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 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/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 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 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 goes along with the concept because it still gets the client access license, Gardner said.

"Suddenly you are able to give the IT 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 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."