While hard numbers remain elusive, business adoption of Linux on the desktop appears to be growing, motivated at least in part by the need to stretch IT budgets during the current economic slump.

Linux currently has a tiny but rapidly growing toehold in the overall desktop market. The upside, according to Open Road blogger Matt Asay, is that Linux desktop systems grew 62% from 2007 to 2008. The downside: even that tremendous expansion only brought Linux desktops to 2.02% of the market.

Open source office suites gain ground

Desktop adoption seems likely to continue to grow, especially with the economic downturn and the entry of IBM into the market with its Linux-based Symphony counterpart to the Microsoft Office suite, giving businesses the application tools (in addition to OpenOffice) that they need to run on top of a Linux OS.

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