Windows or Linux

The new version of Microsoft Windows, named Windows Vista is coming out
later this year or early next year. Again, it is object of intense scrutiny
as Microsoft promised a lot of security and feature enhancement but had to
cut back on a lot of those to meet the shipping schedule. Going by the trend Microsoft has shown in each of the successive OS release, I am very sure that this version will be packed with features. Already a lot of interest has been generated in the display technologies security features.

Again if the trend is anything to go by, this version of OS will be costilier than any other operating system till date. And I am not talking about the retail or license fees. I am concerned about the hardware this OS will consume to run efficiently. It has been said that no matter how much processing power of speed the hardware manufacturers pack in their devices, software vendors almost always find a way to consume it all and cry for more. I have tested (at least tried to test), the longhorn beta 1 on a VMWare with more than enough memory to run even Windows Server 2003 (Incidentally, I have run Windows Server 2003 successfully on even lesser hardware), but it simply refuses to run. I managed to run the OS without the cool display technology and I was quite impressed. But after that I tried to install the display drivers, and since then the OS has simply refused to boot. It takes me almost 30 minutes to get to the logon screen, and I definitely don't have that kind of patience.

Alternatives?

I also worked on Linux (Fedora core 1 and core 4). I have worked both on VMWare as well as physical computers. I have even worked on Fedora on a P-III with 256 MB memory (and work on it currently using it as my development environment) and the performance is acceptable. The same hardware used to run Windows XP and it was a torture. That got me thinking, can Linux be a viable alternative to Windows? If so, what needs to be done to make it happen? Linux as an operating systems is ready for enterprise use. It can be locked down so that the users will get only what they need to do their jobs. They won't have to use the terminal. Applications can be packaged and bundled with the image. But where are the applications?

Dearth of applications

But enterprises don't run on operating systems alone. They need applications and a whole lot of them too. But mainly they need office productivity applications, word processor, spreadsheets, presentation and stuff. You know what I mean right. And there was none available till recently. Well to be fair, Sun has Staroffice, but it was too difficult to use to succeed. That was till OpenOffice was not available. Openoffice is an incarnation of Sun's Staroffice, but it much much improved. I have used it both on Windows and Linux and it has almost all the features that Microsoft office has (Well, spreadsheet softwares don't really match-up, but Excel was the best and is still the best if you use a lot of formulae, macros, analysis etc. For regular users doing just basic maths and some a little advanced calculations, Openoffice Calc should be good enough). Other applications that enterprises use are email clients and web browsers. Mozilla foundation's Firefox and Thunderbird both are excellent and should be used as much as possible.

There are a host of other applications that enterprises use, but most of them are not very critical and / or are home grown. Those can be ported. But those will keep on holding users back from migrating. Its a classic chicken and egg (or catch-22 situation, if you like) story. There are not enough users because there are not enough applications and there are not enough applications as there are not enough users.

Business Community should drive the growth

Community driven projects can do only so much. Businesses should drive the growth of opensource applications that run on Linux. Maybe by funding the projects or creating a project for developing the application that they need. I am sure that other businesses would contribute with resources if we can show at least one success story of running Linux on the desktop. Not just a pilot, but a full grown implementation of Linux on corporate desktops. Of course the migration is going to be costly. Costs in terms of the migration project, user training, administrator training etc. But that is going to be one time cost. Compare what are you up against if you have to stick with Windows. Higher hardware requirements, higher license fees and higher support costs. In the longer term, the one time cost will definitely work out cheaper and from the balance sheet point of view, I am sure it can be treated as a operational expense as against purchase of new hardware or licensing agreement which is definitely a CAPEX.