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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Uptimes are up.

UNIX pretty much sets the standards for Operating System reliability. I’ve been working on UNIX, Windows and Linux for a number of years now and will stand by this statement. Well, that is until I saw this: The 2007-2008 Global Server Operating System Reliability Survey. There are a number of very noteworthy points which I’ll cover with for you.

Linux moves into top gear.

The first point that came out of this survey was that mainstream Linux distributions have significantly caught up with UNIX when reliability was measured. At the same there, a 25% increase in downtime was noted in Windows Server 2003. Much of this time can be attributed to the sheer number of patches and security updates released resulting in a higher than normal number of reboots.

Falling through time.

Back in 2006, a similar survey suggested that Windows admins reported less downtime than their Linux counterparts. I won’t delve into that statement. Now, based on the 2007 - 2008 survey it would appear that Linux has made leaps of up to 75% greater reliability mainly thanks to some serious money being pumped into Linux development by the large vendors.

But we mustn’t leave UNIX out. The venerable OS is still the most reliable out there. The winner here is IBMs AIX which came in at an average 36 mitnutes downtime, over a twelve month period, being reported.

Another significant point that came out of the survey was the adoption rate of the Linux OS. The article shows that, as reliability figures rose, the adoption of the corresponding OS grew i.e. SuSe downtime decreased by 73% between surveys whilst market share grew from 13% - 17%. This increase could be the result of more revenue being available through higher market share or may simply be due to improvements in the SuSe OS.

Finally, the survey noted that use of Ubuntu is on the up. 22% of respondents stated that they used the Debian derivative in their business. The interesting point here is that Ubuntu is a relative newcomer to the server market but users reported only 1.1 hours of downtime per year.

Do you think Ubuntu will be the one to watch? Only time will tell.

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