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Story: 2004: The year of desktop Linux?

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Hmmm, FUD, FUD, FUD, FUD, and FUD.

The initial excitement about Linux as an alternative to Windows on the desktop has long since cooled...

What on god's green IT Unit are you talking about?!? Excitement about Linux, the FIRST viable challenge to the sick, corrupt, and innovation-starved M$ monoculture, continues unabated, despite the Micro$haft-funded FUD campaign waged by SCO. There is NO evidence of SCO's criminal behaviors having ANY effect whatsoever on Linux adoption rates.

...and the most encouraging industry projections don't show the open-source operating system taking off on desktops for several years.

Um, it's "taken off," good buddies, and it's now making what we call "inroads" on the desktop. Your FUDdy use of the term "taking off" is transparent, bovine. The "industry projections" made by the harlots - er, analysts beholden to M$ (particularly Gartner) - have consistently sand-bagged (underestimated, deliberately, IMO) rates of growth for Linux ever since they began to pay attention. ZD knows this, but then again, ZD is OWNED by Paul Allen, co-founder and major stockholder in M$.

But a funny thing has happened over the past year: large organisations have actually started making commitments to Linux desktops, in a trend that is likely to continue in 2004 and pick up steam in the future.

Whatta surprise! Who'd a thunk it, huh? Businesses are tired of paying too much for too little. They LIKE often-free (as in beer) open source (as in free speech) software that THEY can assure themselves is clean, free from "backdoors" and has what M$ crapware hasn't: security built in from the getgo.

This trend may yet be in its infancy, but industry analysts say it could eventually open up the choices available to businesses, and even consumers.

Duh! Did the (cough)"analysts"(cough) actually say "eventually?!?" Man, that's a really obscene twist... like the one above. The choices are open NOW, not some pie in the sky. Mandrake Linux (er, I'm something of a Frog-o-phobe, but I love Mandrake!) or the new curiously-named "Java Desktop System" that includes the best Linux product from Ximian (Novell), SuSE AG and others fit the bill just fine for biz or indiviaduals. RedHat made the decision to go strictly enterprise. Fine, they don't have the friendliest desktop anyway..

The hype around desktop Linux mirrored the dot-com boom in the late 1990s, and tailed off about as quickly.

Whoever wrote that needs to stop smoking crack. Get a new habit, dude.

But at that time, the idea that Linux distributions such as Red Hat, Mandrake Linux or SuSE Linux could be used on the desktop was mainly hypothetical.

There are plenty of non-geeky people using Linux since 1997 on...

The software was available at retail for anyone who wanted it, but those users appeared to be few and far between.

Few compared to what? M$? Well, M$ has 95% of the market.

Since then, it's become possible to find actual significant examples of companies and government bodies that have chosen to switch desktops from Windows to Linux, and the operating system is making a small but perceptible impact on desktop OS market share. IDC says Linux's desktop market share has nearly doubled in the past three years, from 1.5 percent at the end of 2000 to 2.8 percent now. Linux is poised to surpass Apple's 2.9 percent of the market, as projected a year ago.

Essentially correct, except Linux has maybe surpassed Mac already...

IDC says it is predicting mainstream acceptance of Linux on servers by 2005...

Double duh! "2005?" Mainstream acceptance on servers was there a year or two ago, depending on industry. Financials (at least here in NYC) were early adopters.

All of the qualifying language from the "analysts" suggests that Linux benefits are "Just over the next hill, you bet!" They said the sa

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