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Linux On the Desktop: 0.24 Percent?
Canyon Rat writes: "According to this story, less than a quarter of a percent of desktop users have adopted Linux. The survey was based on web surfers so it may be accurate." Anne Onymus adds a link to an
interesting reaction over at lowendmac.com.
The problem with a web survey is that websites are targeted, much like television, to a specific audeince. That audience is more or less likely to be a windows/linux user, and as such, the results are likely flawed. Kind of like if you tried to do an OS survey on slashdot. Linux would have a much higher rating, would it not?
01101001 01100001 01101101 01101110 01101111 01110100 01100001 01101100 01100001 01110111 01111001 01100101 01110010
The survey was based on web surfers so it may be accurate
Er, or it may not. Does the web surfing population necessarily represent all computer owners? I would suggest that web surfers are slightly more likely to be tech-savvy and therefore web-surfers will have a higher percentage of Linux desktop use than non-web users. So the figure may be even lower.
Unfortunately Linux is burdened with the overhead of X Windows. This slows everything down. People that compare Linux desktops side by side wit regular windows know the difference.
------------------------------------------------ let me tell you a story about a man named jed.
How was the servey done? Did they just read browser strings or something else? And what are the other ~2% using?
I know we are still small on the desktop, but this is even less than i expected. One possiblity pops up, though. Have someone established that Linux users have the same surfing habits as other people? Are we as interested in general news? Or maybe we're all so 31337 that we changed our browser string..
Anyhow, when Linux-based web appliances start taking off (when, when, when), the market share will hopefully start increasing.
Stop the brainwash
Maybe cmdrTaco should post the Slashdot stats of it's users OS
So how many of us are actually using Linux/*BSD/etc to browse slashdot?
Right now, I'm using windows at work. Doesn't mean I want to be.
More like wastesidestory. I have their statistical package duplicated right here (in perl of course):
if ($browser eq "Netscape") { #check netscape share
$netscape++;
} else { #check ie share here
$ie ++;
}
#calculate apple share
$apple = "4.8";
#round netscape share
$netscape = "15";
#check for errors here
$ie = $ie - $apple - $netscape;
return reverse "Linux programmers are winnies";
[Insert Pro-Linux Outcry]
[Insert Rambling Out-Of-My-Ass Reasons why Survey Can't Be Correct]
[Insert Attack on Microsoft]
[Insert Short Insult To Silly Un-learned Users Who Don't Know Better]
[Insert Reminder That Survey Can't Be True]
[Close with Name, Followed By Witty Anti-M$ Slogan, Being Sure To Substitute A Dollar Sign For The "S" Because Doing That Is Inventive And Hilarious]
------
Let me give you the lowdown
As soon as Linux is taken up by the general business population, we'll see it infiltrate the general home desktop scene. That won't be for years. Windows has too much of the market share at this point for that to happen and whilst Microsoft are offering software such as Windows XP which is essentially 'eye-candy', Linux won't take hold.
A survey that does not reveal its methodology. Until you know how they did it, how can you really trust the results? Does anyone how the survey was conducted?
I bet that there will be at least 100 posts saying that you can't trust this kind of data, that it's complete bollocks and yada yada yada Linux is so good it will for Bill to eat Linus used shorts.
Please don't care about that article, it's not interesting really. It's not really news. We all know what we use ourselves (XP and linux in my case) and I suggest that our time should be spent on something better than surveys and such things.
Writing serious and useful documentation for linux for instance, and putting it into XML and making it readable and searchable in different applications (such as the exellent Konqi, the only other browser besides IE I would ever dream of using). Go do that instead of reading all the pointlessness that this news consists of.
I think we can all start from the premise that these statistics are:
a) flawed
b) backward looking
What would be more interesting is some insight into where browsing is headed. For example, there will be some sites which will attract mobile traffic much more readily than others - traffic updates, or train running info, or today's tube (as in London Underground) breakdown. Then we are going to see amounts of traffic from appliances such as set-top boxes.
But then I suppose "We produce rubbish statistics" won't be as headline grabbing as "You Linux folks are all losers".
Dunstan
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
And why do we care about surfers rather than *servers* in the first place? Obviously people are MS shills.
