It's only natural, then, that Linux vendors should take this opportunity to tout the open source alternative. Novell's latest enterprise desktop packaging of Suse Linux, for one, looks impressive indeed. Novell claims to have referenced some 1,500 hours of video of users interacting with Linux systems in order to refine the GUI on this latest offering, and the results, according to Novell spokespeople, have performed favorably in usability surveys when compared with Windows.

Don't roll out your tattered old "Year of Desktop Linux" banner just yet, though. It's still premature to expect a landslide of support from the all-important hardware vendors.

Kudos to Dell CEO Michael Dell for speaking candidly with DesktopLinux.com's Stephen J. Vaughan Nichols on this issue. Conspiracy theories aside, it seems that Dell's reasons for not putting more energy behind Linux on the desktop are simple and -- dare I say it? -- make a lot of sense.

According to Mr. Dell, his company simply can't afford to support all the desktop Linux options that are out there. If you think six versions of Vista are hard to keep track of, try all the various versions of Lin spire, Man driv a, Red Hat, Suse, Ubuntu, and who knows how many others. Although they all may share a common kernel, each distribution differs from the others in significant ways. And, Dell says, in such a fragmented market it's not his place to take sides.

This is a legitimate problem, and one that deserves a lot of attention from the industry if Linux is to emerge as a viable alternative to Windows desktops. The way I see it, there are two ways around the issue.