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Operating Systems

Red Hat Drops Consumer Desktop Linux

Red Hat Drops Consumer Desktop Linux
April 17, 2008 1:34PM

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Red Hat will no longer offer a Linux desktop for consumers as the market shifts toward service models. Red Hat will focus on its core strength in enterprises, and it will deliver Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop for its commercial customers. Building a business around the consumer Linux desktop is tough in a changing market, Red Hat said.


Red Hat is dropping its consumer Linux Relevant Products/Services desktop Relevant Products/Services. That makes sense, analysts said, because the desktop is not Red Hat's core strength. Red Hat develops Linux-based software and solutions for enterprises.

As a public, for-profit company, Red Hat must create products and technologies with an eye on the bottom line, and with consumer desktops this is much harder than with servers, the company said on its blog this week.

Still a Commercial Version

"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. Of course, a growing number of technically savvy users and companies have discovered that today's Linux desktop is indeed a practical alternative," Red Hat said.

Nevertheless, building a sustainable business around the consumer Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with efforts that either failed outright, stalled or are run as charities, the company said. It added that technical developments are accelerating the spread of the Linux desktop.

Red Hat will, however, deliver a commercial Linux desktop. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop, which is fully supported and 100 percent compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux server Relevant Products/Services products, is in the works. The company is also working on Red Hat Global Desktop, designed exclusively for small, reseller-supplied deployments in emerging markets.

"Looking to the future, Red Hat customers and partners appreciate that the world is moving to thin/virtualized Relevant Products/Services/appliance-based clients, so we are working with them to deliver open-source technologies that make these systems possible," the company said. "In fact Red Hat's Appliance Operating System project, announced late last year, is expected to enter beta in mid-2008."

Desktop as a Service

In a sense, technology and economics have moved the marketplace, according to Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. The need for and lower PC costs is being satisfied by service Relevant Products/Services innovations. For example, in May Citrix is expected to roll out its XenDesktop. MokaFive is also in the desktop-as-a-service market, as well as Desktone.

"There's an opportunity for both consumers and businesses to cut their total costs for PCs by going more toward an essentially managed approach and delivering the desktop and applications as a service," Gardner said. "Frankly, there's not much difference between some of these subscription-based services in terms of the savings you might get from switching from Windows Relevant Products/Services to Linux."

In other words, the economics are not compelling enough to drop Windows in favor of Linux when you can essentially drop the cost of Windows maintenance on the client. Microsoft Relevant Products/Services goes along with the concept because it still gets the client access license, Gardner said.

"Suddenly you are able to give the IT Relevant Products/Services department control, security, central management, lower total cost for the entire life cycle of the PC. The user doesn't see any difference whatsoever," Gardner said. "You can use any hardware Relevant Products/Services you want, including a thin client. Red Hat may have looked at this and decided it wasn't strategic to compete with desktop as a service. That was probably the correct decision."

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