Last year, there was a bit of discussion about how the launch of Vista was going to open a lot of doors for Linux on the desktop. I’m not going to go into a discussion about the pros and cons of Windows Vista and why the door is open to alternatives, but I have been very interested in seeing how this would turn out.

Linux has been making great strides on the desktop for quite a while. I remember that the first time I thought that Linux was really getting there was in 2002 with SUSE 8. In the last 12 months, Ubuntu has finally made Linux on (my) laptop feasible by finally getting over the last hurdles that had been plaguing me for a long time (projector support with nvidia-settings, and easy WPA Wi-Fi support from the network manager). My wife recently switched to Linux (after her Windows install corrupted) and her first comment was “This isn’t as bad as I thought it would be”. Linux still has some very frustrating issues: Multiple monitor support for all video cards (without knowing how to edit your xorg.conf file and without restarting X), VPN configuration (check out OpenVPN), and the number one issue for corporate desktop use, Microsoft Exchange integration (specifically full group calendaring support).

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