Head for the hills.

Redhat, the Linux software vendor, has announced that they will not be developing a consumer desktop distribution. Apparently, the long shadow of Microsoft has deterred them. The company issued a statement yesterday: “The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today’s Linux desktops simply don’t provide a practical alternative.”

So, in a scene out of…hold on. Did they say: ‘one dominant vendor’ and ’some people’? I’m amazed that ’some people’ can hold such a massive sway over a multi-billion dollar company! And what happened to that word ‘competition’?

Admittedly, the desktop market is a pretty hard nut to crack but that’s not to say it’s impossible. Redhat has decided to go after some ’softer’ markets with the Redhat Global Desktop (RHGD) including Russia, Brazil, China and India but the original push has been set back by about a year due to “business issues”.

So where does this leave the desktop market? Novell have a SuSe desktop OS but the company has stated it will take time to get it ready to go to the consumer market. But don’t forget Ubuntu. The Debian based OS has been climbing the popularity stacks for quite some time now. Couple Ubuntu’s attractive layout, ease of installation and easy navigation with the massive repository of open source and proprietary packages and you can start to understand the appeal of this OS. Maybe it’s time to look at an alternative to the big Linux vendors (and Microsoft)?

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