Summary: Microsoft's slanderous claims about the popularity of GNU/Linux are echoed by its crowd and refuted by professionals

OUR readers 'Goblin' and David Gerard have just pointed out that Microsoft's FUD regarding the sub-notebooks market is being refuted, just as it was before (Dell, for example, refuted this in August and Canonical did so too).

Reports that the Linux netbook is dead or dying are incorrect, at least globally, according to an analyst firm.

Nearly one-third of the 35 million netbooks on track to ship this year will come with some variant of the free, open-source operating system, ABI Research said. The exact split is 32% Linux versus 68% Windows, said Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI, which works out to about 11 million Linux netbooks this year.

That number contradicts third-party market figures, trumpeted by Microsoft, that showed Linux shipping on as few as 4% of U.S. netbooks.

Dell claims that one in 3 sub-notebooks that it sells does in fact run Ubuntu. In Germany, which likes GNU/Linux, one source claimed that 40% ship with GNU/Linux (2008). Microsoft Jack [1, 2, 3] spreads the 4% lie, still. It's part of those massive lies (selective US-only numbers for the most part) that have become so typical. Self-professed Windows guy and shameless Linux basher Alexander Wolfe, for instance, is back to his attacks on GNU/Linux, using invalid data [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].

Alas, as ITWire puts it, many people are becoming cautious about spreading FUD because their deception gets exposed sooner or later, sometimes leaked.

Open source FUD is alive and kicking

[...]

The frequency with which such articles appear has lessened to a marked degree simply because people who pen them often end up being branded as fools.

[...]

I've been watching people trying to spread FUD about FOSS for the last 12 years and not one has succeeded. They've all been shot down in flames. Some of the hardy veterans who have been countering the FUD, people like the erudite David F. Skoll of the Canadian company Roaring Penguin, are still around and still firing back.

In the age of free information and open access, lies are more difficult to get away with. ⬆

Steve Ballmer's presentation slide
from 2009 shows GNU/Linux as bigger than Apple on the desktop

“Forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux...”

--Steve Ballmer (September 2008)

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