Wyse and Novell are delivering the promised Wyse Enhanced SUSE Linux Enterprise, an operating system designed for thin computing.

It will be available only on Wyse devices starting with Wyse’s X50L mobile thin clients in Q4.

The pair quotes IDC’s projection that the Linux thin client market will grow from nearly one million units in 2008 to 1.8 million units in 2011 when Linux is supposed to reach a 30.5% share of all operating system shipments on thin client devices, the result of Linux’ inherent TCO savings and the increasing irrelevance of the client operating system given virtualization.

The widgetry can be integrated with Microsoft’s Active Directory and deployed in a Windows environment. It includes built-in support for Wyse’s suite of virtualization software, enabling enterprises to take advantage of third-party desktop virtualization solutions such as Citrix’ XenDesktop and VMware’s VDI.

The operating system includes the GNOME desktop, Firefox browser and a terminal emulator as well as pre-built technologies for connecting to thin computing architectures such as the VDM client from VMware, the ICA client from Citrix and the RDP client from Microsoft.