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(and on boxes out there running other versions, and on uptimes, etc.) - see the Linux Counter

(and on boxes out there running other versions, and on uptimes, etc.) - see the Linux Counter

i think the question is "Who would admit to using Lindows?", but thats another point. Linux Counter reports that, out of 115,886 submitted values, there are 8 distros in use, none of which are Lindows, which must be in the "Others" department, which takes up 13.13% of the share. Those 8 (in order of usage): Red Hat, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware, SuSE, Conectiva, "diy", and Debian sid. Then again, would your average Lindows user even know or care about something like Linux Counter? -- While you're there, fill out a reg form.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Linus for producing it. Before there was Linux there was MINIX, which had a 40,000-person newsgroup, most of whom were sending me email every day. I was going crazy with the endless stream of new features people were sending me. I kept refusing them all because I wanted to keep MINIX small enough for my students to understand in one semester. My consistent refusal to add all these new features is what inspired Linus to write Linux. Both of us are now happy with the results. The only person who is perhaps not so happy is Bill Gates. I think this is a good thing.

Thank you for showing me sanity.

And I'll also kind of ignore that the first few versions of Linux were published on the comp.os.minix newsgroup.

I will give you that MINIX is mispelled.

fuzzy thinking to make you want to scream for some real answers.

The reality of the situation is that SCO could never collect 100 dollars against every PC running Linux. At best, they would hurt RedHat, destroy what's left of Mandrake's bank account, and have a luminous cloud over every little distribution out there.

Are they going to use the linux counter or something?

Note: I've been unable to substantiate this

Easy one. According to counter.li.org there are 18 million users. SuSEgives us " more than 15 million private and professional Linux users around the globe".

If we consider 15 million users, we have $99 x 15M = $1.485.000.000 (one billion and a half).

Studios have become the leading desktop users of Linux. Three hundred Linux desktops at Dreamworks. That's amazing!

I know that typical Slashdot math (49 + 2 - 1 = 49) is a bit "creative", but I hardly see how a dozen (or even two, three, or four dozen) movie studios with a couple hundred Linux boxes measures up to the predicted number of Linux desktop users (18,000,000) from the folks who run the Linux Counter Web site.

I completely agree with you. I hail from India. Almost all my friends back home in India are doing CS as a major and i am sorry to say that Linux/*NIX has hardly made any inroads.

Dude, you've been moving around the wrong circles. You'll find the good guys here. Yeah, the chapters listed are geographically weird. Really don't think the "Vizag" chapter is different from the "Visakhapatnam" one; you see, Vizag:Visakhapatnam::LA:Los Angeles.

A better reference is probably the Linux Counter. For instance, there are more registered Linux users in India than in a country that most Indians love to hate, but is still smaller than a country they should really hate, fear and compete. :-D

(The comparison is really a joke to tease patriotic Indians. No offense intended to Pakistanis or Chinese)

I completely agree with you. I hail from India. Almost all my friends back home in India are doing CS as a major and i am sorry to say that Linux/*NIX has hardly made any inroads.

Dude, you've been moving around the wrong circles. You'll find the good guys here. Yeah, the chapters listed are geographically weird. Really don't think the "Vizag" chapter is different from the "Visakhapatnam" one; you see, Vizag:Visakhapatnam::LA:Los Angeles.

A better reference is probably the Linux Counter. For instance, there are more registered Linux users in India than in a country that most Indians love to hate, but is still smaller than a country they should really hate, fear and compete. :-D

(The comparison is really a joke to tease patriotic Indians. No offense intended to Pakistanis or Chinese)

I completely agree with you. I hail from India. Almost all my friends back home in India are doing CS as a major and i am sorry to say that Linux/*NIX has hardly made any inroads.

Dude, you've been moving around the wrong circles. You'll find the good guys here. Yeah, the chapters listed are geographically weird. Really don't think the "Vizag" chapter is different from the "Visakhapatnam" one; you see, Vizag:Visakhapatnam::LA:Los Angeles.

