The Malaysian government today announced plans to adopt open standards and the Open Document Format (ODF) within the country's public sector.

I bought a new laptop with the standard Vista installed. I dislike Vista and I would have to go through a costly upgrade to everyone of my programs.

Microsoft will lose market share to open-source desktops, a Dell strategist says at LinuxWorld.

I’m actually beginning to picture a day when users start to ask their IT departments why they can’t run Ubuntu Linux at work, the way they do at home.

"Some of us are perfectly happy just having a system that we no longer have to worry about."

While it has an over 20 per cent market share when we speak of servers in India, the free OS called Linux has just around 5 per cent market share in the country when it comes to desktops -- the lion's share going to Microsoft Windows. The scenario is gradually changing, it appears.

As more than 11,000 attendees prepare to converge on San Francisco for the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo next week, one industry analyst says customers are evaluating open-source software the same way they evaluate proprietary software: It has to be priced right and work well.

Even a discussion on religion and politics might well include mention of operating systems when a Linux user is in the room.