We are at the beginning of an embarrassment of riches in the OS space. In case you have been living under a rock, the most recent OS release season was kicked off by Microsoft with their GA release of Windows 7 the other day. There was some minor fuss in the trades about it. Next to the plate will be Ubuntu with 9.10 on October 29th, then OpenSUSE on November 12th with 11.2, and then Fedora on November 17th with Fedora 12. This not to ignore the recent OS.X 10.6 (now 10.6.1) which came out at the end of August. Pretty sure August is in a different season, but maybe not "Computer Seasons".

I am not sure what is more interesting: The actual operating systems or the emotion and hyperbole around them.

Take Windows 7 for example: it is a solid release. It fixes most of what went wrong with Vista, most especially the *perception* of Vista. I used Vista from its first release, and it got gradually better with every patch and every service pack. It followed in XP's footprints in fact: XP was not all that great before Service Pack 1 either, and really only stable and semi-secure after SP2, though most appear to have forgotten that. XP in its current form is fairly fast, fairly stable, and will be the nemesis of Windows 7 for some time, as most will see no reason to leave XP unless they are buying a new computer with Win7 already installed. As new hardware comes out that does not have WinXP drivers available for it, there will be a slow gentle nudge over to Win7. By the time Win8 arrives, Win7 will have the largest market share of the the Windows OS's.

Windows 7 is not a bad OS, but as Jack Wallen over at Tech Republic points out, it is hardly anything new, with the possible exception that we won't have to wait for the first service pack to have a stable OS. Not being a bad OS will probably be enough to have Win7 do well. There will be some who figure that if they have to change OS's, why not go whole hog? Some will go Mac/OS.X. Others will revisit Linux, especially with IBM and Ubuntu working jointly on a Linux desktop intended to replace Win7.

Netbooks are currently a MS stronghold. MS was going to restrict Win7's special Netbook edition.. MS appeared to realize that might have opened up the playing field for Linux, in particular Ubuntu's NetBook Remix, Moblin, or the Moblin/Ubuntu NetBook remix. This set of restrictions was dropped, but the Win7 edition for Netbooks is still pretty stripped down: For example, no Aero.

No Aero: Is that so bad? No. Aero is to Win7 what Compiz is to Linux: Eye candy. The OS works well without it. But the dropping of Aero is somewhat artificial: I have Ubuntu 9.10 running on my Dell Mini 9 Netbook (a two year old design) *with full Compiz*. No problems. It is not that the hardware, even the low end NetBook hardware, can't deal with compositing the desktop.

Another thing about Win7 without Aero though: It looks a lot like XP. That could be good or bad, depending on your point of view.

Innovate

One word often tossed about in the trades when they are dissing one particular OS or another is that it does not "innovate". I have heard this about every OS at one time or another. Without exception, I have not seen that term defined in any meaningful way. Innovation is a slippery term, and in the eye of the beholder of course. One great example was the recent OS.X release: Was that innovation? It looked almost exactly the same as the 10.5 release before it. Apple had taken all their time and money and put it under the covers, improving and polishing and securing the plumbing. Then, in a nod to the fact that no one was going to perceive the work, they dropped the price of the upgrade, even though, from a changed lines of code, and therefore a cost to develop point of view, this was every bit as big an upgrade as any other.

Is that innovation? Innovative strategy? Shrewd timing? I have no idea. I fully support it though. I love 10.6. It is fast. It is stable. it does what I want, and does not get in the way.

By any sense I can think of, every OS coming out this fall is evolutionary. None of them are innovative exactly, but all of them are better.

The Ubuntu development model pretty much ensures it will always be more of an evolver: How much innovation can one inject with a major release every six months?

Ubuntu 9.10

Two days before Halloween we'll get the next GA version of Ubuntu: 9.10. I have been testing 9.10 since Alpha 3 or so, and it will be another solid release. Faster boots, more unified look and feel, easy install and upgrade, etc. All the hallmarks of Ubuntu.

With the built in OpenOffice, or the option of IBM's Lotus Symphony, the Ubuntu desktop can function in almost every way as a full replacement for Windows. If you are fully "Web 2.0" or "Cloud based" in your app stack, then it is a 100% replacement. Pretty much any modern Linux is.

