The respondents considered the fear of "painful and distracting" change as the largest obstacle to migrating from Windows to Linux. Device driver issues, fragmented distributions and lack of support were not among the high potential hurdles, according to the study.

Results gathered by the market researchers showed that some end-user groups considered a Linux rollout easier than expected. These included "transaction workers and general professional users with lighter and more predictable requirements." Although the perception may be among the cross-section of users that Linux is the "techie" solution, it is just this targeted group that is more likely to migrate to Linux in contrast to office-based power users, highly mobile professionals and creative staff. The researchers found usability and business context to be the most sought after factors for a successful migration, more so than purely technical considerations.

The study with the title "Linux on the Desktop: Lessons from mainstream business adoption" was financed by IBM and executed by the British market research firm Freeform Dynamics. The researchers' objective was "to deliver insight rather than recommendations" and, therefore, is not so much representative or generalizable, but rather more of a case study character.

The survey involved 1,275 IT professionals. A third of the sample was organizations with 10 to 250 employees, and about a quarter each of organizations with 10 or fewer and 250 to 5,000 heads. A good half of the respondents were "hands on" users, a quarter were managers and 15% were consultants. Most (40%) came from the U.K., 23% from the U.S., 19% from other parts of Europe and 18% from the rest of the world. Freeform Dynamics and IBM provide the business community research report as a PDF for free distribution.