A better reference is probably the Linux Counter. For instance, there are more registered Linux users in India than in a country that most Indians love to hate, but is still smaller than a country they should really hate, fear and compete. :-D

(The comparison is really a joke to tease patriotic Indians. No offense intended to Pakistanis or Chinese)

I completely agree with you. I hail from India. Almost all my friends back home in India are doing CS as a major and i am sorry to say that Linux/*NIX has hardly made any inroads.

Dude, you've been moving around the wrong circles. You'll find the good guys here. Yeah, the chapters listed are geographically weird. Really don't think the "Vizag" chapter is different from the "Visakhapatnam" one; you see, Vizag:Visakhapatnam::LA:Los Angeles.

A better reference is probably the Linux Counter. For instance, there are more registered Linux users in India than in a country that most Indians love to hate, but is still smaller than a country they should really hate, fear and compete. :-D

(The comparison is really a joke to tease patriotic Indians. No offense intended to Pakistanis or Chinese)

There's not really a way to say this without making people groan... moderators, do your worst:

The reason RMS carps endlessly about the GNU project deserving credit it, quite simply, that the FSF did most of the work that resulted in "Linux." Linus originally set out to write a Unix clone from scratch (a small hobbyist one, not "big and professional like gnu"), but for a variety of reasons the project scaled back to writing a kernel and a handful of userland kernel-glue (insmod, iptables, etc.), and "Linux" distributions are based on GNU userlands -- the C library, compiler toolchain, shell, basic Unix utilities, and desktop (if Gnome) are all GNU things. They make a fairly coherent whole, provide basic system services such as fopen() and ls, and define the user's interface with the computer (bash or Gnome) -- XFree86 and Linux (the kernel) are as essential as GNU is, but they're smaller and they do less to directly define the operation of the system.

The GNU/Linux beef is one thing (language is inaccurate; koala bears aren't really bears), but calling Linus "the inventor of the Linux operating system" is about like crediting NT to the team that wrote KERNEL32.DLL. RMS spent more than a decade of his life setting up an organization which still puts out voluminous Free code, and crippled himself with RSI writing code to give away, and I see high-modded posts here that treat him with more contempt than I've ever seen aimed at Jack Valenti or Fritz Hollings.

You've heard this all before, of course, and you're probably sick of it by now -- it's only the slow and plodding truth, and it has no punchline. Worst of all, it takes itself seriously, just like RMS. I really can't think of a short or funny way, though, to explain how wrong it is to shit on the guy who had the idea for the GPL, who argued with the world for years until the idea of open source software started to take hold, who at the time Linux was started had written a lot of the existing Free code personally, and who is directly responsible for the userland most of you supposedly use -- that's not RMS trying to grab credit for someone else's work, that's simply the way it happened, the truth.

Not funny, and not sexy like "Finnish teenager writes OS in basement; world stunned." But true.

I wanted to confirm your statement, but I can't find the other two Debian users to ask them. :(

You mean 2 million. According to the 130k registerd users at the Linux Counter, Debian users are 13% of the estimated (by the Linux Counter) 18 million users. That places them in 3rd place, after RedHat (30%) and Mandrake (19%)

I really don't think Al Gore or anybody in the federal government was all that crucial in "producing" or "building" the Internet after 1993 (start of the Clinton/Gore administration). The Internet was alive and thriving and widespread (in the U.S. anyway) back in the late 80's -- I used it all the time for email via my CompuServe account in 1990, for example. And Linus made his first postings about Linux to a comp.os.minix newsgroup in 1991. What DID grow during the Clinton/Gore administration was the World Wide Web, which admittedly is the "killer application" of Internet technologies. However, I don't know how much the federal government really had to do with the growth of the web. And I don't know how many federal dollars went into upgrading the web infrastructure. I think most of the buildup during the 90's was commercial, pure and simple.

It probably is true that Gore was an important -- but hardly crucial -- player during his years as a senator. I think Vint Cerf has said as much. However, I don't really think that the Clinton/Gore administration can be given a whole lot of credit for building the Internet. You might be able to make a case for the World Wide Web. At least they didn't get in the way, which is often what happens when politicians get interested in something.

