Frank Ohlhorst just asked if the penguin is listening. I haven’t thought much about Linux since I made my home computer switch to Mac about a year ago, but he poses some very good ideas.

The Mac guy, the PC guy and a penguin are all standing around having a conversation. The Mac guy, of course, would be pointing out the flaws of Vista, but there would be a twist, the Penguin would be asking, “Why do I have to buy a new computer to avoid all of those Vista problems?”

All fun aside, he gives a strong call to arms for the enterprise Linux distros:

Commercial Linux vendors need to pay attention. The year 2007 very likely will become the year of change on the desktop thanks to Vista and the next generation of the Mac OS, and if the commercial Linux vendors don’t seize the day, the future may very well become bleak for Linux on the desktop.

Vista is not the “minor” migration that going from Win2k to WinXP was. Vista is a major upgrade, albeit with minor benefits IMHO. I know my company is going to hold out until SP1 before taking a serious look at upgrading our systems. Who knows even if Vista will be the preferred OS among users.

For years people have been wondering if Apple can get out of the home and media markets, and into the “regular” business world. I think Apple is in position now to make that serious push, especially with OS 10.5 coming very soon.

Is Linux read to move out from the server and tech enthusiast markets, and into the Joe Average Home User and enterprise markets? That’s a murky question. I like Linux, but I fit into the tech enthusiast category (my favorite distro is Gentoo BTW). I know the kernel is ready, but are Gnome and KDE ready for the non-tech world?

Is there enough momentum left in the Linux machine to take advantage of this situation, or has the fruit-train stolen the proverbial thunder from the penguin?

via Linux Today