After years of having almost nothing on offer for desktop users, the #1 Linux company—Red Hat—is taking aim at the desktop PC. With Red Hat 8.0, there’s finally a Linux desktop that will be good enough for many corporate users, says Prashant L Rao

For years, Red Hat, the leading Linux vendor, focused exclusively on the server market. The battle with Windows on the desktop was left to others, notably Mandrake and SuSE. Finally, Red Hat has thrown its hat in the ring too. Red Hat 8-Psyche, is the first desktop Linux OS from the world’s leading Linux company. To start with, Red Hat India is aiming at mainstream Linux users. Down the line, it will go after everyday Joes. The approach, in what is the first version of Red Hat for the desktops, is to provide PC users with a viable alternative. “We want to give people a choice on the desktop,” says Javed Tapia, director for Red Hat in India. Red Hat has no illusions about its first attempt at taking on Windows XP. It knows that there are rough edges, but, hey, this is Version 1. For instance, users who ran Windows 2 (bundled with Pagemaker 1) found it terrible. “The next version will be that much better,” says Tapia.

Tapia argues, as many have done, that though hardware costs are plummeting, software hasn’t really followed suit. Red Hat 8 is priced economically [See Box, Value for the desktop user]. Better yet, Red Hat is encouraging Indian companies to buy one copy of the OS and install it on all their desktops in the office. This is pretty much what many Indian companies do with Windows anyway, except that in the case of Windows they are guilty of pirating software. By using Red Hat 8, they can rest assured that they are following the law and saving a bundle on desktop software.
“Red Hat 8 has a more cohesive desktop,” says Tapia. Red Hat India is targeting government departments, e-governance projects, the Supreme Court of India, High courts (courts have apparently mandated that Linux be used) and SMEs. There are more offerings in the pipeline, including versions for PDAs. While there are popular applications that don’t have Linux versions, porting is going on at a rapid pace. Red Hat is working with Indian ISVs to ensure that local applications are available on RH Linux. Tapia is upbeat about Kalculate, an accounting application that has been certified by IBM.

The government segment could turn out to be the cornerstone of Red Hat’s strategy. In India, if you leave aside the unbranded segment—almost two-thirds of the packaged software sold is to the Indian government. Though Microsoft pasha Bill Gates is in town as this is written and almost every Indian state government head is out there to greet him, when it comes to economics, they may decide in favour of Linux. Government organisations like Central Railway, Air India and Central Excise use Linux. Linux distributors like Tapia are optimistic that as Linux spreads across the enterprise and people start getting used to it, the penguin will sit on user desktops too.

This is the area where most analysts believe that Linux has the capability to hit Microsoft hard. Red Hat’s discussions with state governments have been extremely positive as most state governments are almost bankrupt, and are thus looking to cut down costs and enable local language applications. With an open source movement that is increasingly contributing applications, if the government decides to put its weight behind Linux, then we could see the penguin on every government desktop. Tapia is also talking with a lot of branded players bundling Linux with their systems as Linux gives vendors a higher margin than an OS like Windows. Korean major LG has just jumped into the fray with a Linux-based PC.

Rough edges
But when it comes to the actual software, it’s not as if RH 8 is a Windows-killer. The biggest drawback continues to be the lack of consistency in the user interface. While Red Hat has managed to provide a slick Gnome desktop (KDE’s there too but the typical install doesn’t include it), unfortunately the Web browser (Mozilla), e-mail client (Evolution) and office suite (OpenOffice.org) have nothing in common with the desktop GUI. The font engine differs in each of these three key applications. While Gnome has beautiful anti-aliased fonts that put the default font smoothening in Windows to shame, Mozilla fonts look blocky and ugly. Yes, you can fix that problem but the fix involves downloading additional fonts and installing them. This isn’t what your average desktop user wants to do. OpenOffice looks good as long as you stick to the 120 percent view that Red Hat has configured as default. Change zoom to 100 percent and the fonts look terrible.

Good e-mail stuff
Evolution is an excellent e-mail and personal information manager (PIM) tool. It is a Microsoft Outlook clone with some extras thrown in. Corporate users weaned on Outlook will feel right at home here. In fact, Ximian, the company responsible for Evolution, even has a product called Ximian Connector that lets Evolution connect to MS Exchange! That, of course, is a separate product, not included here. Still, Evolution gets full marks for power and familiarity.

A nice Office too!
I ran OpenOffice.org with trepidation. Earlier attempts to use this software on Mandrake Linux and even on Windows had left me with mixed feelings. On one hand, OpenOffice is a usable office suite with a fairly good feature set. Still, there used to be some show stopping bugs. You just had to change the language from US English to, say, British English and the application would crash before you could say Humpty Dumpty. Thankfully, the folks at Red Hat have fixed that and many other irritating bugs in OpenOffice and the software is roughly comparable with Office 97 in look and functionality. Office 2000/XP are better suites but then Office XP Standard happens to cost Rs.10,773. OpenOffice, however, is bundled for free with Red Hat 8.

Value for money
Red Hat 8 beats Windows on the value equation. It comes with a decent office suite and yet manages to cost less than Windows XP Professional. Red Hat 8 comes in two editions—Professional and Personal. Though RH Personal is strictly comparable to XP Home, it is being marketed to corporates in India. Feature wise it compares decently with XP Pro and costs much less. Even if you compare RH 8 Pro with XP Pro, the free office suite gives Red Hat 8 the edge in these cash-strapped times.

In terms of price Red Hat Personal 8.0 costs less than a third of XP Pro and half of XP home. Plus Red Hat offers 30 days of free support. XP still leads in terms of hardware support (particularly for gaming, internal modems and so forth) and consistency of the user interface, but with the Indian government and courts moving towards Linux, things look bright for Red Hat. In terms of RoI, Red Hat encourages companies to buy one box and install on all their PCs. This will translate into huge cost savings for companies using Red Hat 8. Red Hat wants 10 percent of the desktop market and it looks like it will get it Bluecurve—good or bad?

Red Hat 8 also marks the debut of Bluecurve, the company’s controversial attempt to make Gnome 2 and KDE 3 look more similar in terms of icons, themes and general look and feel. Despite user interface (UI) fanatics cribbing about this move, overall it is a good step towards unifying the Linux desktop. Corporate users will definitely prefer a common look. It would have been good if Red Hat had taken things a step further and integrated the UI of Mozilla, OpenOffice and Evolution as well. While these are separate products/projects it should be possible for Red Hat to get developers to Gnomify these applications. Evolution needs a port to Gnome 2 to acquire the smooth fonts that make the Bluecurve environment a pleasure to work in. In the case of Mozilla and OpenOffice it will be tougher. Mozilla uses XUL and OpenOffice has its own engine. Still, something needs to be done about this. Windows users switching to Red Hat 8 will find these variations in user interface jarring, to say the least.

Not your dad’s Linux
Red Hat 8 isn’t your lean and mean Linux that runs on a 486 with 32 MB RAM. To install the OS you need 1.5 GB of hard disk space, 128 MB RAM and a decent graphics card plus a CPU of 300 MHz or better. This pretty much rules out any PC sold before 1999. Many Indian businesses and government departments have hardware that’s older than that. Red Hat 8 isn’t the answer for those folks. That said, it is leaner than Windows XP. You can run RH 8 on a P166 with 64 MB RAM (though you must have a 2 GB hard drive at least) and it is usable (though slow). XP needs twice that hardware to give the same performance. Of course, XP is a better-looking OS and Windows applications are very consistent in look and feel.

Buy one—make X copies
Red Hat supports the ‘traditional’ Indian way of buying one copy of the software and installing it on all the desktops in a branch/location. This should be a major reason for corporates and banks to switch to RH 8.

Improvements galore
Adding and removing programs used to be painful. With the new “Package Management” application, it’s as easy as pie. The up2date tool lets you download software updates using a wizard. This works very well indeed.

How will it do?
While it would be far-fetched to claim that companies will jump ship en-masse to RH 8, there is no doubt that it will gain a significant share of the desktop OS market. RH 8 should do at least as well as StarOffice. In the medium term, look at the market share to slowly move into high single digits. And moves by vendors like LG, which has jumped into the PC business with a Linux-based system, will only help. The numbers could be still higher if the government goes ahead with its big plans for Linux. One thing is certain, you have a choice on the desktop. It’s not a one-OS game any more.