Traditional desktop metaphor is dead, says Red Hat

Red Hat announces its plans for developing next generation open source desktop clients

Red Hat is to focus on building next generation open source desktop clients that rely heavily on online services and applications and information hosted in virtual environments, said the company at its annual summit in San Diego.

The company was vague about the exact form the new desktop client would take, but stressed the importance of presence and messaging in its architecture.

“For us the traditional desktop metaphor is dead – it is a dinosaur. Users are not sitting at their desks in isolation any more. They are collaborating, working and playing online. The most interesting new applications are online services,” said Brian Stevens, Red Hat chief technology officer.

Red Hat intends to integrate online services into the client desktop so they interact with the applications that users are familiar with using, so that online documents can be accessed and managed as simply as local files and directories, Stevens added.

Much of the online services technology earmarked for the new client will be seen in the open source Fedora 8 release and its community based software model, though not for some time as Fedora 7 will only launch on 25^th May this year.

“People are moving to web site client applications, partially online and partially locally based activities, and also towards a temporary desktop model,” said Red Hat product marketing manager Donald Fischer.

“Look at the Windows Vista sidebar and the Google desktop, for instance. We are not just looking to clone that but find ways to take it into the OS itself.”

Red Hat conceded that there was probably plenty of life in the traditional desktop client yet for companies that preferred that way of doing things, but nevertheless believes that having a client separate and distinct from the physical desktop device is important from a security and management perspective for others.