A new Vista on Linux

More than five years ago the launch of Microsoft Windows XP -- and its considerably improved features and reliability compared with Windows 98 and 2000 -- made a comprehensive desktop rollout a no-brainer for companies. The other options -- still-nascent Linux, IBM's all-but-dead OS/2, or unstable DOS-based versions of Windows -- were all far from desirable.

Now, as the world gears up for the launch of Windows Vista, the conclusion may not be so cut and dry. Certainly, Vista is set to be feature-packed and reliable, and many companies will move to the new platform as a matter of course. However, Linux has come a long way in five years, with the concerted effort of hobbyists around the world supplemented by the resources of tech heavyweights to push its desktop features to near-parity with Windows XP.

Because of these improvements many companies may take the impending upgrade as an opportunity to reconsider the role of Linux in their overall desktop strategy. It is less expensive, of course, and seamless integration with Windows servers and improved management tools has made it much easier to integrate into existing environments. Furthermore, Linux's lower resource requirements may allow it to run on existing desktops that will need replacement for any upgrade to Windows Vista.

If companies find that Linux and related open-source software offer a better overall value proposition than Windows Vista, 2006 could well be the tipping point for desktop Linux. That would be a major coup for desktop Linux -- long the poor cousin to server-based Linux, which has exploded into the corporate consciousness over the past five years to the point where it is actually remarkable not to be using it.

Despite its popularity on the back end most companies remain reluctant to consider the potential role for Linux on their desktops. IDC has forecast that Linux will grow from three-percent desktop market share (17 million PCs worldwide) in 2003 to seven percent (42.6 million) in 2008, yet that still represents just a small portion of all PC sales, most comparable to the decidedly niche penetration of Apple's Mac OS X.

Government agencies are leading the charge in Linux deployments in Australia. The NSW Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) for one, expects to trim desktop management costs by 20 percent after rolling out 3000 Linux desktops.

NSW Office of State Revenue CIO Mike Kennedy recently announced plans to start scoping for a 600-strong Linux desktop rollout after expressing dissatisfaction with Microsoft's planned Vista licensing arrangements. And tender documents from the NT Department of Corporate Information Systems indicates it is seriously considering Linux "to substantially lower the overall cost to government" of its 8000 desktops during a refresh in June.

Why do so many companies have an ongoing aversion to desktop Linux? There is no single answer but anecdotal discussions repeatedly suggest that perceived issues of risk may be Linux's major problem: many companies see it as complex and difficult to use, fear they don't have the right support skills in-house, or don't trust the perceived lack of accountability that comes from having more than 200 different Linux distributions to choose from.

Such perceptions are short-sighted: companies such as Red Hat and Novell, which bought Red Hat competitor SuSE in 2003, are backing the charge on to the desktop with enterprise-level support reinforced by partners such as IBM and HP that are already well respected by all kinds of businesses.

Having or delivering the right skills and maintaining strong internal advocacy is of course important in any Linux deployment. With a growing range of skilled local integrators providing on-the-ground support it is now easier than ever to find people who speak Linux fluently enough to get it up and running who can also teach your technical staff to keep it that way.

Microsoft's five-year gap in updating XP has given Linux developers a huge window of opportunity to catch up, and they have made the most of it.

"In actually looking at Linux on the desktop, we've found that it's much less of the actual desktop than it is a discussion about the applications our customers are using," says Ivan Kladnig, Linux business development manager within the Software Group of IBM Australia-New Zealand, which is looking to establish a Linux Desktop Centre of Competency in Sydney to encourage customers to give the platform a go. "The office productivity tool set, e-mail, collaboration, and other parts of the software stack are really what are important."

No matter what your requirements on the desktop, the benchmark for Linux acceptance is going to be how well users make the transition to OpenOffice, which in its recently released 2.0 version is the safest alternative to Office. Talk with a company that has actually implemented OpenOffice -- whose acceptance will be essential to most desktop Linux deployments -- and anecdotal evidence is likely to suggest that most users, with the right training, quickly come to grips with OpenOffice and find it quite acceptable.

"Most of our users are happy to run OpenOffice, which runs natively on Solaris and could just as easily run on Linux," says Andrew Buckeridge, IT director with Perth-based building materials, construction, contracting, and transport company BGC, which abandoned Windows desktops more than four years ago. The company now runs Sun Microsystems Sun Ray thin clients that are based on Sun's Solaris operating system and it runs OpenOffice as the key productivity suite.

OpenOffice may be the most popular open-source productivity application but it's not the only one relevant to corporate needs. Capable open-source standards like the GIMP image editor and Evolution e-mail client, paired with a growing range of point solutions from independent and commercial developers, offer enough functionality to let most companies replace 80 percent of Windows desktops without users even knowing the difference.

A technological safety net
It's important for companies to realise that installing Linux a desktop does not mean a company must go cold turkey on Windows. Even if half of a company's desktops were changed to Linux, lower ongoing management costs could well support an adequate business case to justify making the switch; over time, advanced users' needs, such as process-specific macros and niche Windows-only applications, can be addressed individually.

However, such applications are becoming fewer and fewer with the exception of Microsoft Office; most commonly-used enterprise applications now have a Web interface that renders perfectly well on a Linux desktop. Furthermore, it's worth remembering that even those applications that simply must run under Windows can still be offered to Linux users using time-tested thin-client technology that runs the applications on a Windows server for access from remote desktops.

