Red Hat to focus on enterprise market, not consumer Linux

by Brad Linder Apr 17th 2008

Once upon a time when you mentioned Linux to non-Linux users, the first thing they thought of was Red Hat. That's because the company was one of the first and most successful to get its desktop Linux onto retail shelves. But in a blog post today, the Red Hat team notes that they will not be working on a consumer version of their Linux product in the foreseeable future, instead focusing on enterprise software.

In a nutshell, the company has concluded that while Linux has come to be popular as an operating system for servers, it's hard to build a business model around Linux desktop software. If you look at the desktop OS field, Linux is starting to make mild gains on Windows and OS X, but desktop Linux users are still few and far between when compared with users of the two more dominant platforms. And most of the popular Linux desktop operating systems are not just open source, they're free as in beer.

The Fedora desktop Linux operating system is based on Red Hat and will continue to be developed. But all of Red Hat's commercial software will now be designed to compliment the company's server and middleware software.

Tags: desktop, linux, operating-systems, red-hat

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Franklin said 7:06PM on 4-17-2008

I'm surprised this is considered news. Hasn't Red Hat always focused on enterprise?

It looks more and more that Ubuntu is becoming the defacto Linux desktop.

ZeRo said 9:57PM on 4-17-2008

You completely missed the point. The reason why this is news, is because one of the key players in making linux mainstream is leaving. Not because they are one of the major distros currently out there.

ogman said 7:48AM on 4-18-2008

ZeRo - No, you missed the point; Red Hat left long ago.

Featured Time Waster

Civiballs is a beautiful, soothing physics puzzle Time Waster

I have an absolute weakness for physics games, and while Civiballs isn't the strongest physics-based game, what it lacks in the physics department it makes up for a few times over in style and fun.

In Civiballs, you are presented with a few colored balls, and your goal is to get those balls into the same-colored urn on the level. The "civi" part of Civiballs is that there are 3 sets of levels to play, each representing a different civilization. While the civilization doesn't affect gameplay, the artwork for each level is beautifully themed to it's appropriate era.

To play the game, you are given only one tool - a sword with which to cut the chains that are holding the balls. The puzzle part of the game is in figuring out what order, and with what timing to cut each chain. Do it right, and all the right balls end up in the right urns, with no stray balls entering an urn (a no-no). Do it wrong, and you get to start over again.

Civiballs is not terribly deep on gameplay; the entire game can be completed in about 15 minutes. But if you enjoy this type of game, it will be a very enjoyable 15 minutes.

View more Time Wasters