Gartner Weighs In on Linuxs Desktop Prospects

Microsoft does not appear in any imminent danger of losing much market share on the desktop productivity front to any Linux or open-source competitors.

In a presentation at this weeks Gartner Symposium/ITxpo here in San Francisco titled "Client OS and Office – Charting a Course to Longhorn (or Linux)," Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst, said that just because Linux is free does not mean it is cheap.

Among the impediments to using open-source office software products among businesses are compatibility and fidelity issues.

"You just cant move all of your users to StarOffice/OpenOffice.org. You will have to keep some Microsoft Office. You will have to look at big swaths/large departments and groups of people relatively isolated from others and who pretty much only send documents between themselves as potential users," Silver said.

Asked whether the Macintosh might be a better choice than Linux on the desktop at the moment, Silver said it could be, as there is Office for the Mac and it has a better, more intuitive user interface.

Resource Library:

Click here to read more about Microsofts Office suite for Mac.

But Silver said this is also a good time for business and enterprise customers to take a close look at Linux and StarOffice/OpenOffice.org on the desktop "as we now have a better idea of whats coming in Longhorn [the next version of Windows] and how compelling that will be."

To read more about Longhorn, click here.

"Longhorn will include a single worldwide binary that can be used to reduce the number of images companies have to deploy across the world," he said.

Longhorn would also see the concept of LUA (Least User Access), where users were no longer given administrative rights and applications did not break as a result of those lesser rights. Longhorn would also bring better search, better ways of categorizing and searching documents, Silver said.

Linux on the desktop for mainstream business users has also "passed the peak of hype" and real deployments are starting, so "well now see what some of the holes actually are," he said.

But Silver also cautioned the audience not to believe all they hear about Linux on the desktop, listing what he sees as the 10 myths around this. These are that:

Linux on the desktop is an all-or-nothing equation.

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