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The folks over at the KDE team hope you'll use something that works. I think their newest offering does just that. I've been working my way through KDE's newest offering and recommend you check out their newest slideshow presentation concerning Kopernicus, aka KDE 2.0. If you really really like it, maybe even develop on it, and especially start to use it, that could make a big difference to a whole collection of Linux and Unix vendors.

While everyone in the Linux community has been in denial about it, there is a division of opinion among Linux vendors concerning what desktop platform to support. While most vendors say they support both GNOME and KDE, they usually make it clear where their heart is. Firms like Caldera, Corel, Mandrakesoft and SuSE Linux in particular have promoted the KDE desktop.

There's a lot to promote. Kopernicus includes the core libraries, an improved desktop, the Konqueror Web browser, a prototype office suite (KOffice), plus utility and administration software, plus stuff for games, graphics, network utilities, and more.

Is the desktop important? For months, many Linux vendors have suggested that the workgroup and small Internet server market (where Linux has developed huge momentum) was more than sufficient to carry the OS and its primary vendors. The sinking stock prices of many Linux distributors suggest otherwise. Caldera has dropped nearly 40% of its market value in the last month. Red Hat has lost better than 30% of its value in the same period. And while vendors like Microsoft and Apple have had their own stock troubles lately, the low valuations of many Linux software vendors reduce their ability to acquire other firms, or raise capital, and make them potential takeover targets. Capturing desktops and lots of them, could become critical to maintaining corporate independence over the longer term.

Can that be done?

For the longest time it was an article of faith among Linux developers that the corporate desktop marketplace was nearly impenetrable. The installed base was too embedded; losing Windows meant losing customer's key apps and the data that resided on them. The technical competency of many corporate IT managers was too limited; some kid with a Microsoft certification wasn't likely to be able to do much with the array of tools that Linux apps provided. The cost of support was hard to calculate; therefore relative cost of ownership of Linux vs. Windows remained an unknown. The biggest problem was that other firms had Linux on their desktops. As every IT manager knows, there's real risk associated with being first.

Increasingly that reluctance is beginning to break down.

I was asked by a client last week to help him build a case for replacing his Windows installed base with Linux. The firm has hit rough seas recently, and the company decided it couldn't afford to drop a couple of million dollars on spiffy new hardware and software. It was also looking at maintaining a prohibitively expensive customer support system that it had bought two years ago and had never fully implemented.

If there was a Linux or Open Source alternative to his dilemma, this tech officer wanted to know about it. If I could surface evidence that other companies were looking at an alternative to Windows, he wanted to know about that, too.

I'm still looking for that evidence. I spoke to about 60 mid-sized firms and found that 20 of them were going through a similar exercise, but only three had actually begun to port desktops to Linux in any significant way. Those are interesting numbers. They suggest that the potential market for a viable Linux desktop is far larger than any study I've seen to date. But it also suggests that the barriers to adoption remain high, whether they are critical custom Windows apps, technical competency of the IT staff, or plain ol' Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt.

These issues are important to my client. The tech officer I worked with expressed considerable fear that the company's IT staffers would have difficulty managing any conversion. In addition, many employees have all sorts of downloaded software programs and browser plug-ins loaded on their systems. Oddball software is another worry. One department runs an old custom software program with hardly any documentation, a constant headache now, but a potential nightmare if the company chose to convert. Mid-conversion catastrophes are another concern. It's no big thing to convert a few dozen NT stations to Win2000 each day. Nothing breaks down during the conversion. Can the same be said if the company began to convert to Linux, the tech officer wanted to know. Seeing what someone else had done, learning from someone else's experience, was critical.

So is the only barrier to widespread adoption a lack of early pioneers?

Maybe. So the next question is, if those pioneers try KDE or GNOME on for size, will their experience be good enough to help Linux, and many Linux vendors start to really break out into the larger corporate marketplace?

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