John Cherry's Weblog

Hi freedom lovers everywhere.

The 2007 Desktop Linux Survey results are out and freedom still tops the list for those that are deploying Linux desktops.   You have to do a little digging in the results to uncover this salient fact, but when asked about deploying one or more of the pre-installed Linux desktop/client products, the results were that 56.6% of the recipients believed that pre-installed LInux offerings did not meet their business requirements.

Now that several pre-installed Linux products are available, would your organization be likely to deploy one or more of these pre-installed Linux desktop/client products?

• Yes, our organization has been waiting for pre-installed Linux offerings. - 42.4%
• No, pre-installed Linux offerings do not meet our business requirements. - 57.6%

These responses definitely came from an "enterprise deployment" perspective.   When IT decision makers and system administrators listed the issues with deploying pre-installed Linux offerings, they indicated that freedom trumps convenience.  When deploying corporate desktop systems, the administrators want the freedom in defining settings and configuration options.  The choice of Linux distribution is import as well.  IT organizations do not want to be locked into the Linux distribution vendor that is pre-installed on the hardware they have selected. 

On the flip side, 42.4% indicated that their organizations have been waiting for pre-installed Linux offerings and these offerings would meet their business requirements.   These desktop Linux deployments take advantage of the integration testing, system management, and support that comes from pre-installed offerings with Linux distribution support.  However, even with these desktop products the administrators will tweak configurations settings, define pre-loaded sets of applications, and set security and remote access policies (VPN) before deploying the clients.  Freedom is still a huge factor in deploying and maintaining pre-installed Linux clients.

This survey was not directed to consumer users of pre-installed Linux desktop systems.  When you move outside of the geek and developer circles, everything just has to work out of the box.  Pre-installed Linux systems are very important to the consumer circles.  They need to be able to power on the machine and be immediately able to play their mp3s, play their DVDs, browse the internet, use their office productivity tools, set up their printer, manage their photos, and download applications that are interesting to them.  Most Linux distributions that are targeting the consumer markets support this level of turnkey operation.  The latest one that I have tried with outstanding results is a Ubuntu-based distro called Linux Mint.

So who actually took this survey and were there any other interesting results?

The survey was sent out with a shotgun approach, but a profile of the recipients can be derived pretty closely from the responses.  The typical respondent...

• came from a small company (1-100 people) - 69.4%
• is an IT professional or software developer - 43.3%
• is involved with computer software companies or education/research - 35.9%
• is from the US or Europe (this is the English version) - 86.5%
• has already deployed Linux  - 64.1%

All the data from this survey is available and you may draw your own conclusions, but I have taken the liberty to draw a few conclusions myself.

• For the enterprise client, it is really a two horse race with Windows and Linux.  Of the companies represented, 57% were running greater than 50% Windows clients and 46.6% were running greater than 50% Linux clients.
• There is extremely high confidence in using Linux for mission-critical applications (76%).
• 66.1% of the companies responded that Linux was used for client desktops.  Many of these are configured as thin clients.
• While Adobe Photoshop came in as the top Windows application that should be ported to Linux (47.5%), the majority (61.8%) indicated that their "best" plan was to use equivalent Linux applications where possible.
• Eclipse wins (32.7%) as the top developer environment, although it was interesting to see that Microsoft Visual Studio pulled 9.9% indicating that many applications are developed on Windows and ported to Linux.  The strength of Eclipse is that it can be used on Windows or Linux.
• The top "potential issues" in migrating to Linux is for the support of new devices.  In order, missing device driver support was #1, followed by the quality of peripheral support, application support, and the ability to sync with mobile devices.

For enterprise Linux deployments, all the critical applications are available on Linux platforms with the exception of some internally developed applications and some applications specific to business needs.  The critical applications were no surprise and turned out to be:

1. Email - 62%
2. Browsers/plugins - 48.6%
3. Office productivity tools - 46.8%
4. Applications specific to your business - 40.6%
5. Database applications - 35.9%
6. Internally developed applications - 30.1%
7. Secure remote access - 30.0%

For the Linux kernel community and Linux desktop community, the recipients requested that the following items be top priority:

• Open source drivers for proprietary hardware - 62.7%
• Wireless - 47.2%
• Linux desktop standards (cross-distro) - 42.5%

The areas that have gone down significantly in the past two years in their "criticality" include printing (which used to always be at the top), audio/multimedia, fonts and document fidelity, and application packaging.   The Linux Desktop community has done some incredible work in these areas.

I won't use this entry to chronicle all the advancements in desktop distributions, pre-installed desktop offerings, application availability, application distribution capabilities, and mobile desktop advances this year.  I will talk about these in another posting.  However, the data from this survey clearly indicates that there is surging interest in desktop Linux.   This was demonstrated by the huge response to the survey.