Looks like to me that the choice of word "surfers" is intended to cast FUD on the real figures on Linux' and Unix *server* market dominance.
The stat that 0.24% of desktop users use Linux came from 125,000 disparate, largely general purpose websites (i.e. not "WindowsUserFanatics" or "BillGatesFanBoys": Indeed there are extremely few sites that are geared to specifically Windows users): Comparing these general stats against the stats against a technologically biased site is absolutely absurd. And if only fanatics and fanboys use Linux, well then they've proven their point about Linux' low acceptance right there...
Cheers, Andy!
Andy Rabagliati
I tried using Linux KDE as a desktop last year and was disappointed with the speed of the graphical interface. I could watch the dialogs painting and this was on a 900MHz machine.
This is not an issue with Servers.
I, like most users, expect performance to be at least as snappy as on other systems using comparable hardware.
As hardware gets faster, the GUI sluggishness will be less apparent. That along with the advent of more mainstream compatible apps will make it more prevalent as a desktop OS.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Isn't that one in 400? Think about that. Of all the THOUSANDS of PCS that Dell, Gateway, and others sell each day, how many of these get Linux put on them? I am trying to comtemplate all the computers I have ever seen on my life on the desktop, myriads! And maybe 2 have had Linux running on it for the desktop. EVERYONE (speaking from mid america here) today has a computer, most families have two, think how many run Linux, none. Think how many have heard of Linux, practically none. This seems ridiculously high, its probably much less than .24 percent.
I hope this kills off for once and for all the tinny cheerleaderism about "Linux on the desktop", so that we can put that absurd, counter-productive, and frankly idle fantasy to rest. Please, leave us alone, fuck off, and please don't try to fix what was never broken. Thanks.
Pushin' 'n dealin', shovin' 'n stealin'
revealed that 100% of people own mobile phones.
24% may seem small, but Linux is the only OS making headway in the broad OS marketplace, the one OS with the strongest compounded growth projection over the next couple of years (at least), and the one OS which supports more hardware platforms than any other. This didn't happen with any high-powered marketeering or monopoly power, but out of grass root free choice.
Man and Goat
I want to see the stats for the page that story is served from. Fools will see more Linux desktops than they thought existed!
While I doubt the numbers, I suppose it could be true. At my current company, they insist on supplying *everyone* with a windows box, regardless of need. As a sysadmin, all I use it for is surfing (google searches, sfocus, pstormm slashdot =), since my Linux desktop is where I get all my real work done ;)
Sinepaw.org: Grape Winos
I've got some issues with this... mostly in what sites were used. I mean if it was yahoo, geocities, aol, etc... obviously we know that that .24% was some random newbie who just happened to click the wrong thing in mozilla (slighty kidding). If it was slashdot... than well that .24% is still probably accurate. Look people... linux isn't ready yet. It will be, maybe soon... kde 3.0 looks promising, the kernel gets better overtime, etc. But not yet. People have tried, and people have failed. This isn't a flame, I use linux... but right now, I'm on a win 98 box due to a damn winmodem. But thats the thing... think about it... how many computers do you think are in the world? How many of those are on the internet? How many of those also happen to be running linux? Say there are 200 million pcs in the US (which may be accurate). Now say 100 million are on the internet (close). Now, .24% of 100 mil is 240 thousand, which seems alittle low. By how much? I have no clue... but from what I've seen linux is primarily servers and research machines. Either way, this number is close to the truth, probably with a margin of error of 100 thousand either way. Of course this all comes down to what you consider a desktop machine. I mean if you're using the machine to be dedicated to squid, but you play solitaire on it all the time... is it a server or a desktop? Oh well... i've got 2 linux desktops so you can mark those down.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
Damn, that's much better then I would have guessed. Think about it, that means, one out of every 400 users is using linux as a desktop system. I'm impressed, honestly, I didn't know there were that many clued lusers out there.
Wow!
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
As long as the web is based on open, broad industry standards (as opposed to de facto Microsoft standards), I don't care what most web users are using. As long as the web and websites are based on open standards, I can use whatever the heck I want. Mozilla and some others have enough impetus now to keep up more or less with the basic standards. If I'm in a tiny minority, so what?
