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Andreas Pleschek from IBM in Stuttgart, has apperantly said that IBM has cancelled it's desktop contracts with Microsoft, and will not be upgrading to Vista, and in the end phasing out Windows as the OS they use on their internal office worker desktops, and replace it with Linux.

This has to be a huge kick in the bollocks for Microsoft!
I sure hope this is true, because I think it could be seen as a good example for a lot of other businesses.

Link: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=13899

I really think the aspect of not upgrading to Vista needs to be pushed by the F/OSS community. This includes those of us in the coporate/academic IT community. Why upgrade to Vista if it's going to cost a heap of cash? What's the benefit? Move to linux and save a ton of cash! Everyone needs to push this idea in their own way.

I really think the aspect of not upgrading to Vista needs to be pushed by the F/OSS community. This includes those of us in the coporate/academic IT community. Why upgrade to Vista if it's going to cost a heap of cash? What's the benefit? Move to linux and save a ton of cash! Everyone needs to push this idea in their own way.

I totally agree with you Pat.

Vista is going to cost companies/schools/people tons of cash. But if you listen to microsoft the hardware will be free and it is the software that is going cost money. All I can say is I want some of that koolaid.

I also think that the devlopers/companies who write these children software really need to start considering porting their stuff over to linux. Macromedia also need to start supporting more platforms on linux than just the 32 bit x86 platform - especially now that mac is moving over to intel there is going to be a lot of excellent ppc hardware out there just waiting for a new os. I have written macromedia numerous times about this but I get an answer that just refers me to the download - I don't think their tech support has a clue. Maybe you guys have some power and could bring this up to them and tell them your listeners and their customers are demanding more platform support for linux.

I am avoiding vista like the plague - the last microsoft os I bought was 95 - I was using os2 at the time and os2 blew it away - it actually ran windows 3.1 programs better than 95 at the time. But apparently the press didn't think so. os2 was better than 95 period.

Here's to hoping vista is a complete and utter failure.

Just want to add xfce rocks - I have an old sunblade 100 at work that I ugraded to solaris10 and I put xfce on it and it is now usable. go xfce!!

For any listeners that are stuck with solaris at work http://www.blastwave.org is an excellent source for open source stuff and it uses pkg-get which is a nice tool.

Patrick wrote:I really think the aspect of not upgrading to Vista needs to be pushed by the F/OSS community. This includes those of us in the coporate/academic IT community. Why upgrade to Vista if it's going to cost a heap of cash? What's the benefit? Move to linux and save a ton of cash! Everyone needs to push this idea in their own way.

Our company just upgraded from NT 4 to XP during the past year. That's 20K desktops. I don't see many companies upgrading to Vista anytime before the first major service pack. It's always been that way in the business world. Stability is more important than new features the majority of the time.

The real challenge is convincing people to move towards Linux. Linux is cheap? Windows XP is free because it's already on the systems! Hopefully small companies can lead the way in the move to Linux so the rest of us can eventually benefit.

Gomer_X wrote:The real challenge is convincing people to move towards Linux. Linux is cheap? Windows XP is free because it's already on the systems! Hopefully small companies can lead the way in the move to Linux so the rest of us can eventually benefit.

You know it. Aside from the issue with application availability, the OEM don't make it easy. When it is cheaper to buy a system with Windows installed because of the software and business deals made behind the curtains, it's a tough case to recommend Linux for purchasing new systems. This discounts, of course, the long term costs associated with each system. Take those into account and I believe the Linux system wins out.

I think looking at the market today Linux has a great opportunity:

1) The cost of moving to Vista is going to be steep

2) OS X breaks some significant funcionality with each upgrade.

Couple those two issues together and get software developers on board, Linux will dominate.

dann wrote:I think looking at the market today Linux has a great opportunity:

1) The cost of moving to Vista is going to be steep

2) OS X breaks some significant funcionality with each upgrade.

Couple those two issues together and get software developers on board, Linux will dominate.

And the cost of OS X is ridiculous! But you know what, the sad thing is that all the big name apps are not available for Linux, for example Adobe Photoshop, Quicken, Macromedia Flash, Dreamweaver, Adobe Premiere...... all the big apps that businesses use for production stuff are just not available.

The hardware requirements for Vista are going to piss alot of people off especialy if they have a recent pc. Either a good opportunity to get them to switch to Linux or to put alot of good cheap hardware on the market.

dennis999 wrote:The hardware requirements for Vista are going to piss alot of people off especialy if they have a recent pc. Either a good opportunity to get them to switch to Linux or to put alot of good cheap hardware on the market.

Yeah, we just need a good amount of marketing.

Some things that linux is missing:

The ability to lock the desktop down/user profiles - not sure why this is, but last time I checked there was no easy way to create user profiles, and remove functionality the user doesn't need. Even Apple has this nailed down.

Roving profiles - again, not sure why this is, but it remains the case, and I don't see it improving until actual on-box profiles are created. I suppose Novell has this stitched up, but I can't imagine NLD + Novell is cheap.

Groupware - again, I suppose Novell is the solution here, but again, you're loosing a good bit of your "savings" if you have to repurchase a lot of your software.

Apps - many apps company's *depend* on just aren't available for linux. Its all fine and good to point at the linux alternatives, but many times they are missing either functionality or stability. In some cases the alts just don't exist - CAD for instance. A Notes client as another one. Poo-poohing notes as trivial doesn't gain a lot of traction an a marketplace where a good number of companies still use it.

Easy centralized management - yes, it's fine for us as geeks to sit around and dick with our arch or slack boxen, but to the best of my knowledge, even the big guys don't have a way to make a change on a single box and push these changes out to 12k boxen. I know there's a lot happening in the RHN world at this point, but last time I checked, there still wasn't a good way to roll out upgrades that wasn't essentially a glorified cron job.

Snarkout wrote:Groupware - again, I suppose Novell is the solution here, but again, you're loosing a good bit of your "savings" if you have to repurchase a lot of your software.

How about Kolab + Kontact or Kolab + Evolution?

Snarkout wrote:Apps - many apps company's *depend* on just aren't available for linux. Its all fine and good to point at the linux alternatives, but many times they are missing either functionality or stability. In some cases the alts just don't exist - CAD for instance. A Notes client as another one. Poo-poohing notes as trivial doesn't gain a lot of traction an a marketplace where a good number of companies still use it.

Lotus Notes should be under way after what I've heard.

Snarkout wrote:Easy centralized management - yes, it's fine for us as geeks to sit around and dick with our arch or slack boxen, but to the best of my knowledge, even the big guys don't have a way to make a change on a single box and push these changes out to 12k boxen. I know there's a lot happening in the RHN world at this point, but last time I checked, there still wasn't a good way to roll out upgrades that wasn't essentially a glorified cron job.

Dude, you need to go try out SUSE's YaST and then Ximian's Red Carpet stuff.