LinuxCon: The world's largest Linux desktop deployment
The first day of LinuxCon 2011 started off with a keynote from the Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin, in which he joked about the perpetually-next-year "year of the Linux desktop." Interestingly enough, that afternoon a smaller session with Userful Corporation's Timothy Griffin dealt with Linux on desktops in massive numbers. Userful deploys Linux in very large-scale "digital inclusion" projects — such as schools in second- and third-world environments — including the world's largest, a 500,000 seat deployment in Brazil.
Userful is a small, Calgary-based company that contracts with local system integrators to roll-out Linux desktops, usually in schools, and often to fulfill government mandates to deploy open source software. Griffin showed a cartogram that colored the countries of the world by the relative price of a PC, and scaled the size of each country by its population. According to that graphic, the vast majority of the world population lives in countries where a computer costs the equivalent of 6 months' salary (or more), and the ratio of schoolchildren to computers is as high as 150 to 1.
![[Timothy Griffin]](https://static.lwn.net/images/2011/lcna-griffin-sm.jpg)
In those countries, governments frequently undertake nation-wide computing initiatives (sometimes even creating national Linux distributions), for basic cost-saving reasons and to keep development and IT support jobs in-country. When deploying the machines into schools, Griffin said, the cost of the hardware accounts for but a fraction of the overall cost: power may be expensive and unreliable, the site may be several days journey on difficult roads, and there may be no Internet connection for updates and IT support. As a result, Userful tailors its software solution to function in circumstances that ordinary Linux distributions do not.
The most visible difference seen in Userful deployments is multi-seat PCs. Using commodity hardware, the company configures machines to serve up five to ten front-ends (including monitor, keyboard/mouse, and sound) from a single PC. Userful's multi-seat setup relies on USB hubs, using hardware from HP, ViewSonic, and a number of other commodity peripheral vendors. While in the past such multi-seat configurations would have required special-purpose components, Griffin said that (ironically, perhaps) the popularity of Microsoft's "Windows Multipoint" product led to a glut of easily available hardware. The USB devices at each front end include simple graphics chips of the same type used in laptop docks, and are capable of running applications at normal, "local" speed — unlike most remote-desktop thin client configurations. A "medium" strength PC with four CPU cores can serve ten front ends running normal office applications, and do so using less power than ten low-end PCs, plus offer simplified configuration management, printer sharing, updates, and support.
Brazil
The Brazil deployment has been rolling out in phases since 2008, and currently includes more than 42,000 schools in 4,000 cities. The base distribution is one created by the Brazilian government, called Educational Linux [Portuguese], which is based on Kubuntu. But a bigger component of the project, Griffin said, was the support system that was also built by the government to provide teachers with classroom materials and software updates, and students with a social networking component. The computers are pre-loaded with multi-gigabyte data stores — from lesson plans to video content, and in rural areas without Internet access, updates are sent by mail on DVD.
As a case study, Griffin noted, the Brazil deployment reveals valuable lessons for the Linux and open source community as a whole, on subjects such as "sustainability," where too often the focus is on power consumption alone. But a genuinely "sustainable" deployment must sustain itself, he argued, including being resilient to lack of an Internet connection, predictable visits from IT staff, and teachers that may not have any more experience with computing than do the schoolchildren.
Griffin called these situations "green field
" deployments, where there is no pre-existing computing environment at all. They are common in regions of the world where computers are expensive, he said, and where national governments often do studies and end up mandating the use of Linux and open source.
Where open source is silently ceding the field
Yet despite those mandates, he said, Microsoft Windows often ends up ultimately getting deployed instead. There are many reasons why, including lobbying efforts, entrenched players, politics, and money. But the troubling part is that the open source community has no response to these gambits, even when they are based entirely on FUD and distortion. The major commercial Linux distributions (Red Hat, SUSE, etc.) put no effort into competing for green field deployments, and offer no on-the-ground field support to those who lobby and bid for the contracts.
There is not an easy solution; what is needed to improve the situation includes better coverage of the large-scale success stories to counteract FUD and even outright lack-of-knowledge. Griffin told an audience member that there are many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working in impoverished nations that run Windows on their computers solely because they have no idea that Linux even exists. In fact, he added, they pay full price for their licenses, when they could save considerable money just by telling Microsoft they were considering Linux and getting a steep discount in return.
