In all of the PR about Red Hat's move from Xen to KVM and the SolidICE/SPICE desktop virtualization tools earlier this week, it almost got missed that when Red Hat starts offering a desktop to sit on a virtual machine, they'd need an actual desktop offering.
Steven Vaughan-Nichols, though, was pretty sharp and noted the distinction--something he confirmed with Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens. By late Summer 2009, there should be a Red Hat deskop product ready for market.
But before you you say "it's about time," it's important to remember that in some ways, Red Hat never really left the desktop arena. They've been contributing to desktop apps all along, and there was always the Fedora Project. Fedora 10, especially, is getting solid reviews for desktop performance.
Still, there's the perception game, where it looked like Red Hat had left the Linux desktop behind. This was a bit worrisome to the community back when Red Hat Linux was re-branded and moved to the Fedora Core product. There was a concern that this spelled the end of the Linux desktop, because the biggest player had seemingly given its desktop marbles to someone else and left the game.
In actuality, of course, nothing of the sort happened. Ubuntu, SUSE Enterprise Desktop, and openSUSE--as well as a host of other distros--not only kept the Linux desktop business alive, but really helped to grow deployments over time.
Now that Red Hat is "back," though, I expect that we will see an even stronger growth in desktop deployments and development--which will be good for every player in the Linux desktop market.
