A key area of advancement in open source is visual. As digital converge comes to fruition, the move toward an open environment for entertainment took a major leap when Sun Microsystems released Project Looking Glass under GPL. Email functionality is another subject to discuss: this will be the most significant factor governing the take-up of Linux on the desktop, according to a study published by the Open Source Development Labs.  The lack of a powerful email application could hinder the adoption of Linux on the desktop.

Without quality email applications, Linux on the desktop was not a feasible alternative for most users as email was rated the most important application regardless of platform.

The message is clear: application vendors must focus on developing a quality email application for the Linux desktop. There are some groupware clients for Linux that provide email, calendaring, tasks and contact management functionality.

Mozilla developers are already addressing this issue, with a project to integrate its calendar application Sunbird with its email application Thunderbird. Sunbird has been available as a separate extension for Firefox and Thunderbird for a while, but there’s been little integration between calendar and email functionality.

Licensing costs and total cost of ownership were the most popular reasons given for deploying desktop Linux, while few users are considering security as factor.

But Linux is getting more and more attractive, because the speed of development is getting so rapid … It is so hard to get excited for each upcoming release, keep the system completely up to date, and even remember what the current version of the favorite distributions are.