I have the 9.10 RC1 loaded up on the D620, and it deals very well with the dual head configuration, as long as I remember to turn off Compiz first. It does not deal well with all the screen real estate of two monitors and the composite video at the same time: The Intel GMA 945 just does not have the juice for that. One or the other. Not both. The failure is disheartening too: The screen goes black, and cntrl-alt-backspace does nothing. Hard reboot to get back the screen.

The changes to X that made it far more able to dynamically deal with changes in graphic configurations were a good thing, but taking out the ability to bomb out of X via cntrl-alt-backspace was very much *not* innovation.

Evolution 2.28.1

Ubuntu will ship with 2.28.1 as its final version of Evolution. I had been testing Exchange 2007 functionality via MAPI all along, but RC1 was the first move from 2.28.0 to 2.28.1 I noted. The MAPI provider is (as of today anyway) still 2.28.0. The account sets up, authenticates (even using the real server name rather than the IP address like the version of Evo-MAPI that shipped with 9.04. Click on a message in the MAPI Inbox, and Evolution crashes.

The IMAP access appears to have been sped up a little bit though, so that is something. Since the rest of Evo is at 2.28.1, hopefully MAPI will go there soon. Looking at the GIT log for MAPI, there are at least three checkins that look like they are must-haves that are targeted at the 2.28.1 version.

OpenSUSE 11.2

I have been testing OpenSUSE 11.2 as well. Not quite as often as Ubuntu, to be honest, but my Dell D620 triple boots between Windows 7, OpenSUSE 11.2, and Ubuntu 9.10. I had hoped to see some evidence that Evolution MAPI (in it 2.28.1 form) would be appearing sometime soon in OpenSUSE, but it is not there by default as of RC1. Some quick poking about revealed no special repository that needed to be enabled either.

I took the opportunity of having OpenSUSE 11.2 installed to look more closely at KDE 4.3.1, since OpenSUSE is supposed to be the very best place to experience KDE.

I have had nothing but trouble from Xinerama and KDE under OpenSUSE. It just does not want to configure correctly my D620's 1440x900 internal LCD and the Dell 1901FP 1280x1024 external panel. I do not know what its problem is, but I am pretty sure it is a KDE thing, since when I load up Gnome it had no issues at all with Xinerama, same as Ubuntu. I have not tried Kubuntu to see what that would do.

That little problem, plus the no-show so far of MAPI, plus an annoying keyboard bounce (only there is OpenSUSE / KDE), have kept me from running what is otherwise a pretty good desktop (though I am typing this on it now, using the lovely Bilbo Blogger). I can see why people love OpenSUSE enough to make it their primary desktop OS, but it is missing a few things I need, want, and actually care about such that Ubuntu is where I always fall back to.

Linux in General

Looking across the sea of Linux releases that are being actively maintained, I perceive four major subgroups.

One is the cutting edge, leader type. I mostly review that type here. The folks that are actively releasing once or twice a year (OpenSUSE is going to an every 8 month release cycle). Right now those releases are all hovering around kernel 2.6.31, OpenOffice 3.1, Firefox 3.5, Gnome 2.28, and KDE 4.3. The near alignment of the package releases makes it difficult in some ways to really say that one Distro is really all the different from another. They are all hewn from the same materials... For all that common fuel, there are big differences between the big three, but they have to be experienced to be fully understood: YAST versus Synaptic versus YUM being one example.

Another group is the supported versions: The RedHats and SUSE's and Mandrake's of the world. Perhaps Ubuntu LTS. These releases stay behind current, do more internal testing, release only once every two or three years. These are the solid, reliable, day in day out server types. The Linux desktops in the group all suffer, in my mind, because they do not have the latest X11 and the latest kernel so that they lag in new hardware support.

Then there are all the special use Linuxii: the Real Time, or the embedded Linux. The WebOS and Android Cell phones. The system recovery and password reset disks. Clonezilla. This category, in sum, may actually represent the largest install base, if for no other reason than no one out there actually knows they have Linux in them. To them, its a DVR, not a OS, etc. Android 2.0 just came out, so clearly there are lots of holiday goodies here.

Then there are all the others. There may be more distinctions than I make, but to me they are an amber waving sea of single use / single developer systems. The "I did not like their Icons, so I started a new Distro" types.

And Finally ...

