This Infoworld piece notes that a major initiative to promote Linux on the desktop is now underway. Because of IBM's recent announcement to support it, the article points out that HP and Dell will have to support it as as well, and that we should expect to hear announcements from them in January. The mommentum is also supported by Novell's purchase of SuSE, from what I understand, possibly the leading Linux distribution in Europe, and Novell's acquistion of Ximian, an Outlook-like application which can communicate with MS Exchange servers. Novell apparently has plans to fully integrate Ximian with GroupWise.

As I blog this from my Fedora Core 1 desktop (formerly RedHat)--I stopped using Windows a few weeks ago--I can tell you that for email, browser, and word processing, Linux on the desktop is a suitable replacement for Windows. After all, I'm using the same applications on Linux that I was using in Windows: Mozilla Firebird, Mozilla Thunderbird, and OpenOffice.