GNU/Linux Desktop Market Share
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2011-08-19 23:22:59 UTC
- Modified: 2011-08-19 23:22:59 UTC
20 years old kernel finds itself everywhere
Summary: The usage of GNU/Linux on the desktop is not as tepid as the corporate press has some people believe
WHEN this site was a lot younger and well before it required a cache server to offload pressure, monthly "market share" statistics were occasionally posted to show that about 40% of the visitors of the site use GNU/Linux. We have a wiki page about this subject, still. Many actually used SUSE, perhaps because we covered SUSE quite routinely.
After the DDOS attacks of 2009 we needed to move to a server which was not shared. Whenever people attacked the site this impacted some other sites. It was then that we lost cPanel and AWStats. Later in the year we also added server-level cache for handling the load and for protection against attacks (common around December of that year). This was not CMS-level cache, which continued to be used. Varnish basically divided, based on some criteria, requests that could be served from a local file (static) and those that needed to be passed for processing the usual way by Apache and the underlying CMS (with or without the database, depending on cache). The outcome of this was that statistics ceased to be meaningful. The logs contained requests from Varnish rather than from the users who accessed pages. Having said that, it is reasonable to speculate that about 40% of the visitors are still GNU/Linux users, putting Android aside.
What might be worth noting here is that there is a population bias that affects how people perceive the "market share" (usage) of GNU/Linux. Users of this operating system are drawn into niche sites that have a strong privacy policy and would not give away logs for the sake of someone's business model. Moreover, there are uneven distributions of OS use, typically based on geographical and lingual factors. Those factors are rarely or never accounted for by quick 'facts' vendors that just use brute force to output some 'magic' numbers, never bothering to study the population in question.
The bottom line is, as far as a site like
Techrights is concerned, GNU/Linux as a desktop operating system is massive. It keeps growing, too.
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Comments
NotZed
2011-08-20 05:55:28
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
Based on capability, GNU/Linux has had its "desktop" year a long time ago.
Michael Glasser
2011-08-31 01:22:35
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
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
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
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
2011-08-31 06:55:10