As Vista Struggles, Desktop Linux Finds Beachhead

this excerpt from Novell's conference call

It's not just as simple as pre-loading Linux onto a hard drive, either. It's pre-loading it into PCs or notebooks that provide value. Fahmida Y. Rashid examined the Lenovo ThinkPad T61 this week, pre-loaded with SLED 10. It didn't just "work," but it worked well and at a competitive price point. And it's hitting the market at a time when Microsoft is struggling just to place Windows Vista on par with Windows XP. (See Samara Lynn's review of Vista SP1 from earlier this week.)

Other publicity Microsoft received this week surrounding Vista surely didn't help.

Just getting beachhead, though, isn't the entire story. Novell and other Linux distributors like Canonical (with Ubuntu), Red Hat and the Fedora group, and all the rest, could just as easily find themselves kicked back into the ocean unless their gains continue. For now, though, evidence of Linux' momentum on the desktop is growing.