I've been teaching a class in Personal Red Hat Linux 9 for an East Bay nonprofit organization for the last several months.

Part of the class has been devoted to showing how to use the desktop interface and a variety of GUI productivity tools (Mozilla, Open Office, Ximian Evolution, The GIMP, GhostView, etc.) as free alternatives to similar Windows applications. The students have absorbed this will little effort and appear to be more interested in the server options (Samba,MySQL, PHP), which I hope will continue to be supported in Fedora.

I will say this, I think RedHat shot themselves in the foot, several months ago, when they allowed their GUI package updater to break down. (Since September, in place of the automatic Up2Date, new users have been greeted with a screen explaining that SSL certificates are expired, and they must manually download and install new command-line versions of the package updater. This may be a trivial task for anyone who's mastered command-line basics and simple permissions, but I can guarantee you, it was a big deal to my students -- who were expecting a seamless installation and update process until they could get their sealegs and learn more about the OS.

I'm wondering what the impact of the RedHat announcement will be on the Mandrake and SUSE user communities. If I get to do this class, again, I'm considering switching over to one of those as the base platform.

I have no insight into what goes on in the minds of the people behind RedHat. But it's pretty clear to me that they are following the money, i.e. businesses who are willing to pay for "enterprise solutions". They may even be doing what is for them the right thing.

System integration is always going to be a pain in the butt, one that end users don't want to put up with. One of the reasons for Windows' wide acceptance is that PCs come out of the box with it installed. Apple pretty much closely controls the hardware configuration of its products, which makes system integration more reliable. Making the switch from Mac OS 9 to OS X is therefore an easier chore for an end user than upgrading (say) from Win98 to XP.

Until people can walk into CompUSA or its equivalent and buy a machine off the shelf with Linux (or some flavor of BSD) installed and optimized for its hardware configuration) there's going to be a significant barrier to overcome.

In fact, of course, they can do just that – because Mac OS X is "some flavor of BSD".

After living in the Microsoft desert for fifteen years, it's refreshing to work again on a computer that runs the way a computer is supposed to run.

You know, I've noticed that people who say "I hate to say 'I told you so'" are almost never telling the truth.

I was surprised by Red Hat's CEO's dismissal of desktop Linux, particularly when Linux really seems on the verge of breaking through, with outfits like Lindows and Ximian providing easy-to-use and slick packages. (Installation of the major distributions is already of no greater difficulty than installing Windows.)

I wonder if it's just a case of:

a) They made a business decision to "focus on their core competencies" (ulch) and push Enterprise Linux to the exclusion of desktop.

b) Having done so, they felt obliged to tear down the latter lest their decision look dumb.

I think it's as simple as "aftermarket". Enterprise solutions (you should pardon the expression) are tailor-made for hitting the customer up after the installation with service contracts and other value-added activities. The desktop market is much more of an install-and-forget environment. Joe User wants to pay only once, if at all, for the operating system on his PC.

The desktop aftermarket is weak, and so Red Hat doesn't care. They're being tactless (and stupid, IMHO) about how they are showing how they don't care.

PNH: And then there's "I don't like telling you people 'I told you so' ..."

"But he is, of course, dead wrong about UNIX never getting a foothold in the home or office market" - you're misquoting me, Alan: I said "significant headway", not "a foothold" and I stand behind that 100%... Apple's market share has never been particularly significant outside of education (because of the discounts!) and publishing, and their move to a BSD-variant does merely represent a _foothold_ for desktop Unix.

The main thrust of that segment of my 'blog was about Linux itself, too, rather than all Unixes in general - and one has to wonder, if Linux is as wonderful is is often claimed, exectly why it doesn't have a more significant penetration onto the home and corporate desktop? Given the developments of the last few years, surely even the most fervent of lawn dwarves couldn't claim that it was /all/ to do with Microsoft's unfair and monopolistic business practices?

Oh, and Patrick? Surely someone in /your/ profession has encountered the idea of irony before...? If not, well, ok, I'll admit it - after the fuss that has been made about Linux in recent years, and all the lies and exaggerations about its unparalled security, I am *extremely happy* when I hear that (as this week, for example) these absurd claims have once again been discredited by the discovery of a serious security weakness in the kernel... I wonder how the Debian techies felt about Linux security while they were rebuilding the compromised servers in November?

"You don't have to browse very far in Thomas's blog to determine that he thinks Windows r00lz and that Linux is teh suck" - in fact, you don't have to browse very far at all to find *exactly the opposite*... A mere two paragraphs below the section you quoted, I wrote:

"I'd be the first to admit that Linux (and any other Unix you care to name) has a place in the data centre, of course - it has always been an excellent high-performance high-stability platform for critical systems such as public-facing web servers, and until recently I probably wouldn't have considered implementing any other OS in such a high-profile application..."

Does that sound like "Linux is teh suck"? I think not.

Such selective quoting on your part is petty and unfair, IMO... Sheesh...