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Why the Linux desktop dream is over

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Linux

Will Linux ever be a major player on the desktop? Andy McCue hears from IT chiefs - who, for the most part, answered with a resounding 'no'.

When Microsoft released Windows XP in 2001, the controversy around Redmond's abolition of its traditional volume discount licensing and the cost of upgrading caused a flurry of businesses to explore the possibility of switching to Linux on the desktop.

But despite the many threats to ditch Windows, to date the German city of Munich remains one of the few high-profile organisations that has made the leap. It aims to migrate 80 per cent of the local government body's PCs to Linux by the middle of 2009.

Other threatened migrations came to nought. Famously the London Borough of Newham was involved in open source desktop trials before declaring that switching to Linux posed "unacceptable levels of risk" and then signing a new deal with Microsoft.

It seems that for many organisations the business case for switching to Linux on the desktop simply doesn't stand up.

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Why Linux will never go mainstream on the desktop

I really didn't expect the post I wrote last week about Linux (The world just isn't ready for Linux) to generate the interest that it did.

The first thing that struck me were the poll results. Fully 28% of you claim to be running Linux on all your systems while another 50% are planning to increase the number of Linux systems you run. Those are incredible numbers but I think that they have more to do with the type of audience that the post drew, rather than being representative of the kind of growth in users that Linux is going to experience over the next 12 months (although I expect that someone will use the data to say just that). Currently the desktop Linux user base stands at about 1% (the figure varies wildly depending on what source you look at), so if 28% of you are already running Linux then that means that the readership here is made up of a large number of users that fall into that 1% user base.

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You talk the talk, but do you waddle the waddle?

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