I recently noted in my personal blog that I was not enjoying Blackberry OS 4.7 on a BB Storm nearly as much as I would have hoped. I fixed that today by loading up OS 5.0. What a difference! it is not stable yet, but it is faster, it uses the keyboard better, and it generally makes the Storm a much more livable place to be. OS's may not be something everyone get excited about, even when we are in the middle of such a tidal wave of updates, but having a usable OS sure makes a person a lot less miserable.

I mentioned in my Enterprise Desktops: Linux, OS.X, and Win7 post that I never expected to see OS.X pass Linux in the race to MS Exchange compatibility.

OS.X 10.6, codenamed "Snow Leopard" got there first.

As a Linux maven, this has been a hard loss to accept, but as I also have a Mac, it has been an easy loss to accept... Yes: I am feeling very split-brain about it all.

Just to be sure, I loaded up Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 4, and updated to the very bleeding edge, to see if Gnome 2.28 / Evo 2.28 and its built in MAPI support was going to catch up, or even be close. But it has not. It is not even close yet. When I try to enter the server name or IP address in the setup dialog, it just crashes, and it does not even ask if I want to report the problem. It's Alpha, so I can not really criticize it. I was just hoping. I was just looking for a glimmer of MS Exchange 2007 interoperability light.

To be even more sure I loaded up SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (SLED 11) and applied all the maintenance. I can enter the MS Exchange server by name rather than address, but the GAL (Global Address List) does not work, and calendaring hangs. I am told some have working calendars, so this does appear to be variable, but it does not work on my calendar, as built up over the years, so I assume that it will not work for others as well.

I also built a SLED 11 appliance with SUSE Studio (very cool) and had the same results.

Last try: I downloaded OpenSUSE 11.2 Milestone 6 and installed it, but that does not have MAPI in it at all yet.

OpenSUSE 11.2 and the GA of Ubuntu 9.10 are still months away, and I have no idea if full MAPI is going to make it even then. The forums I watch about the subject have been very quiet about MAPI status. The Wiki has:

• http://www.go-evolution.org/Evo2.28
• http://www.go-evolution.org/MAPIProvider

But the last updates there are severely out of date. I scoured the forums, and Googled with fervent hope, but at the end of the day, OS.X was there with fully functional MS Exchange support, and Linux is not yet.

Nope. This round goes to OS.X. That is not to say that the support for Exchange in OS.X is perfect yet. I found a bug with scheduling meetings this morning. I have not seen any public discussion of this problem yet either, but then 10.6 is brand new, so there may not have been time. It appears to be an issue with the Global Address List (GAL) looking up the name.

I am also having another problem, but this appears to be a MS bug. The 'affinity server' is, after 3 days of steady use, suddenly rejecting my password. It is my password though, and I can not seem to convince the affinity server that it is OK. Whatever this little issue is, it locks out my Mac from email, but Linux (using IMAP) and Win7 (using whatever RPC's and MAPI bits Outlook 2007 uses) are both still able to access the Inbox.

There is an easy "work around" though: Look them up in the address book, and then drag and drop them on the appointment. In retrospect this is probably what Apple thought people would do anyway, rather than trying to do direct adds in the meeting itself. Its kind of funny: the meeting invite is sent the second that the person is dropped onto the meeting, rather than when the edit of the meeting is finished. But it works, and very well.

All of this does not even count the fact that MS will release Outlook for the Mac too, so that there will be two ways to access the Exchange server on a Mac. Outlook does not arrive till the end of 2010 though, so the built in MS Exchange 2007 support in OS.X will have plenty of time to mature and have a great deal of uptake.

The reason that this all works is probably that Apple did not take the MAPI/RPC route with 10.6. They are using Web based API's. I traced out a conversation with MS Exchange just to verify this was true. In this regard it seems like that the MS Exchange support in 10.6 is a bit like the Exchange Connector support used to be in Evolution... except that was WebDAV based, and with MS Exchange 2007 WebDAV is dropped in favor of these new API's.

This is also why 10.6 only supports MS Exchange 2007 and not 2003 and earlier. When MAPI / RPC support is finally fully working in Linux / Evolution it will have that over 10.6: MAPI / RPC means that Evolution will be able to talk to any version of MS Exchange all the way back to 5.5 more than likely. But then Outlook will arrive in the Macstack at the end of 2010, and probably negate that advantage, unless MS releases a Web API only version of Outlook. They might... never know.

