Linux Loses My Desktop

Okay, I give up.

As i’ve written before, I’ve run Linux (SUSE) on my personal desktop and home servers for several years prior to moving to the Mac. I still run Linux for my home server. The only Windows computer I have running at home is my kid’s computer. They have games that won’t run elsewhere.

I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my office desktop in a dual boot configuration. It handled my dual monitors, quad core CPU, 4Gb of RAM without a hitch. But what it couldn’t handle was working in my office. Now, I had no problem administering our dozen or so Linux servers, reading/writing Word, Excel, Powerpoint documents. I had no problems dealing with our various Java applications, or accessing data on our office network. But, two things have made a permanent conversion difficult, at best. Number one is Exchange/Outlook. I wrote about this earlier. Interacting with Exchange via Linux is painful if you use Exchange calendaring, contacts, or anything other than mail. There is no good way to interact with Exchange calendaring in Linux. Number two is somewhat surprising. As part of a server upgrade project we have adopted Citrix XenServer to handle server virtualization. This is based on the Linux-based Xen project. You would expect it to be very cross platform. You would be wrong. The management tools are Windows only. So, it uses a Windows only management console to manage Linux based hypervisors with Linux guest virtual machines.

Interestingly, both of these observations have been commented on in the last few days:

Where are the Enterprise Management Tools for Linux on the Desktop? by David Lane

What would you exchange Exchange for? by Doc Searls

So, I’m not alone.

I think as desktop virtualization matures, it will be easier to run the desktop of your choice. I use VMWare Fusion on my Mac to run Linux, Windows, and even Haiku. The downside for Linux is there will be less of an incentive to develop the replacements for Outlook and the enterprise management tools. There will also be fewer requests for those applications from corporate users. Why wait for the open source equivalent when I can run the Windows version in a virtual machine.

In the meantime, it’s back to XP. I’ve got work to do.