop Linux, particularly among customers that already run Linux on servers. “There’s much more interest and evaluations of Linux on the desktop than there was 18 months ago,” Crenshaw says, particularly in industries that are concerned about security, have limited IT budgets, and are looking to reduce their IT administrative costs.

The compatibility and familiarity issues that used to plague desktop Linux have receded, making the operating system a viable alternative for some organizations. “People were afraid that they wouldn’t be able to use a Linux desktop like their existing machines,” Carr says. “There was a time when Linux had a command-line interface, but now the interface is much more Windows-like and Web-like.”