I do care, however, if too many sites use this as a justification to create "IE-only" sites. I've seen a few of those, and those are stupid and annoying.
-Rob
The stats from LowEndMac claiming a higher %age of Linux users is probably bias, since it's a techy web site about low end Macs, probably the best techy thing to do with a low end Mac is to install Linux on it. (They even have a special Linux page.)
The stats from WebSideStory is based on the stats from 125000 sites, and so is arguably more realistic.
I tink the problem that linux faces, is no matter how user frendly the GUI gets the command line is sill needed for many tasks. I couldnt imaging dropping into a command box on 2k just to start word, I may browse to the installed directory and start it there, bu i woudlnt type \progra~1\microsof~2\office\winword.exe unless the os was totally crashed.
:)
as soon as linux has a GUI that was able to run any app easly then there would be more linux web surfers.
just my thaughts on the topic
--
The computer told me to press any key to continue,I pressed the one looking like this (|) !!OH SH*T!!
Windows (all versions): 93 %
Macintosh: 4%
Linux: 1%
Other: 4%
Detailed figures on browsers and operating systems on their site. I think Google can be considered quite representative, not?
(posted with Konqueror / Linux)
I'm wondering if they took into account the fact that many Linux users change their user agent settings on the browser to be compatible with web sites. I know some sites that won't let you on with other than IE settings.
While I like Linux and run it whenever I need some server somewhere the whole thing is still quite far from being suitable as a normal desktop OS.
I use a PC at work which runs MS-NT and I got a machine at home which uses MS-XP. At work I don't have a choice but NT does what it needs to do and adinistrating the whole lot isn't my job so I really don't care.
At home 75% of the time spend behind my computer is spend on gaming. Gaming under Linux sucks, and don't give me all these rants that gaming under linux rules supreme or anything 'cos you're not convincing me. There's hardly any games for Linux and they usually (I SAID USUALLY, AS IN, NOT ALWAYS) come out way later.
So I'll stick to MS for my desktop until Linux gets better support from game developers. This does not only go for me but for many people I know who all love Linux but would also like to play a lot of computer games. Since a lot of games need patches etc. most people also do their surfing from within windows, so, however this survey came into being, it really isn't all that surprising.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
I've had some training in statistics, and I see a number of problems. First, the slashdot editors are making the perennial journalists' mistake of misinterpretting statistics. Statmarket only claims to be measuring web client usage, and doesn't make any claims about the desktop market in general (at least from what I saw).
In terms of the study itself, statmarket admits that the sample is "self-selected" rather than randomly selected. This results in a biased sample. In particular, since they are offering a service to business users, the sample is likely biased in favour of business sites. The bias is then against more "arty" or technologically-oriented sites, resulting in lower-than-expected numbers from Macintosh and Linux users. It might also be biased against home users.
That said, while the survey may be off by an order of magnitude, I wouldn't expect it to be off by more than an order of magnitude. Most other surveys don't put Linux usage at more than 2 or 3%
If you want to change the stats, bite the bullet and switch to Linux all the way. Yes, t's scarey, but you will find that you will probably only miss a game or two. I can't believe that anyone in thier right mind uses MS Office for home stuff. I'm mean what the hell, they can't write mom without frilly fonts?
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
Win 98 80178 (45%)
Win 2000 33183 (18%)
Unknown 17948 (10%)
Win NT 15051 (8%)
Mac 13085 (7%)
Win 95 11717 (6%)
Linux 2459 (1%)
Win 3.x 1055 (0%)
Unix 761 (0%)
WebTV 226 (0%)
OS/2 24 (0%)
Amiga 4 (0%)
The scariest thing is that win98 is still 45%. If not being part of that 45% is wrong, I don't wanna be right, baby!
"Old man yells at systemd"
Is this really news? I mean, come one, Google Zeitgeist has been reporting on browser access statistics for over a year now and it's CLEARLY Internet Explorer with the HUGE majority of use. Anyone simply looking at the corporate world can see this. My guess would be that the most reliable statistic on Linux use on the desktop would be the number of unique visitors to /. excluding a small percentage of those who are forced to sneak in a few minutes of /. from their Windoze box at work. And Will Wheaton.
