User-Friendly Linux Part IV By Ben DuPont

Storming The Last Bastion
Linux has long been a staple in niche markets and can be found in products from TVs to PDAs. Lately, it's gained ground on every facet of servers in the enterprise. The two nuts yet to crack: enterprise desktops and the home PC. In fact, it's a veritable David versus Goliath scenario: Microsoft Windows owns more than 95 percent of the desktop market, according to Gartner, while Linux holds less than 2 percent.
Why? A number of enterprise applications, both purchased and developed in-house, still run on Windows only. In addition, with Microsoft supporting Windows XP until 2013, there's little impetus to switch, given the cost of end-user training.
If your company is using .Net, you may find that the Mono platform in Novell SuSE, available for all Linux variants and Windows, provides the functionality needed to port your applications to Linux, possibly without modification. Also working in Linux's favor is the move toward Web-based applications. As Ajax development kits and Flash-based technologies become more feature-rich and easier to use, enabling developers to build RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) with functionality and usability very near desktop applications, this trend should snowball. Many users are already familiar with Firefox, and Open Office is eerily similar to Microsoft Office.
When most everything is Web-based, the OS running on the desktop becomes a nonfactor ... which means you should spend as little as possible on it. Yes, Vista has some whiz-bang features, but if a stripped-down version of virtually any free flavor of Linux will suffice, can you justify it? Alternatively, you could use LTSP (Linux Terminal Server Project) to serve thin clients, which will further reduce costs on the hardware side.
Another drag on adoption has been that though Linux supports almost all enterprise-level hardware and peripherals, consumer hardware support is a bit lacking. Most drivers are reverse-engineered--if a new chipset is introduced, Linux will likely not support it as fast as Windows because Linux support will be added sometime after the device hits the market, whereas the Windows driver is provided with the device.
Our take: As Linux catches on with enterprise desktops, end users will want to run it at home as well. When that happens, we should see more peripheral and hardware vendors providing at least binary Linux drivers, which will benefit the enterprise. For now, though, there's still a ways to go. Mice, keyboards, printers, USB drives and many digital cameras, to name a few common peripherals, generally work out of the box. The items users might have a hard time getting to work include some Wi-Fi and TV tuner cards. ATI and Nvidia provide binary Linux drivers for most of their video cards, with 3-D support, but these must be downloaded and installed separately.
And of course, there's a discouraging lack of games ported to Linux.
For pilot tests of desktop Linux, we recommend Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu--all have complete, easy-to-use desktop versions of their OSs. Slackware is ideal for the tech-minded users who don't want everything hidden by GUIs. If you check out Slackware, be prepared to edit config files.
Ubuntu and Slackware don't provide separate versions of their OSs for home and enterprise use. In fact, Slackware doesn't provide commercial support for its OS, but there are consultants who do.
Red Hat and Novell keep the enterprise and public versions of their OSs separate; Novell calls its free version openSUSE; Red Hat's free version is Fedora. There are two main differences between enterprise and public versions: First, free versions are released more frequently and include more-recent kernels (which usually means more hardware support), and they also include what the enterprise might consider beta versions of some software, as well as some other software that the enterprise has no need for but home users love. We can draw a parallel to the proprietary world, where businesses pay a premium for a few extra features that home users don't get.
Ubuntu, openSUSE and Fedora, in that order, top the list in hits per day on the DistroWatch Web site, and for good reason. All three OSs are user-friendly, easy to update, and they come with a ton of free software to play with. Ubuntu, the youngest distro in the list, has made installing, updating and removing software as easy as point and click. The Synaptic Package Manager provides a GUI for browsing packages (programs) that are installed or can be installed, and they're grouped by likeness. If you select a package that requires another package not already installed or selected, the manager will warn you and automatically install the other packages. Our only complaint is that there are so many to choose from, it's sometimes hard to find the package you're looking for. Synaptic also provides a search function that works well.
Before Ubuntu came along, there wasn't a good, easy-to-use Linux distro for new users. Since Ubuntu took the Linux world by storm, claiming the No. 1 free distro spot, openSUSE and Fedora have really picked up the pace.
Previous versions of Fedora were extremely bloated and had usability problems, and SUSE didn't have very good hardware support. Both lacked software. Today, these are both stellar OSs. It just goes to show how open collaboration helps everyone. Not only has Ubuntu raised the bar in terms of usability and cleanness in a desktop system, it's also contributed a lot to the open-source community, which benefits everyone.