PSA Peugeot Citroën, Europe's second-largest car manufacturer is migrating to Suse Linux desktops. Novell announced the deal to deploy GNU/Linux up to 20,000 desktops, the biggest single company desktop Linux migration so far, at the end of January.

According to a statement by Novell, Peugeot Citroën says the Suse Linux desktop is easy to use. Both companies claim good interoperability with the Windows operating systems and Office applications. According to IBM, its recently introduced Open Client offering also contributed to Peugeot Citroën's decision to migrate.

The biggest commercial switch comes on the heels of a decision by the French parliament to dump Microsoft Windows in favour of GNU/Linux. This summer, some 1,154 workstations in the French parliament will be migrated to a version of GNU/Linux, Open Source office tools OpenOffice and the Open Source Firefox web browser.

The migration of the parliament is backed by French parliament members Richard Cazenave and Bernard Carayon, of the Union for a Popular Movement party. The decision is based on a study by IT consultancy Atos Origin.

"The study showed that open-source software will from now on offer functionality adapted to the needs of parliament members and will allow us to make substantial savings despite the associated migration and training costs," a spokesman for the parliament said, according to news service CNET.

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