Maddog left Compaq a while back to join VA. When VA crashed, Maddog left their payroll. As a spokesperson for Linux International, he's had funding from a variety of sources, including, notably, IBM. But, just like Bruce, he's happy to consider opportunities to help companies with their Linux strategy or just to understand what Linux could mean to them.

Linux International

Have you considered Novell's eDirectory it would do you proud, if your budget allows. It's not free but, it isn't expensive either.

-- Do you count?

Do you count?

No, RedHat completely dominates the entire linux market. Here's a poll.

While its not clear who is ahead between Debian, SuSE, and Slackware, it is clear that RedHat leads, followed by Mandrake. This population size is enough to know this rather conclusively despite statistical error.

Of course, you could argue that this is mostly the US market, but then again, the US has slightly less than three times the number of computers with Linux on it than the second largest (according to this poll), so its not really statistically insignificant enough to leave out when talking about who is the leader in Linux.

BTW, this poll rates SuSE as 4th among 102413 machines.

58k.com is the leading online print job auction company and they their entire operations on open source software.
Here is a case study.

This site has much more reliable data

Best regards from Linux user #127040...

Of course, the only thing really shown here is that if I am allowed to pick any number, and multiply by any factor I want to, I can get any number I want to get!

Of course, the only thing really shown here is that if I am allowed to pick any number, and multiply by any factor I want to, I can get any number I want to get!

having counted Linux users since 1995, I believe I know something about the error factors when estimating the Linux user population.
This guy is not saying ONE word about where he got his numbers from; that's a new low in statistical harebrainedness.
If I could invent my own data points, I could do considerably better than three datapoints, at least. So he's probably using someone's numbers. But whose?

Apologies. Rechecked my history sources... Linus began working on Linux in April 1991. Don't know quite where I got that wrong date in my mind. Bleh.

--LP

According to the Linux Counter, about 1.6% of the Linux users use the 2.0 kernel.
That's more than the number of people using 2.5.
(Don't like the numbers? Get counted!)

According to the Linux Counter, about 1.6% of the Linux users use the 2.0 kernel.
That's more than the number of people using 2.5.
(Don't like the numbers? Get counted!)

The fact is that we don't know what Palladium with his hardware implementation will do. We are all just speculating. The expo with M$ will be a good place to ask them about it. The question is also who will certify the software that will be allowed to run on such hardware. I doubt that it will be M$. They are not authorized to give such certificates.

I don't see why Linux would not be certified. After all pirated software is no issue in GNU/Linux world. We don't break any licenses using our software. If they force DRM on mp3's that's ok.

GNU/Linux is a legitimate, legal OS. US Department of Defense is using it. German Parliament is using it... M$ can not just say that they don't approve it. I'm sure, that every OS will be certified and will be able to boot on such architecture. The Linux counter estimates that there are 18 million Linux users. Do you think M$ can say to all of us that we will have to use Windows in 2-4 years? And even if they can do you think we will change their minds by throwing rotten eggs at them on the expo? No, i don't see them as a threat they are just competition.

Yes they have balls to show up on the expo but we will have to show more balls in dealing with them on a professional basis and not to look at them with hate in our eyes despite the facts what they already did or will do to us.

TiVo: great interface, looks like a regular component, has hardware to do what you need, is quiet, cheap monthly and reasonable lifetime fee.

Linux tool: clunky haX0r3d interface, driver bullshit, noisy, honkin, ground-loop havin beige box.

How do you explain this Linux counter entry, then?

In the old days, many many people used the 2.3 kernels.
Today, the Linux Counter system statistics show less than 1% of users using the "development" kernel.
Is this a worrying aspect of the Linux community's development cycle?

Checking Linux Counter you will find that Slackware runs 12.09% of the registerd boxes. I couldn't find any current numbers indicateing how many netscape users there are. Maybe someone else knows.