This approach has proved quite successful for BGC, which despite its open-source conversion realised that many users would still require advanced functionality. Six dedicated servers deliver Microsoft Office and several other applications to users using the X terminal capabilities built into Solaris. Windows applications run in a window alongside the Solaris-hosted tools, giving users the advantages of a stable desktop that also provides access to the applications they need.

"The biggest benefit of this platform is the ability to deploy a much more robust operating environment to users, which translates to a better service level for users without an increase in IT staff," says Buckeridge. "There is some reduction in administration, and we have been able to contain our costs and support many more users [than with Windows]. If we were to do it with Linux, it would be much easier to do today."

The process was not without its troubles: although Microsoft applications are generally written to work well using thin-client software, not all third-party applications are so forgiving. Buckeridge says a few of the company's third-party Windows applications didn't take well to thin-client delivery, with one of the company's Windows 2000 servers "dying".

A coming upgrade to a pair of 64-bit Windows Server 2003 systems is expected to improve the situation but BGC's experience highlights the importance of testing: "It's important that if you're moving to a terminal server environment, you drastically limit which applications are in that environment," Buckeridge warns.

Virtualisation is another way of bridging the gap between Linux and Windows, with products such as VMWare and Xen allowing the installation of Windows under Linux; since those Windows instances are virtual and can be destroyed and recreated at any time, it's possible to carefully manage them to prevent bad behaviour. This approach was used by the NSW Judicial Commission, which recently built its 600,000-page JIRS document management system around Linux desktops and used VMWare to deliver Windows applications to the users.

Linux vendors recognise the potential use of thin-client technology to ease migration from Windows to Linux, and most major distributions include thin-client software. Novell's SuSE Linux Desktop even has two: an open-source client that connects to open-source VNC, Microsoft RDP and Citrix ICA thin-client servers, and Citrix Systems' own ICA client itself. For companies concerned about application availability under Linux, this broad support means setting up thin-client servers is a viable and practical option to maintain backwards compatibility.

Your future desktop?
For years, the story of Linux on the desktop has been all about catching up with Windows XP. Microsoft's five-year gap in updating XP has given Linux developers a huge window of opportunity and they have made the most of it.

However, the road to Linux desktops is littered with the carcasses of distributions from the likes of Mandrake, Debian, Corel, Lindows, and others that have niche followings but lack the enterprise credentials needed to hit the big time. Novell and Red Hat are clearly the only companies with the enterprise credentials to push Linux onto corporate desktops en masse -- yet even as Novell readies its Linux Desktop 10 for early-2006 release and Red Hat's Fedora distribution continues that company's desktop push, the release of Windows Vista could change the game all over again.

With a completely redesigned user interface, application structure and infrastructure, Vista could be a threat to Linux on two fronts. Firstly, since Windows XP has been the target for Linux developers for so long, Vista's new structure will send them back to the drawing boards to replicate the user experience it provides (although it must be noted that the user-interface aspect of this challenge may be easier since those developers have already taken some inspiration from Mac OS X, which Vista is copying heavily).

The second potential showstopper: with well-established versions of Linux and Mac OS X no doubt studied heavily by Microsoft during Vista's design, it is possible that that distribution could offer enough reliability and capabilities that enterprises are willing to shell out for it. Certainly, highly touted remote management features are expected to make Vista much easier to manage in enterprise environments -- an issue that is frequently cited as a shortcoming of Windows.

Linux supporters are wasting no time in working to take advantage of the coming desktop operating system inflection point. Reflecting their strength-in-numbers approach, Adobe Systems, IBM, Intel, HP, Novell, RealNetworks, and Red Hat, recently put their weight behind the Free Standards Group's Linux Standard Base project, which is seeking to keep Linux unified even as distribution developers continue working to differentiate it from Windows.

That's easier said than done, says Max McLaren, Red Hat's general manager for Australia-New Zealand, who concedes that the dizzying growth of server-side Linux has meant that desktop Linux "is not my priority. It's very difficult to make leaps and bounds by innovating on the desktop these days," he explains.

"All of that innovation happened a long time ago, and -- apart from features like voice integration and so on -- we're never going to see dramatic improvements in desktop productivity. We will slowly bite off people tired of paying the sorts of sums they pay to Microsoft for an environment where they use very few of the features, but there's inertia because people are using Windows and don't want to change."

There are some small wins: in December, for example, rental company Kennards Hire took a major step towards Linux with what could become a 400-desktop rollout of Fedora Linux, as well as a trial of Linux-based point-of-sale terminals at more than 80 outlets nationwide.

Ultimately, the decision to move to Linux desktops will be made only when early trials prove that the operating system is effective enough to service each company's current business needs. While many companies will no doubt decide that Windows Vista is still the right path for them, the coming imperative for companies to review their desktop strategy could well chisel out a few market share percentage points for Linux.

"The fact that there are alternatives means people now need to think about Linux and ask whether it's applicable to their organisation," says Paul Kangro, applied technology strategist with Novell. "If, from a due diligence standpoint, you can't say you've evaluated the options you haven't done the right thing by your company's shareholders. There are going to be some transitional stages that people go through, but at some point, Linux is going to meet all your requirements. I suspect that for most organisations, it's already there -- and has been for some time."