More than 50% of IT executives in a recent survey said that they were planning to accelerate Linux adoption in 2009. “As organisations fight to cut costs and find value in this tough economic climate, Linux adoption will accelerate,” said Michelle Beetar, country manager for Novell South Africa.

For enterprise system administrators looking for interoperability with Microsoft Exchange, but not the high costs associated with it, PostPath email and collaboration server could be a smart business investment.

New global survey reveals more than half of participants plan to accelerate their adoption of Linux in 2009

With all of the talk these days about the desktop Linux taking on Windows in the enterprise sector, have you ever considered that with some simple compromises, using Linux desktops running different thin clients can work very well within the confines of what most businesses need?

For the last 15 or more years I have been waiting for Linux to be as user friendly as Windows. As more and more impressive software came out for windows, this grew stronger and stronger. Now, I am finally satisfied. I installed and instantly saw that my life was about to get easier. I spend about 16 hours a day coding and Googling. So, my operating system must be top notch.

Almost 80% of enterprises that use Linux will be increasing their use of Linux over the next five years, and 84% of them increased their Linux use in the past year, despite the economic climate. More of these companies will be reducing the number of Windows servers they use (25.9%) than increasing them (21.7%) too.

We are in an economic downturn, perhaps even a full-blown recession. Any doubts I had about that were removed by two related, recent phenomena.

Over the past few years, 3-D rendering in window managers has become a new trend in the desktop environment. OS X was the first to make fancy visual effects prominent in the way users interact with the windows in their desktop. Windows Vista has also jumped on the bandwagon with its Aero interface, though it has some performance issues to work out.

When asked in an InformationWeek Q&A how Linux compares with Windows, Torvalds didn't go into a marketing discussion of Feature Y over Feature X. Instead, he discussed the strength of Linux's process/approach over Windows' "We are Microsoft--trust us to be your god" approach: