HP: Linux will also break into the desktop

Rome – On the server market, Linux has the wind in its sails: the estimates are for the most part optimistic and the 2.4 kernel is gathering a lot of support.

On the desktop market, on the other hand, analysts have already drawn a pitiful veil: in 10 years of life, Linux has managed to carve out less than 2% of the market, a percentage that would discourage the most optimistic of investors.

One of the excellent victims of this situation was, just recently, Eazel, a company that had bet everything on the transformation of Linux into a desktop operating system: unfortunately, losing.

In the wake of the further pessimism that emerged from the departure of Eazel, even Dell and other PC manufacturers, in recent weeks, have declared that the Penguin, the desktop market, can also forget: it is not for him.

To raise the spirits of those who still believe that Linux, aided by Nautilus, Gnome and KDE, can compete with the ease of use and intuitiveness of Windows and MacOS, is the executive of HP Bruce Perens, a veteran of the ‘IT.

Questioned by ZDNet Uk, Perens said he was confident that the free operating system could also establish itself on the consumer market, declaring that Linux “in the desktop is not dead, and will be able to do in this market what it has done in the server market, becoming a curious toy a contender for a large slice of the market “.

Responding to the disheartened words of big manufacturers like Dell, Perens argues that it would be shortsighted not to consider Linux as a solution for the desktop market.

“Let’s consider the age of the Linux desktop,” Parens says. “Development started from scratch during 1997. It’s almost a maturation time for this desktop, and a few years is a lot less time than any other desktop project to get to the level where Gnome and KDE are” .

Perens, who is a Linux and open source strategist at HP, says his company will play a major role in bringing Linux to the mass market, and is confident that the development of Nautilus, the interface designed by Eazel for Linux, it will continue to be developed by the open source community linked to Gnome.

That Linux, after IBM, has found another consistent champion in HP?