The green field market is one that Linux and open source ought to fight hard to win, Griffin said, for precisely the reasons that Zemlin said Linux had been successful in the first world: its free availability enables innovation and experimentation in areas (inside and outside of the technology field) that are simply unpredictable. National governments regularly end up recommending and mandating open source, Griffin argued, because they see that by not buying into a proprietary solution owned by a foreign company, they put more power into the hands of their own people.
If you want to see the year of the Linux desktop, he said, look to the green field deployments. "The next billion computer users haven't even decided what their operating system is going to be
". Brazil's roll-out of 500,000 desktops running Linux has put Linux into the hands of millions of students. In five to ten years, the open source community is going to see a return on that investment when those students enter the workplace, having been trained on a computer — easily the most powerful educational tool in the world — that runs free software. Microsoft recognizes that those stakes are huge, and has adopted a "win at any cost" strategy. Unfortunately the open source community is not nearly as organized, and lets many of those opportunities slip from its grasp.
As Griffin said repeatedly, there is no simple answer: his company works on software, but most of the work needing to be done is hands-on and in-the-field. But for all the talk at LinuxCon about how the PC era is over, it is a powerful reminder that the smartphone and tablet wars are a decidedly first-world problem, and that for most of the computer users of the future, the desktop battle is far from being over.
Index entries for this article | |
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GuestArticles | Willis, Nathan |
Conference | LinuxCon North America/2011 |
LinuxCon: The world's largest Linux desktop deployment
Posted Aug 22, 2011 22:59 UTC (Mon)
by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
[Link] (12 responses)
Posted Aug 22, 2011 22:59 UTC (Mon) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] (12 responses)
Smartphones and tablets are ALSO devices rather than replacement devices.
The PC is dead. Long live the PC!
LinuxCon: The world's largest Linux desktop deployment
Posted Aug 23, 2011 7:16 UTC (Tue)
by spaetz (guest, #32870)
[Link] (7 responses)
Posted Aug 23, 2011 7:16 UTC (Tue) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link] (7 responses)
I have. I own a NAS, a tablet, a dumb phone, and a notebook. All I ever need. Do look at the sales forecasts, the PC curve will be flat in the most optimistic case.
LinuxCon: The world's largest Linux desktop deployment
Posted Aug 23, 2011 9:26 UTC (Tue)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Aug 23, 2011 9:26 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (5 responses)
LinuxCon: The world's largest Linux desktop deployment
Posted Aug 23, 2011 11:00 UTC (Tue)
by spaetz (guest, #32870)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Aug 23, 2011 11:00 UTC (Tue) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link] (4 responses)
LinuxCon: The world's largest Linux desktop deployment
Posted Aug 24, 2011 11:56 UTC (Wed)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Aug 24, 2011 11:56 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (3 responses)
LinuxCon: The world's largest Linux desktop deployment
Posted Aug 24, 2011 12:52 UTC (Wed)
by spaetz (guest, #32870)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Aug 24, 2011 12:52 UTC (Wed) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link] (2 responses)
That having said, I did buy a bluetooth keyboard for my tablet and plan to not replace my notebook when it dies as I hardly use it.
LinuxCon: The world's largest Linux desktop deployment
Posted Aug 24, 2011 13:25 UTC (Wed)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link]
Posted Aug 24, 2011 13:25 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]
LinuxCon: The world's largest Linux desktop deployment
Posted Aug 28, 2011 2:38 UTC (Sun)
by giraffedata (guest, #1954)
[Link]
Posted Aug 28, 2011 2:38 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]
I did buy a bluetooth keyboard for my tablet
If you use a tablet with a keyboard, isn't it a PC?
To me, the defining characteristic of a PC, as opposed to a tablet or smartphone or any other kind of personal computer is the keyboard and display. I guess a traditional whole-hand mouse helps, too.
Likewise, it's hollow to claim one doesn't have a desktop computer if one plugs one's laptop into a docking station and uses a full keyboard and giant display screen.
