Help design tomorrow's Linux desktop

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Nov. 06, 2006

What should the Linux desktop of 2007 and beyond be like? That's what the OSDL wants to know in its latest Linux Client Survey, which runs from now until Dec. 1. The results will help the OSDL's Desktop Working Group work on the areas of development that are critical to users.

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The survey, while touching on consumer issues, such as iPod support, is really focused far more on business use. Besides general questions -- how many desktop systems does your company use? -- the OSDL also wants to know such specifics as what peripheral equipment needs to work with your Linux desktops. And, if you are going to run Windows applications on Linux, what method, such as virtualization or WINE, would you use.

The information gathered in this survey will be put to immediate use at the next OSDL Desktop Architects Meeting in Portland, Oregon in early December. It was at this meeting last year that the ground-breaking Portland Project and its technical summits on printing, wireless, and power management began. These efforts, in turn, have led to breakthroughs in making the Linux desktop far more friendly both to users and ISVs (independent software vendors).

The first Portland 1.0 tools are already available in several major community distributions, including Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE. The corporate Red Flag and Xandros distributions have also committed to including Portland in their next releases. In addition, Linspire, Novell, and Turbolinux are supporting Portland TrollTech's Qt 4.2, the primary KDE application framework, is already using the Portland toolkit to provide developers with tighter integration with the GNOME desktop environment.

If you fill out the survey and supply an email address, the survey results will be emailed to you when the survey is complete. The OSDL states that your email address will be kept strictly private and will not be used for any other purpose. Additionally, when you finish taking the survey, you offered the opportunity to view the results that have been compiled so far.

You can participate in the OSDL Desktop Working Group's latest desktop Linux survey here.

-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

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