The survey results are freely available to anyone that wants to use or analyze them.  Feel free to feed your closet urges to be an analyst of these survey results.  We are all interested in being enlightened by differing opinions and perspectives.

Long live freedom!

DAM-4 Summary Points
--------------------

- The Desktop architects meeting yielded a new set of priorities
  for the community.  The priorities continue to evolve and shift. 
  The new priorities set by the Desktop Architects for and with
  the community are as follows:

                Packaging
                Multimedia
                Developer Tools
                Power Management
                World Typography
                Printing

- The gstreamer and helix communities agreed to engage in the
   analysis of their respective multimedia frameworks to advance
   the development of Linux sound solutions.  Linux distribution
   representatives agreed to evaluate the low level audio interfaces
   and to recommend standard audio and multimedia stack
   implementations.  OSS announced that they have moved their code
   into the open source, providing more options in the audio stack.

  Breakout notes:
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Dam-4_breakout_multimedia

- The LF DAM-4 packaging workgroup included representatives from
  the distributions, ISVs, enterprise I/T, individual users and
  open source software application owners/maintainers.   The
  discussion started to identify the viewpoints of the stakeholders
  and what is required to improve Linux application packaging for
  all communities.  Particular focus on the user experience, how to
  manage trusted repositories, package standardization, integration
  and testing.   The communities will continue to refine these
  packaging requirements on the LSB packaging mailing list.

  Breakout notes:
http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Dam-4_breakout_packaging

- D-BUS was actively discussed by the desktop architects. The meeting
  included representatives from both the KDE and GNOME communities
  who agreed to issue the following joint statement on D-BUS "Both
  KDE and GNOME committed to D-BUS at DAM-4, and to a common set of
  interfaces for desktop services."

- The desktop architects agreed to extend standard internationalized
  text layouts mechanisms and font management.  Adopt HarfBuzz as an
  open standard to compliment FreeType and Font Config. (HarfBuzz is
  an OpenType Layout engine.)

- The discussion on developer tools surfaced Eclipse as an IDE
  solution for the gaps found in other existing developer tools now
  widely used by the community, like gdb.

- Recent improvements in power management have shown up to 20% better
  power utilization in typical Linux desktops and laptops.  Developers
  continue to use power monitoring tools to evaluate power usage and
  to develop multiple-state power decisions.  Good, auto-magic power
  management should be pushed into the kernel and into the driver
  level when possible, but power policy can be managed in user space. 
  The general power management case is pretty well covered.  However,
  more device/peripheral support is needed to take advantage of low
  power modes beyond just the power modes of the processor.  Power
  management developers are meeting next week (June 25-26) in Ottawa
  to continue vital power management discussions.


https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/linux-pm/2007-May/012759.html

- The printing team discussion : Distro independent printer driver
  DDK (driver development kit) The DDK will allow printer
  manufacturers to target multiple Linux distributions with their
  drivers, reducing the time and expense it takes for them to support
  Linux.  Linux users no longer need to worry about compatibility
  between their printer and distribution.

- A record number of desktop architects from the Linux distributions,
  hardware and software vendors that support Linux, and open desktop
  organizations attended and participated in the Desktop Architects
  Meeting, a regular meeting of the open desktop architects. 

It was great to see many of you at the Google facility in Mountain View.
It was difficult to catch all the topics, so please add your summaries
on this mailing lists.  I'll continue to add presentations to the DAM-4
site as they come in (there were a couple of late-breaking
presentations).

http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/DAM-4_Presentations

Power management discussion will continue next week at OLS.  I believe
the sessions on June 25-26 will be led by Len Brown.

https://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/linux-pm/2007-May/012759.html

Relating to world typography, Ed Trager is hosting a text layout summit
at aKademy in a couple of weeks as well.

http://akademy2007.kde.org/codingmarathon/textlayoutsummit.php

Thanks again to the Linux Foundation Desktop Linux workgroup for
sponsoring and coordinating DAM-4.  It was a good time for collaboration
for meeting the architects and developers in the desktop community.  I
notice many other collaboration meetings outside of the planned
breakouts.  When the right people get together, good things just happen.
There were some hacking sessions in mobile space and some genuine
interest from the kernel developers in desktop activities, including
power management.  Thanks to the LSB developers that joined our sessions
and participated in the breakouts.

Perhaps the most interesting points relating to the acceleration of the
use of Linux came from our mobile Linux representatives.  David "Lefty"
Schlesinger gave a talk on the top issues facing the deployment of Linux
on mobile devices.  He basically stated that there were no roadblocks!
Just watch the deployment of handheld mobile devices running Linux this
year.  The forecast for the next few years is great.  While things like
power management could always be better, there are no real showstoppers
for mobile deployments.