LinuxCon: The world's largest Linux desktop deployment
Posted Aug 23, 2011 15:38 UTC (Tue)
by Cato (guest, #7643)
[Link]
Posted Aug 23, 2011 15:38 UTC (Tue) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]
LinuxCon: The world's largest Linux desktop deployment
Posted Aug 23, 2011 7:45 UTC (Tue)
by halla (subscriber, #14185)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 23, 2011 7:45 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)
LinuxCon: The world's largest Linux desktop deployment
Posted Aug 23, 2011 9:17 UTC (Tue)
by sebas (guest, #51660)
[Link]
Posted Aug 23, 2011 9:17 UTC (Tue) by sebas (guest, #51660) [Link]
So for some use-cases, tablets can (and I think will, as more users purchase tablets) replace the PC, for others, they won't. Now if a user can replace her PC with a tablet depends entirely on wether the use-cases are narrow enough to not need a PC (e.g. no writing of long texts, coding, etc).
I've noticed this myself, since having a tablet, I do prefer this device to catch up on news, or play a game once in a while. For "real work", I definitely prefer a notebook or full workstation PC.
Your question is kind of premature
Posted Aug 24, 2011 2:32 UTC (Wed)
by khim (subscriber, #9252)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 24, 2011 2:32 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)
Why do you think people should start with replacing desktop computer (or notebook) with a tablet or smartphone?
This is the very last stage of disruptive technology.
First you'll get a lot of users who never even touched the PC. There are about 1.5 billion PCs in the world and more then 5 billion mobile phones... which are quickly replaced with smartphones. Yet in reality sales of smartphones have just barely overcome sales of PCs - but they are still growing fast.
Next you'll have all the apps ported to smartphones/tables. This stage is starting already but it'll be few more years till you'll be able to actually ditch the PC - and keep all the apps.
And then finally users will start abandoning the PC - because it's more-or-less useless for most users at this point.
Since we are just switching from stage one to stage two it's no wonder so few people abandoned PC already. But this argument was used many, many, many times in the past (with mainframes, minicomputers, etc) - and every time it was wrong argument to use. But of course not that all these platforms have fully went away - some users are still around... last Multics systems was switched off in 2000!
Your question is kind of premature
Posted Aug 25, 2011 3:15 UTC (Thu)
by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
[Link]
Posted Aug 25, 2011 3:15 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
Ceding ground to FUD
Posted Aug 23, 2011 0:56 UTC (Tue)
by PaulWay (guest, #45600)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Aug 23, 2011 0:56 UTC (Tue) by PaulWay (guest, #45600) [Link] (3 responses)
Where we can combat them is by not doing drop-ship, set-and-forget deployments. They have to get long-term support. We have to build enthusiasm and dedication in the people working with Linux in the deployment so they can see the reason why it's good. We have to prepare them (just as any lobbyist does) to combat the FUD from Microsoft, to point out the flaws in their arguments, and to provide expert assistance and legal counsel when Microsoft inevitably makes its move.
I suspect there's a culture in FOSS companies of 'why should we be the ones to take on Microsoft'. We already have organisations like the FSF, the SFLC, the EFF and others who have the access and the credibility at the business level to do the work of countering MS FUD. We need to support those organisations and build them. Otherwise we will keep ceding ground, we will keep seeing these deployments reinstalled with Windows, because we expect to just do our work and move on and Microsoft is much more patient an adversary than that.
Nothing new there, I suspect.
Have fun,
Paul
Ceding ground to FUD
Posted Aug 23, 2011 8:53 UTC (Tue)
by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Aug 23, 2011 8:53 UTC (Tue) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (2 responses)
Ceding ground to FUD
Posted Sep 5, 2011 16:52 UTC (Mon)
by n8willis (subscriber, #43041)
[Link]
Posted Sep 5, 2011 16:52 UTC (Mon) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link]
But perhaps there is room for consulting & training services from the NorthAmerican/European distros to those local businesses. I'm not clear that they're pursuing that any, but if they did then having someone "on the ground" would also help with educating the decision-makers against the Microsoft argument. But absent certification (or any other potential sales/services), asking the distros to send people to advocate is basically asking them to volunteer charitably. I suspect their answer would be "that's the community's job."
</conjecture>
Nate
Ceding ground to FUD
Posted Mar 24, 2012 6:24 UTC (Sat)
by jbicha (subscriber, #75043)
[Link]
Posted Mar 24, 2012 6:24 UTC (Sat) by jbicha (subscriber, #75043) [Link]
simple graphics chips of the same type used in laptop docks?
