Linux desktop market share is up as much as 61 percent, study finds
It's possible that the Linux desktop will never be anything more than a fad among geeky enthusiasts. If so, a growing swell of people appear to be much more faddish of late, as numbers from W3Counter.com appear to indicate.
Looking at the data, Linux clearly has a ways to go. But consider just how far it has come:
Linux went from 1.25 percent in May of 2007 to 2.02 percent in March of 2008. That is 61.6 percent increase in market share in nine months. [Put another way,] that is 82 percent annual growth in installed computers.
These numbers don't match up with similarly gathered data from Hitslink, which has Linux market share still hovering around 0.61 percent market share. But even Hitslink shows strong growth over time: 41 percent-plus growth since May 2007.
It's not a perfect way to measure adoption. It's highly fallible. But one thing does seem clear to me from the data: Linux on the desktop is growing. It may only be growing within a small class of users, but it is growing. But if my grandma can use it, perhaps that "small class" will grow, too.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
I also live for the day when big publications like CNet actually publish informative articles. This isn't even piffle- it's piffle light. How many ways are there to measure market share? Here's a few ideas off the top of my head, and I'm not even an elite CNet tech "journalist":
- Tier 1 vendor OEM sales (Dell, HP)
- Major vendors like Novell and Red Hat
- Smaller independent vendors, such as Emperor Linux, ZaReason, and such
- Download statistics from the major distributions
- Surveys that attempt to sample how many Windows and Apple PCs are re-purposed to Linux, or use multiboot/virtual environments
Come on Mr. Asay and CNet, you can do better. A whole lot better.
I stay away from numbers which have no meaning ("we sold 3 widgets last year and this year we increased sales by 4,000%") other than to make yourself feel good. I'm more impressed by how many companies are now selling computers with Linux distros.
Wasnt it just recently that we were all excited that DELL launched their IdeaStorm?
I agree with Tuxperson that stats are worth the value you want to assign to a certain methodology and its flaws.
I know how many installs go on at our LUGfests and on my own I must have Linuxified over 25 work related PC's and about another 80-90 on my own (50 were for a retirement home) and about half of them are dual-boots because of games and that one killer app.
But the amount of non-tech people who now are aware that there is something called Linux out there is totally different from 2 years ago. LOTS of people didnt want to chuck out their single core CPUs to upgrade to a 'new' OS. and people started learning,. For the ones that need convincing, my "here are some Linux eye candy" routine is very popula ;-).
Slowly but steadily the desktop problems have been fixed and web experience makes OS agnosticism possible for many casual users. "Old" people can use it with no problem too. (I have no problem with 'grandma' since it usually is someone from a generation removed from computers like my mother was. Her first foray onto a computer was on PCLinusOS. She has loved it so far. My dad switched because he had read about open source and Shuttleworth and the principles behind FLOSS)
Now, its the turn of the low end PC's to come to mass markets with the EEE, Everex and other brands. This is were the real numbers are. I think support for those people will be critical for desktop acceptance to move forward.
Linux has never been, and likely never will be a product designed for grandma. Grandma would require her own personal administrator and with modern uptake in PERSONAL COMPUTING this is something we are clearly moving away from and not to.
If anything Linux will grow slightly from the hard core religious Linux sector more into the general geeky and power user population.
There are /many/ geeky/power user people using Linux today (thats me), but many of them are only using it as a secondary OS.
Additional Linux growth starts with these people, not with grandma.
thx.
pwnt.
I haven't had driver problems in my last 3 distributions of Linux. I have driver problems for EVERY version of Windows.
More, with websites that are created by M$ BackOrifice or other M$ pwned web tools, the client user experience is usually restricted or even totally locked to using M$ Interknot Exposer of some modern version, thus forcing users to invoke a browser user agent hack to even visit a website. Using the statistics of visiting browsers agent declarations could be a faulty way of gaging the quantity of installed Linux userbase.
Never had a W3C verified site fail to accept my Linux browsers. Many a W3C tested website uses Interknot Exposer specific constructs. It would seem that M$ sets defaults and assumes everyone will be borg.
Simply put, accurate figures are hard to obtain, but declaring Linux as being something grandma cannot use is discourteous - discourteous to grandma! I know of several people whose middle aged parents (these people are the age of grandparents, I simply am unaware of there being grandchildren - is this important?) that tell of setting up a computer using Linux and the 'older' people are quite happy. I know people older than my 50 years that are proficient at using Unix, is that an important difference? BTW - at 49, I was a step grandfather - is that not the same as a grandma?
Registered Linux user #260423
When her new laptop arrived about a year ago with Vista on she said
"This vista is the biggest load of bollocks I've ever seen"
She has been using Fedora ever since.
- by IG-87 August 18, 2009 8:14 PM PDT
- Yet another (but hopefully accurate) source for y'all
- Reply to this comment
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(15 Comments)http://marketshare.hitslink.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=8
I hope Linux increases coverage... by a lot. Personally, I am typing this comment with my desktop xubuntu box, I wiped Vista from my HP pavilion dv2 netbook/notebook, and my brothers have also their laptops AND desktops with Linux. All of them Ubuntu/xubuntu/kubuntu, and linux mint (based on ubuntu). Linux owes quite a bunch to Ubuntu+its derivatives. Why? because ubuntu makes it an easier way to have much more things in one place. For instance, the ubuntu repositories (add/remove), synaptic package manager, and tons of things made to be compatible with x/k/ubuntu.
I must agree though, they need to fix many things still (they're getting there fairly fast), it doesn't come without its bugs.