Two weeks after the release of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Long Term Support) in May 2012, Canonical published the first update of its Business Desktop Remix [1] enterprise variant. Canonical first released this remix in version 11.10 with the aim of providing an Ubuntu counterpart to the enterprise desktop products by Red Hat and SUSE. In version 12.04, the Business Desktop Remix became the LTS standard and is thus a potential alternative to commercial enterprise desktops by Red Hat (RHEL for Desktops) and SUSE (SLED – SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) thanks to Canonical's five-year support guarantee.

A quick check of the candidate's features on paper shows that any comparison with the other enterprise desktops is misleading. For one thing, Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix is available free of charge after registration, in contrast to RHEL and SLED; for another, the distribution isn't actually much different from a regular Ubuntu distribution. In terms of the installation, there is actually no difference apart from the welcome screen. In contrast, the enterprise versions of SUSE and Red Hat vary considerably from openSUSE and Fedora.

Advantage Ubuntu

Within the scope of the Advantage program [2], Canonical also optionally offers a commercial support program (Figure 1) for server, desktop, and cloud services or products. This means that at least our overview of the current crop of enterprise desktops now contains a server and a desktop variant of Ubuntu (Table 1).

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