Comments

• NotZed

  2011-08-20 05:55:28

  My blog is but a piddle of a puddle but I see a fair bit of Linux. Not entirely surprisingly given my past and blog posts, but I don't have too many regular readers from previous connections and most hits are just from web search results unrelated to gnu/linux (e.g. #1 hit every month for the last year has been: "java fft").
  
  So most of those are for quite technical programming stuff - OpenCL, scientific programming with Java, beagleboard related, or obtuse performance stuff even I can't remember writing much about. That probably means the demographic is largely students and other engineers who are probably more likely to be using a decent engineering platform like gnu/linux. Last month I had about 20% gnu, 65% microsoft and 5% apple.
  
  What I find more interesting is where the people are from. USA is by far the biggest on it's own, and then usually a bit over 1/3 as many hits from Germany, with Australia and India a bit behind, and then UK trailing somewhat. But the USA is only about 1/3 of the total too, so it isn't even a majority.
  
  The Germany and Australian figures surprise me a bit, particularly Australia with it's much smaller population than every other source. Perhaps googlesearch.au adds some bias to the results based on location/the language I use (unfortunately, you never can tell ...).
  
  A few of the others are surprising too (although the numbers are so low it's hard to be definitive), for example in the last month Malaysia has more more hits than Russia or France, and Thailand (just) more than China (maybe malaysia/thai are hitting the cooking/gardening posts!).
  
  But back OT ... personally I think the 'year of the linux desktop' was about 8 years go. That people chose not to use it is their own problem - one that often costs them dearly - I definitely wouldn't even consider using anything else right now .
  
  As far as I can tell it did everything back then that all the 'desktop' systems do now, which for the most part means automatically mounting a usb drive when you insert it, or configuring a pcmcia card (or whatever the current iteration is called) automatically. Oh except sound actually worked out of the box ...
  
  I think all the work since then has been purely cosmetic (or big steps backwards, e.g. trying to put a touch interface to a keyboard+mouse system, or packagekit, or pulse-audio). On the other hand the quality and breadth of software beyond the core so-called 'desktop' just continues to improve in bounds and leaps.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2011-08-20 07:32:40

  Last night my connection was down (had been down for 14 hours), so I went through my file system looking at old screenshots of my older Linux boxes (I love to document these). I saw Ubuntu 4.10, Mandrake 9, SUSE 8, and a few more. It was then that I reminded myself they had to compete with XP. Nowadays XP is still "the one to beat" and GNU/Linux is considerably better. I installed Queeze last week (with KDE4) and I am still finding new features that astound me. Carla put it well last week.
  
  Based on capability, GNU/Linux has had its "desktop" year a long time ago.

• Michael Glasser

  2011-08-31 01:22:35

  Shuttleworth speaks of Apple's OS X as the one to beat. As you and I discussed, at least in the areas we covered, desktop Linux, as represented by PCLOS, has not yet hit that mark.
  
  From the audiocast when you kindly let me on your show:
  
  Snit: 24:45 ----- When you have "Save" on the left and "Save" on the right - people click on the wrong button. And it's user error - that's what it's called - but it's not; it's an error of the system. [About older PCLOS] looking at its default programs ... and there is a mish mash [quit/exit, save dialog with "Save" on left or right] ----- Roy: 25:32 ----- I've used it before and I don't think it's true what you are saying now. -----
  
  And:
  
  Snit: 32:28: ----- [Of the newest PCLOS] I will post - I will make screenshots or maybe even a quick video and we can look at it. Now I haven't used the newest one ... but let me look at PC Linux and I can pretty much guarantee you there will be a mix of quit and exit, there will be a mix of hot keys, there will be a mix of save dialogs, there will be a mix of print dialogs, ... some programs will lose the clipboard when you quit some programs won't... ----- Roy: 33:15 ----- [talks about how development happens... ] Interesting that you raise this point ... when you are using something like a file dialog you might say that will be inconsistent but that is just not true ... the way it works in KDE I would be quite surprised if it is very inconsistent. I would be very happy if you found some cases where it's not consistent - maybe even help developers. -----
  
  In both cases, though, you were shown to be wrong.
  
  http://tmp.gallopinginsanity.com/PCLOS-OSX-comparison.pdf

• Nate

  2011-08-20 03:20:11

  I administer a server for a small business based in MA, USA. I occasionally check the server-wide logs to formulate statistics, but unfortunately they haven't really impressed me. I just did a quick check now, and only 0.34% of 48,496 form submissions to approximately 200 websites from 2011-01-01 to 2011-08-19 have been from a system identified as a Linux (excluding Android). Most of our clients are small businesses located in the northeatern United States. The submissions I am referring to are from such as general contact forms, reservation request forms, payment forms, and shopping cart order forms.
  
  Of course, I know that statistics will be different for different audiences, but it's disappointing to me not to be able to see better numbers from the only source I can personally trust.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2011-08-20 07:25:23

  Yes, this validates exactly the point that I was making. The users of GNU/Linux tend to located in other geographies (Brazil for example) and visit particular types of sites. My other site, schestowitz.com, has 10%-20% of the visitors running some form of "Linux". Those sites are never included in statistics from the firms the corporate press loves to quote (US-based firms).
  
  See
  
  http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/08/21/linux-popularity-across-the-globe/ http://royal.pingdom.com/2011/05/12/the-top-20-strongholds-for-desktop-linux/
  
  The US is not even listed in the top 20.

• Michael Glasser

  2011-08-31 01:20:09

  I responded to this post here: http://trw.gallopinginsanity.com/2011/08/27/gnulinux-desktop-market-share

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2011-08-31 06:55:10

  Please refrain from spamming this site. You have just posted 7 non-content self-promotion links in a matter of 5 minutes, Your trolling and stalking elsewhere have verged the pathological too.