Posted Aug 23, 2011 3:38 UTC (Tue)
by pflugstad (subscriber, #224)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Aug 23, 2011 3:38 UTC (Tue) by pflugstad (subscriber, #224) [Link] (2 responses)
Thanks,
Pete
simple graphics chips of the same type used in laptop docks?
Posted Aug 23, 2011 9:29 UTC (Tue)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 23, 2011 9:29 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (1 responses)
simple graphics chips of the same type used in laptop docks?
Posted Sep 8, 2011 18:25 UTC (Thu)
by JanC_ (guest, #34940)
[Link]
Posted Sep 8, 2011 18:25 UTC (Thu) by JanC_ (guest, #34940) [Link]
(Those who have been at FOSDEM in recent years may have seen/used such a multiseat system with 3 dual-head video cards, providing 6 seats running Compizand I have seen people play a first-person shooter on that machine!).
What does 'Userful' do?
Posted Aug 23, 2011 9:32 UTC (Tue)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Aug 23, 2011 9:32 UTC (Tue) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (6 responses)
What does 'Userful' do?
Posted Aug 23, 2011 12:28 UTC (Tue)
by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Aug 23, 2011 12:28 UTC (Tue) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (4 responses)
Before we rush to pull Userful's oxygen, perhaps we should ask ourselves what the consequences would be. It sounds like Microsoft is investing a lot of money to ensure they do not lose these markets. If we think that Linux based solutions would be a positive step forward, we need to understand how to make that work.
I agree, it would be great to see all the software as free software. If efforts to install Linux as a significant fraction of emerging market deployments are successful, I am sure fully free alternatives will emerge.
What does 'Userful' do?
Posted Aug 23, 2011 18:38 UTC (Tue)
by nhippi (subscriber, #34640)
[Link]
Posted Aug 23, 2011 18:38 UTC (Tue) by nhippi (subscriber, #34640) [Link]
I doubt per-seat licensing is all their oxygen. Usually there is also a fixed project price and consulting fees on extra work. Most likely the per-seat cost is even included in the fixed project price when Userful is pitching their deployment project to countries.
Even after losing the per-seat revenue userful would still sell projects and consulting as the most experienced wide scale deployment provider.
What does 'Userful' do?
Posted Aug 24, 2011 11:58 UTC (Wed)
by epa (subscriber, #39769)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Aug 24, 2011 11:58 UTC (Wed) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (2 responses)
What does 'Userful' do?
Posted Aug 24, 2011 14:11 UTC (Wed)
by n8willis (subscriber, #43041)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Aug 24, 2011 14:11 UTC (Wed) by n8willis (subscriber, #43041) [Link] (1 responses)
As it stands now, Multi-seat X can be done by nesting multiple X servers (eg, with Xephyr) -- which is slow -- or independently configuring an Xorg server for each front-end (which is no doubt painful, and probably not easy to do on the USB terminals). So my guess would be that whatever solution they have rolled into Userful Linux simplifies the configuration of maintaining 10 Xorg servers on one host machine, in a location without an Xorg hacker on staff. It may even have required special work for the hardware support; but that's speculation.
In any event, my point was that they aren't pushing their X solution as a product and may even be licensing it from someone else, because it can't be done effectively in free Xorg. If that changes and a future X server can natively handle multiseat, I would expect them to switch over to that -- no matter what the situation is, not maintaining your own X server software saves considerable time and resources.
Nate
What does 'Userful' do?
Posted Sep 1, 2011 5:36 UTC (Thu)
by Burgundavia (subscriber, #25172)
[Link]
Posted Sep 1, 2011 5:36 UTC (Thu) by Burgundavia (subscriber, #25172) [Link]
Full Disclosure: I used to work for Userful
What does 'Userful' do?
Posted Aug 23, 2011 14:02 UTC (Tue)
by jwakely (subscriber, #60262)
[Link]
Posted Aug 23, 2011 14:02 UTC (Tue) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]
Good luck to Userful, it's great that free alternatives exist, but if noone is willing to promote and support those alternatives then I'd rather see Userful get the sales than MS get them