Linux Adoption

Although Linux status as mainstream operating system is relatively recent, it has already been adopted in several different scenarios throughout the home, business, and government.

Power users

Government

Brazil's PC Conectado program

• City of Munich has chosen to migrate its 14,000 desktops to Debian-based LiMux
• The United States Department of Defense uses and develops open source software
• The city of Vienna has chosen to start migrating its desktop PCs to Debian-based Wienux
• Spain has been noted as the furthest along the road to Linux adoption, for example with Linux distribution LinEx
• State owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) is installing Linux in all of its 20,000 retail branches as the basis for its web server and a new terminal platform. (2005)
• In 2005 the Government of Peru voted to adopt open source across all its bodies. The 2002 response to Microsoft's critique is available online.
  In the preamble to the bill, the Peruvian government stressed that the choice was made to ensure that key pillars of democracy were safeguarded: "The basic principles which inspire the Bill are linked to the basic guarantees of a state of law."
• In January 2006, law in Venezuela went into effect, mandating a two year transition to open source in all public agencies.
• In April 2006, the US Federal Aviation Administration announced that it had completed a migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in one third of the scheduled time and saved 15 million dollars.
• The Government of Pakistan established a Technology Resource Mobilization Unit in 2002 to enable groups of professionals to exchange views and coordinate activities in their sectors and to educate users about free software alternatives. Linux is an option for poor countries which have little revenue for public investment; Pakistan is using open source software in public schools and colleges, and hopes to run all government services on Linux eventually.
• The Ministry of Defence in Singapore began migrating its computers from Microsoft to free software in 2004, while South Korea, China and Japan agreed to cooperate in creating new Linux-based programs.
• The French Parliament has switched to using Ubuntu on desktop PCs.
• The Government of India has set up a resource centre for Free and Open Source Software managed jointly by C-DAC Chennai and Anna University, Chennai. It has one of its node in Mumbai at VJTI College
• The Federal Employment Office of Germany (Bundesagentur für Arbeit) has migrated 13,000 public workstations from Windows NT to OpenSuse.
• Czech Post migrated 4000 servers and 12,000 clients to Novell Linux in 2005
• German Foreign ministry is migrating all of its 11,000 desktops to GNU/Linux and other Open source applications.

Education

Linux is often used in technical disciplines at universities and research centres. This is due to several factors, including that Linux is available free of charge and includes a large body of free/open source software. To some extent, technical competence of computer science and software engineering academics is also a contributor, as is stability, maintainability, and upgradability. IBM ran an advertising campaign entitled "Linux is Education" featuring a young boy who was supposed to be "Linux".

Examples of large scale adoption of Linux in education include the following:

• The OLPC XO-1 (previously called the MIT $100 laptop and The Children's Machine), is an inexpensive laptop running Linux, which will be distributed to millions of children as part of the One Laptop Per Child project, especially in developing countries.
• Republic of Macedonia deployed 5,000 Linux desktops running Ubuntu across all 468 public schools and 182 computer labs (December 2005). Later in 2007, another 180,000 Ubuntu running, thin client computers were deployed.
• Schools in Bolzano, Italy have switched to a custom distribution of Linux (FUSS Soledad GNU/Linux), which will be used by the 16,000 students in the area when they return on 12 September 2005.
• Brazil has around 20,000 Linux desktops running in elementary and secondary public schools.
• The Netherlands has an initiative called Open Source en standaarden in het onderwijs, "Open source and standards in education".
• Government officials of Kerala, India announced they will use only free software, running on the Linux platform, for computer education, starting with the 2,650 government and government-aided high schools.
• 22,000 students in the US state of Indiana had access to Linux Workstations at their high schools in 2006.
• Germany has announced that 560,000 students in 33 universities will migrate to Linux.
• The Philippines has deployed 13,000 desktops of Fedora, the first 10,000 where delivered in December 2007 by ASI. Another 10,000 desktops of Edubuntu and Kubuntu are planned.
• Russia announced in October 2007 that all its school computers will run on Linux. This is to avoid cost of licensing current unlicensed software.
• 9,000 computers to be converted to Linux and OpenOffice.org in school district Geneva, Switzerland by September 2008
• An Indian state Tamil Nadu plans to distribute 100,000 Linux laptops to its students.

Home

Business

Linux is also used in some corporate environments as the desktop platform for its employees, with commercially available solutions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and Linspire.

• Ernie Ball, a company manufacturing guitar strings, and known for its famous Super Slinky guitar strings, has used Linux as its desktop operating system since 2000.
• Novell is undergoing a migration from Windows to Linux. Of its 5500 employees, 50% were successfully migrated as of April, 2006. This was expected to rise to 80% by November.
• Wotif, the Australian hotel booking website, migrated from Windows to Linux servers to keep up with the growth of its business.
• Union Bank of California announced in January 2007 that it would standardize its IT infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in order to lower costs.
• Peugeot, the European car maker, announced plans to deploy up to 20,000 copies of Novell's Linux desktop, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, and 2,500 copies of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, in 2007.
• Mindbridge, a software company, announced in September, 2007 that it had migrated a large number of Windows servers onto a smaller number of Linux servers and a few BSD servers. It claims to have saved "bunches of money."
• Virgin America, the low cost U.S. airline, uses Linux to power its in-flight entertainment system, RED.