Linux desktop news

Red Hat has announced its new desktop Linux applications which will work with Web services like those provided by Google. No software like Windows will be required for these web applications.

These may be popular in countries where broadband is cheap and easily available, but in countries like India, many of the largest ISP’s charge users for every MB of  information they upload or download from the internet. In such places,  Windows based applications will continue to be popular.

Zonbu has introduced  Zonbox, which it claims is a $99 Linux PC. However, the $99 price is only available if sign up for 2 years service at $12.95 a month. Otherwise the cost of the PC is $249 and the price does not include a monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Amazon’s S3 service updates the Zonbox and provides data backups. It uses Gentoo Linux and the user cannot install software himself. 

Dell has started shipping PCs loaded with Ubuntu 7.04 version of Linux.  The prices of the E1505n , XPS 410n  notebooks and E520n desktop vary between $599 and $849, since there are no software licensing costs involved. 

Though Windows is unstable with many security flaws, Linux is widely used because most applications work with Windows, a Linux version is  not available. Also, customer support for computer applications is not available and people hesitate to work with something new.