Thousands of people broke out with applause in Salt Lake City this week, including many jumping to a standing ovation with excitement over what they were seeing.

No, they weren't Jazz fans thundering their approval of what Andrei Kirilenko can do with a basketball, but rather technophiles showing their support for what Novell can do with a computer desktop.

The Salt Palace was overflowing with shaking heads, almost-disbelieving laughter and clapping on Wednesday when company officials demonstrated that Novell can make the mundane desktop into a dynamic, efficient and even fun experience.

The demo of the SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 was part of the weeklong BrainShare conference touting Novell products and services.

Nat Friedman, Novell vice president of Linux desktop engineering, said the new desktop is for corporate America's "knowledge workers."

"Our goal of Desktop 10 is to build a really easy-to-use, powerful desktop for general knowledge workers," he said. "These are people who live in e-mail, in the browser, in the office suite — not people who need a hundred different applications, but people whose lives really consist of just living in those applications."

The demo indicated it would be a good life in the new desktop, also referred to as SLED 10. Users are able to scroll miniversions of windows open on the desktop, shuffle quickly to the needed window, easily access Web sites and easily attach items to e-mails — often with drag-and-drop moves.

"It takes no time at all," Friedman said.

Friedman and Guy Lunardi, senior product manager, also demonstrated e-mail, spreadsheet and folder-sharing capabilities. They managed an iPod playlist quickly and showed how a photo could be shot, edited and put on the Internet in about 45 seconds.

Lots of little "wow" moments caught the eyes of the audience, such as "stretching" desktop icons to better see their contents or scrolling over a timeline to easily find certain photos stored on the computer. The capper was turning a flat desktop image into a virtual cube, able to be spun and manipulated to see various open windows moved over to the sides — even wrapping around the cube's corners.

Lunardi noted that "regular people" helped engineers with development of SLED 10. With their actions tracked by multiple cameras, people were asked to perform simple desktop tasks, such as changing the desktop background. Their experiences helped engineers streamline the process.

Friedman said Monday morning tests would result in changes that night, and by Friday of that week "we would have completely different applications."