According to the "The Open Source Developer Report," which became available from the Eclipse Foundation this month, there is a clear trend toward Linux increasingly becoming the operating system of choice on developers' desktops.

This finding emerged as one of the key highlights of the executive summary of the 2010 Eclipse Community Survey which Eclipse conducted between April 15 and May 15, 2010. A total of 1,696 individuals completed the survey.

The survey summary says that in 2007, 73.8% of developers cited Windows as their primary development operating system, but in the 2010 survey, that percentage was 58.3%, representing roughly a 16-point drop from the 2007 survey and a 6-point drop from the 2009 survey.

By contrast to the Windows usage decline, close to one-third, 32.7%, of developers responding to the 2010 survey use a variant of Linux on their desktops, representing an increase of almost 6 points from 2009, and an increase of almost 13 points from 2007. In the 2010 survey, Ubuntu was the most popular at 18.3%, followed by Fedora at 4.7%. "Developers appear to be shifting away from Microsoft Windows to Linux for their development system," states the report.

For more information on the survey, go the Eclipse Foundation website.