You don't need to be Microsoft to predict Open Source's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Open Source faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Open Source because Linux is dying. Things are looking very bad for Open Source. As many of us are already aware, Open Source continues to lose market support. Red ink flows like a river of blood. Red Hat is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

Linux leader Linus states that there are many users of Linux. How many users of Linux are there? Let's see. The Linux counter extrapolates a figure of 125,613 registered Linux users to eighteen million actual users. A recent article put Linux at about 0.03% of the desktop market. This result and the discrepancy on the Linux counter are consistent with the fact that only about 1 in every 150 Linux newbies have successfully set up PPP.

Due to the troubles of ArsDigita, Eazel, Linuxcare, Cygnus, Aktopia -- abysmal sales and so on -- they all went out of business or were taken over by Red Hat who also sell the troubled OS. Now Red Hat is almost dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Open Source has steadily declined in business credibility. Linux is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Linux is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Open Source continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Open Source is dead.

Fact: Open Source is dying

Simple, Download yourself a decent Linux distribution or maybe one for beginners and start using a stable system for a change.

this is probably too late to do any good, but....
the stats at the Linux Counter show that the most popular 2.4 kernel is 2.4.12 (144 boxes), closely followed by 2.4.9 (126), 2.4.13 (116) and 2.4.14 (110).
The average uptime of 2.4.0 boxes is higher than for anything else in the 2.4 series (46.5 days), but this is very much a reflection of the days since release, too!

Did you mean 18 million? Cause last I checked there were 18 million But maybe I can't read.

You sure about that?

says the Linux Counter systemstats.
Granted, this has about a month's lead time, and is hardly "representative" (more enthusiasts than real users), but it shows 2.4 at 58.6% of the 1142 machines registered. 2.4.14 is 0.4%, 2.4.12 is 10.8%, beating everything but 2.2.19 (at 14.6%).
btw, the 5 registered 2.4.14 kernels are all prereleases - pre5aa1 being the most popular one.
This is a fun view - but that's no reason not to get counted!

Harald, counter, compulsive.

Approximately 18 million is a lot of nerds!

It's a good thing I can buy a Mac after all. Monopoly Shmonopoly.

and has (or had:) net access, I guess this must be Osama Bin Laden!

At Oct 14 2001 16:53:42 GMT, there are
191444
users registered
108009
machines registered

My guess at the number of Linux users:
Eighteen million

Get Counted!

Count your Machine!

98946 dead accounts will be deleted on November 1.
Rescue an account! Log in today!

At Oct 14 2001 16:53:42 GMT, there are
191444
users registered
108009
machines registered

My guess at the number of Linux users:
Eighteen million

Get Counted!

Count your Machine!

98946 dead accounts will be deleted on November 1.
Rescue an account! Log in today!

At Oct 14 2001 16:53:42 GMT, there are
191444
users registered
108009
machines registered

My guess at the number of Linux users:
Eighteen million

Get Counted!

Count your Machine!

98946 dead accounts will be deleted on November 1.
Rescue an account! Log in today!

At Oct 14 2001 16:53:42 GMT, there are
191444
users registered
108009
machines registered

My guess at the number of Linux users:
Eighteen million

Get Counted!

Count your Machine!

98946 dead accounts will be deleted on November 1.
Rescue an account! Log in today!

At Oct 14 2001 16:53:42 GMT, there are
191444
users registered
108009
machines registered

My guess at the number of Linux users:
Eighteen million

Get Counted!

Count your Machine!

98946 dead accounts will be deleted on November 1.
Rescue an account! Log in today!

Linux Counter (?)

• More 2.2 persons have registered
  
• The 2.4 persons have forgotten to use "machine-update -c", and have slipped out of the list after not updating for 60 days.
  

I know it's off topic, but...

If I wanted to block all afghanistan internet
connections, would this work?

$IPTABLES -A INPUT -s *.af -j DROP


Oh, and here is something interesting, there is only 1 person in Afghanistan who uses Linux. Don't believe me? here's proof

If the trend from the last three months continues, we will soon be seeing Brazil overtake the US in terms of new registrants.

It would be probably a bad idea to send registering e-mail, even if anonymous. However,
it would not be so bad to point them to the
Linux Counter

This guy sure did.

Have you registered your linux boxes at Linux Counter