This report is based on how browsers identify themselves to websites.
I use Konqueror and Opera, both of which by default identify themselves as MSIE 5.
If I had left these settings alone I would be counted as a Windows user rather than Linux.
Scroll down a little bit, take a look at "operating systems"..
i think google is pretty fair, 1 percent is not much, but it is about 400% percent higher then those in websidestory
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
previously on slashdot -- search the page for "slow".
Just out of curiousity .... how would dual booting effect this percentage?
What if some poor sap just happened to hit the site while logged in under Windows?
The methodology is bogus, hell how many Linux system hits does slashdot get , then how many does say MS or MSN or MSNBC get ?
I use it and thats all that matters, I am happy, I am also not a frothing at the mouth Linux Preacher, If theyre smart enough to use it great, if not so what, I dont run around telling people what TV to buy or car to drive, let them choose, education is one thing but cmon.
I typically see about 10% *NIX hits on 40 websites I host at about a million users a month total , thats High, But Im also dealing with a lot of companies that do some serious engineering. hence Unix....
Linux is great, it can do everything I need it to well, and better than windows, its free and stable. I use it at home and work, but theyre are clients that I would suggest NEVER use it, they couldnt possibly use it effectivley, and would in fact become less productive. Why am I going to tell my customers to be less productive ? If someone dosent belive you they probably never will, human nature is such that even when a person is proven wrong they still wont change, people are stubborn.
Sig went tro...aahemmm.....fishing........
Linux versions are mostly in unstable versions or they are ancient. Linux STILL lacks window managers that would be good to use. For instance KDE is nice, but it's in the use of useability far far from the standard Windows[tm] interface. For nerds perhaps *nix is aok, but John Doe wants that things feel good. Not that the mysterious security aspects are dealt with.
Linux also lacks software. Still. Where is Photoshop? A packet that really could compete with MS Office? SoundForge? Winamp? All the games? Good browser? (Ok, Opera is great on Linux! It's just commercial.) Good email client like Outlook Express? (Don't laugh, it is USABLE despite the fact that it is buggy and stupid as a brick.) Big email client system with shared calendars, video conference and all goodies such in Outlook? Enterprise software such as reporting systems?
Sure there are many software projects and alternatives. The best of them are 99% as good. But it's the 1% that counts. That's what Linux is missing. In support, useability, neatness etc.
The problem with Linux community is that everyone is researcing the same wheel again. Go to Freshmeat, do a search for an email client. Whoa, LOTS of projects. If all those guys collaborated and worked together, they could in all areas create killer applications in a few months. But they will not. Some program has some nice feature, some other then other features. Getting all them is pain in the ass if compared to putting the CD inside and starting clicking next next next next like in Windows world. Because there is no coordination, Linux applications will never rock Windows applications. Sorry.
Then, where is my hardware support for my integrated sound chip? My cheapo network adapter? How about making us a real dvd player software that actually could beat PowerDVD? Blah. At least Counter-Strike would work. And my Geforce.
I don't mean to flame or troll here. It's just that until Linux has it all, it will never succeed. From an old geek's perspective Linux has already what it should have. Try telling John Doe "No you can't buy that hardware, buy this or your computer won't work with it." when all the products DO support Windows[tm]. Won't work.
Try to get them to jump into a completely new software world where most of the software is in early alpha stage. Won't work either.
The fact is that most of the computer use in homes nowadays is Internet surfing and entertainment. You have to either tweak Mozilla a lot faster and less demanding or make Opera free or something similar. You will also need an email client that is usable, supports many users (protected with simple passwords etc) on the same computer (this kind of a client does not exist on Linux. Outlook express is one.). Full DVD functionality with stunning quality would be also required, including 3d sound and such. Linux would also need a lot better hardware support, people want all kinds of gizmos. Linux needs multimedia player that plays EVERYTHING, including all the MS formats. Natively, wine and such are resource hogs and they won't work perfect in all situations. Get all the games working on Linux. Max Payne and such. All external things like emulators and VMWare are too complicated for John Doe. It must be more or less native. Ahh.. I could go on for a while.
