IT staff pleasantly surprised by Linux desktops
By John Lister
A study by IBM reports that IT staff find setting up Linux desktops easier than expected. The news came as an executive for the firm called Windows Vista the best recruiting tool for Linux desktops.
The study involved a survey of 1,275 IT workers from firms around the world who answered questions online. (Normally that might raise suspicions of biased results, but IT professionals are pretty much an online audience anyway.)
Around 90 percent of those who replied had hands-on experience of setting up Linux desktops – that is, running it as an operating system for staff, rather than using it solely for servers. In its introduction to the report, IBM stressed that the survey audience was specifically designed to cover those who’d used Linux rather than the IT profession as a whole.
Asked to pick their three main reasons for using Linux in a business setting, 70 percent mentioned price, with security and stability the other most popular choices. However, only around 60 percent of those questioned agreed that support and administration costs are lower when running Linux. (It would be interesting to know if this changes over time, for example if staff queries drop as they become more familiar with a desktop system.)
Attitudes to the best split between Linux and Windows machines within an organization were pretty varied. Overall most of those questioned had Linux currently installed on 20 percent or fewer machines. Looking to the future, the average prediction was that around a third of machines in the respective organization would wind up running Linux, though most believed that around half of users would find Linux met their needs.
When it comes to barriers to rolling out Linux across an organization, the three dominant factors mentioned were internal politics, individual users being wary of moving away from Windows and problems with finding compatible applications.
Bob Sutor, who heads IBM’s Linux operations, acknowledged that there are far more people with Windows technical knowledge, but noted that Linux needs fewer support staff anyway. He also argued that Linux will probably take off best with staff who use computers for specific tasks such as those who work in call centers.
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