Red Hat CEO thinks the desktop is becoming a legacy application

A running joke at this years LinuxCon is that “X is the year of the Linux desktop.” Jim Zemlin, head of the conference’s sponsoring organization, The Linux Foundation, started it with his keynote in noting how often he’d made that prediction and how often he’s been wrong. The current prediction, which I believe Linus Torvalds made last night was : “2031! The year of the Linux desktop.” Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, has another year in mind for the Linux desktop though: Never. Oh, and the Windows and Mac desktops? Get ready to say good-bye to them soon.

In an interview with me, Whitehurst told me that he believes that the “Fat client operating system [the traditional desktop] is becoming a legacy application.” What he meant by that isn’t that your desktops are suddenly going to vaporize into puffs of smoke in 2016 like from some really lame disaster movie. No, his point is that the cost of maintaining and securing a desktop operating system is growing increasingly higher.

So, what he sees happening is that everyone, and it’s not just Linux, “writing their functionality for the back engine. Why would anyone with all the different platforms—smartphones, tablets, etc.—and the costs of securing all of them want to spend money on that? The cost to manage and secure a fat client is ridiculous.”