Red Hat Nixes Desktop Plans, Cites Microsoft's Dominance

Raleigh (NC) - Red Hat is canceling its plans for a desktop operating system. The company’s desktop team cites a dominant vendor (aka Microsoft) as the main obstacle to such an OS. Red Hat will still develop a light-weight desktop OS for emerging markets.

"We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future," said Redhat’s Desktop Team. They add that some people believe modern Linux desktops don’t provide a practical alternative to Microsoft Windows.

And it seems Red Hat has learned something from all the failed attempts at cracking Microsoft’s dominance in the past. Later in the blog post, the team said, "Building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities." - Yikes, talk about being spooked by the Redmond giant.

Red Hat isn’t completely abandoning the desktop however. It helped develop the desktop OS for the OLPC and will be releasing the Red Hat Global Desktop (RHGD) for emerging markets sometime this year.

You can read Red Hat’s blog post here.