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The desktop Linux market got a big boost earlier this month at LinuxWorld, where Lenovo unveiled plans to soon begin selling ThinkPads preloaded with Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop. The deal makes Novell the second major vendor to support Linux on its consumer PCs, following the trail Dell blazed in May with its decision to offer machines loaded with Ubuntu Linux.
Soon after I joined Novell, I started blogging about our technology directions. My first entry back in April 2006 was entitled “The Linux Desktop has arrived: The better desktop”. I argued that with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 – due to ship that summer – that the time had come for more significant inroads for Linux into the desktop market.
Top-dog OS on the enterprise desktop? Linux and Apple had a golden chance to grab that title, and boy did they blow it! Despite having nothing better to offer enterprise customers than the ridiculous Vista or the ancient XP for the past two years, Microsoft still rules the enterprise desktop. And with Windows 7, that reign is set to continue.
Today enterprise users have two new choices in desktop distributions. Mandriva Corporate Desktop 4.0 is an all-new version of Mandriva's enterprise workstation, while White Box Enterprise Linux 4 Respin 2 incorporates the recent OpenOffice.org and OpenOffice.org 2 updates.
A shift from multi-core power-gobbling monsters toward whisper-quiet systems with single-digit power consumption is rippling through the desktop market. This trend plays right into the hands of a Paris-based company called Linutop, which offers a miniature Linux-based desktop system.
What do you get when you mix Novell's SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 11 with the Linux Foundation's Moblin 2.1 netbook desktop? A lightweight Linux desktop that's trying to snag the netbook desktop market before Google's Chrome OS runs away with it later this year.
Basically, Novell and Red Hat won’t be trying to get consumer desktop market share, focusing instead only on the ‘enterprise’ desktop market; Fedora and openSUSE thus appear to be relegated to ‘hobbyist OS’ level. Ubuntu is now THE distro of choice for home use, with no major competitors, but I think we’ve known that for some time:
Mandriva has released a beta version of their business based desktops in Mandriva Corporate Desktop (MCD) 4.0. Mandriva, on the heels of trying to gain popularity in the office environment has released a desktop that can rival its opponents like the Micorsoft sponsored Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) and RedHat's Fedora desktop.
In case there’s anyone left out there who doesn’t get that the UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC) is a big deal for the Linux desktop consider that arguably the most important business Linux desktop, Novell’s SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP2) is now available on MSI’s (Micro-Star International) new Wind Notebook.