The Mac I am using for all this is a 3.5 year old unit, and 10.6 has also had the side effect of making the unit feel like it has had a new processor installed. The system has a 2.1 Ghz Core processor (not Core 2) and 2Gb of RAM, and while it has never felt slow, it now "feels" every bit as fast as my Macbook with 4GB or RAM and 2.4 Ghz Core 2 processors. I used the word "Feels" there very intentionally, since I have not done actual objective measurements. Still, Safari seems to snap open, and Filezilla seems to transfer things with great speed, etc. The mail.app is quick, and the interface clean. The emails are sent quickly.

Does all of this mean the Mac is now "Enterprise ready"?

I have read this question over and over in the trades, along with endless (and endlessly vapid, IMHO) 10.6 / Win7 "Shootouts" and "Death Matches" and other similar cruft.

The answer is of course "Yes". Unless it is "No" in your shop.

MS Exchange is at something like 50% market share in the email server space, so having this support was critical *if* you are in a place that uses MS Exchange. If you were in a place that uses some other email server, or maybe have it SaaS'ed out to Google Apps or something, then you already were ready to use a Mac in the Enterprise. Whether or not you do is probably more about the size of your organization, the enlightenment of your IT department, and so forth. I was talking to one person recently whose IT department had a very cool hardware standard for their laptops: They gave folks a budget and they bought whatever they wanted to schelp around. If they bought a Windows based unit, it had to be locked down with a corporate software stack, but OS.X or Linux were not nearly as restricted.

Right after I was told about this, I got curious what I could buy for their stated budget. I have done this a couple times in the past, but I wanted to be sure the numbers had not changed much. According to a couple of vendors online configurators, that I could get a Mac for about the same price when configured the same way. And I got the Macbook unibody to boot. To be sure, I could not buy a 500 dollar Mac laptop or anything: I was comparing 13.3 inch screened, 1033 Mhz buss'ed, fast, large disked, corporate units only. Combine this with what, at least for me, has been a high level of reliability / durability / schelp-ability, and I can see why some would want to bring their Macbooks into their office settings, rather than their normal habitats like graphics studios and print shops and Hollywood offices and other parts of the creative world.

In the very strict confines of an MS-infrastructure-only shop, Mac's were historically harder to use: Same as Linux. Also like Linux, Macs have the same coping mechanisms now. Examples:

• Office Apps:
  • OpenOffice  (Have had NeoOffice for years): I just loaded up 3.1.1, and it has had no problems with an MS formatted documents
  • iWork:
    
    • Pages opens MS formatted stuff as well, and usually with high fidelity.
      
    • Ditto Keynote for PowerPoint.
    • Numbers: I have had slightly less luck with Numbers. The problem is, as always, macros, although it also does not like outlined and sorted spreadsheets. Numbers is the new kid on the iWork block, and it is a great spreadsheet on its own: it is just not fully MS compatible. Yet.
      
• Browsers:
  • Firefox
  • Opera
  • Chrome
  • Seamonkey
    
    • I like the Composer HTML editor. NVU stopped at 1.0 and its child Kompozer often goes stale (although I see some movement over in Komposer, and I am using both Composer and Komposer on this post on 10.6, to see what is what. Komposer is buggy and feature-full, and Composer is solid and feature-few. Sigh.)
      
  • And of course, Safari 4.

... and so forth: OS.X has benefited greatly from the Open Source world, to be sure.

And Of Course, with Web 2.0+ All This Matters Less Anyway

As the screams around the Internet reverberate every time Gmail has a multi-minute outage, it is clear that a huge part of the world now uses online infrastructure rather than dedicated, installed in the computer or personal datacenter based infrastructure. Out there in Cloudland, you need a computer to access the cloud, and it matters not if it is a Mac, Linux (or some varient / imbedded version of it), BSD, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, or something else. All that matters is if you have a good standards compliant browser available for your platform. That was the idea behind the Netbook, and my Dell Mini-9 came with a 2GB SSD hard drive: Enough to run Ubuntu and a browser, and it works extremely well.

The more standard (as in Open Standard) the less the client platform matters. The trends are that the people using one platform will be able to communicate with those of all the other platforms, and never know if they are talking to someone like them or not like them, computer-choice-wise.

That is good for Linux.

Or, looked at another way: I can tweet from anywhere. And anything. Change "tweet" to be whatever you need it to be.