Increasingly, businesses, government entities and schools are starting to look beyond Windows, which IDC says securely dominates the desktop market with a 94% market share. Instead they’re considering running Linux as their client operating environment. But the move is a slow one.
Increasingly, businesses, government entities and schools are starting to look beyond Windows, which IDC says securely dominates the desktop market with a 94% market share. Instead they’re considering running Linux as their client operating environment. But the move is a slow one.
While organizations see big cost savings in casting off proprietary licensing fees, many challenges remain, including the lack of application support and a reluctance within companies to move from an established operating system to one that is unfamiliar.
An SG Cowen survey of more than 500 North American companies last year found that of the 80% of respondents that were using Linux, only 15% were using it on the desktop.
“While that may sound healthy, it represents less than 5% of the PCs across the whole survey base, and less than 0.5% of the PCs among larger organizations,” the report says.
But interest is growing, as vendors such as Sun and Novell focus on their Linux desktop offerings. IBM also sees budding demand, and an internal memo leaked to the press in January indicated that Big Blue planned to move all employee desktops to the open source operating system by 2005. A spokeswoman downplays the company’s intent.
“We have no plans in place to migrate all our employees to Linux desktops. We have just begun the work to determine whether this might make sense,” she says.
But it’s important to note that IBM is looking at Linux as a client operating system. Users say there are some real benefits. Governments in particular are turning to Linux for cost savings, as well as for reliability and stability. And with Linux, customers are not tied to a predetermined package of desktop tools and can mix and match according to their needs. Linux runs a variety of open source programs, including Gnome, K Desktop Environment (KDE), StarOffice and OpenOffice productivity suites; Mozilla browser; and Evolution mail and calendar.
Four years ago, the city of Largo, Fla., decided to expanded its use of Linux, which was deployed on servers in the late 1990s, to reduce the costs associated with running a Unix client operating system.
“New applications and open source software were becoming available on Linux,” says Harold Schomaker, the city of Largo’s IT manager and CIO. “This makes it easier to replace servers once they have reached end of life [because Linux can run on multiple hardware platforms]. Also, the staff skill set migrated fairly easily.”
The city had tested Windows, but because many of its applications ran on Unix, the city had to use Citrix Unix Integration Services to emulate the applications on the Windows PCs. There were just too many headaches, Schomaker says.
With city employees connecting through thin client devices to a Linux desktop they now have access to all the applications they need, whether they are open source, Unix or Windows-based.
“Since we deliver every application regardless of platform to the desktop through the thin client, [Linux] makes it really easy,” Schomaker says. With Linux, no emulation code is necessary to connect into heterogeneous applications, he adds.
Schomaker says Linux provides better stability and lets him avoid the headache of installing frequent patches as he would with Microsoft. What’s more, with Linux running in a thin client environment, the city saves as much as $400,000 per year.
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Despite possible cost savings, some organizations turn away from Linux on the desktop because they consider it “too techie.” In an effort to get around that image, the open source community is working to make interfaces for Linux desktops more user-friendly. For example,the KDE project, recently released the latest version of its open source desktop environment with features to improve usability and performance. Some Linux desktop distributions – the SuSe Linux Desktop, for one – support Microsoft Office, which makes the transition to Linux less painful for end users.
IDC predicts that Linux in both server and client operating environments will continue to grow at a faster rate than any other operating environment. On the client side, paid shipments of Linux held a 1.7% share in 2000, but grew to 2.8% in 2002, a tenth of a percent behind Apple. IDC predicts that Linux will be in the No. 2 spot when the 2003 data is tabulated, says Dan Kusnetzky, vice president of system software at IDC.
The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a consortium focused on honing Linux for corporate use, recently formed a desktop Linux working group with the aim of creating a framework to help IT managers deploy Linux as a client operating system. The working group was created in response to the organization’s user advisory council, made up of Global 500 companies. Tim Witham, OSDL lab director, says the companies in the user advisory council all are doing some type of prototype deployment with Linux on the desktop. He declined to say who those companies were.
Freedesktop.org, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, OSDL, Red Hat and Sun all are involved in the OSDL effort.
“The ultimate goal is to make sure that for people who want to deploy [Linux on the desktop], there is in essence a cookbook: ‘We know this works and we can go forward with that,'” Witham says. “An overall goal of OSDL is to see that [independent software vendors] are in the position where they port once and run everywhere. . . . I don’t think we’re at that point yet.”
But things are moving in that direction.
“Except for those groups of users within a business who only need minimal stuff like mail, word processors and a browser, there continues to be reluctance because most of the applications they need are not available on Linux,” says Bill Claybrook, an analyst at Harvard Research Group. “But that will change. It’s changing fairly quickly.”
In Austin, Texas, the city government conducted a pilot project last year to test Linux. It currently has 5,200 Microsoft desktop licenses. But the city is facing a $39 million projected deficit this year and Linux desktops could mean significant cost savings, says Pete Collins, Austin’s CIO. But there also are challenges, he adds.
“When you’re looking at some other sophisticated applications such as police and fire report management systems or computer-aided dispatch for public safety – and that’s all Windows-based – then you start having some issues,” Collins says.
Collins says the city is reviewing the results of the pilot project and plans to make a decision by year-end.
Analysts say the biggest uptick in the use of Linux as a client operating system is for developers who are writing Linux applications. But it also is making inroads for kiosk deployments and for transaction-focused workers in call centers and retail locations.