I really, really don't wonder why Linux was just a bubble and it will never be used widely on desktops. Linux developers should really rally and look at what counts: John Doe. Not other nerds.
Linux is the greatest, and microsoft suck! ;-) )
(Sorry, this makes half the other \. comments redundant
Backslashdot
News for nerds. Stuff that matters.
:)
May we live long and die out
The other problem that may drive *nix browsing market share is that there is a gazillion browsers who all have different identification strings. Very often, poorly designed stats system will not even notice that a given browser is actually a linux one, and will classify it as unknown.
Also, many poorly designed sites ony lets people with Ms IE 4 or Netscape 4 visit the site. Opera, mozilla, konqueror users have to fake the identification strings to be able to see the site. And, as a matter of fact, I know several people who have set their browsers' id string to be IE like, to avoid troubles.
There's no arguing that Linux's desktop market share is far lesser than that or windows and mac, but I do think and hope it's above 0.24%
!
^_^
All survey's are biased. What websites did they use? How did they determine which ones had a good mixture of users? Do you think the inlcuded an OSDN site?
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
How many millions is this. Oh, and by the way, this reminds me of an Umberto Eco quote regarding the
MAC vs. PC Religious war..
He didn't even bother with Linux. But his concerns of DOS being protestant apply to Linux. Or maybe he believes Linux is atheist?
This makes for just one more ``Linux is not mainstream yet'' story.
Well at least I can stand up and say I am proud to be 1 of the .24% that uses Linux almost exclusivly for my work (servers at an ISP) and at home. I think it is fantastic to think that it may be true that 1 in 400 surfers are now using this fantastic operationg system. One day soon it may even be 2.4% . Well done Linux! No matter how much Microsoft lovers put down Linux. I am just glad I have the choice to not use Microsoft products(and Mac, and Sun, and BSD...and even Linux if I didn't want to). Where as only a few years ago if I wanted a cheap desktop computer with a sturdy usable operating system...well....you know what choices I would have had!
In the company I work for we have quite some people that use their PC to access mail, surf the internet or type a document. Some of them have their nice and shiny HP-UX boxes and use a Citrix client to connect to the server and open their Outlook clients. Well, the Citrix server isn't too stable and if it goes down they can't check their mail. Two HP released Gnome for HP-UX, so I put it on their desktops and they love it. The for the ones without the nice UNIX boxes I set up a linux terminal on 130 mhz boxes - KDE + all office suites. All of them got Evolution (they complained that it was too slow and the phonebook lookup was inconvenient). They can do almost everything but _ONE_ (we run Exchange) - use the shared calendar. And this is the reason why the linux terminal didn't work even if the users liked the setup. It is a large corporation, so switching to something else than Exchange is not going to work. The bottom line is - no robust Exchange compatible client = no Linux desktops (in the corporate world anyways).
I like the answer on lowendmac. Not the article, but the statistics. Beside that, could it be that we're witnessing the same "netscape effect" of the web? The article says that lots of web developers use those statistics to build sites. Translation: they only target IE. I can believe this, since I use galeon and I often have quirks in commercial sites. Now, if your site works well only with IE I'm not surprised that 98% of the visitors use IE.... Just like netscape-enhanced sites used to justify their attitude by saying that "90%+ of the visitors use netscape"....
(Note: I use Windows == IE. I don't know the statistics of Ns/Mozilla/Opera vs IE on windows, am I guessing right that they are a tiny %?).
I will also bet that Linux users are MUCH more likely than other users to reject the cookies which these sort of tools rely on. As a result, we are probably left on the table.
So what the survey really tries to say is...
...Linux is dying?
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Mostly use junkbuster to hide what kind of operating system and browser I use.
Never understood why I need to tell the webbserver that information.
I want all webb server to conform to the standard and stop sending out specific HTML code for specifik browser so if a site can't send me correct HTML code - I never visit them again.
Just saying it like it are.
..blame the Linux desktop.
The fact still remains, that Linux's desktop is far from usable. Hell, I only write code with it. Everything else I do with Windows better, faster, easier. And anyone who says "oh but Linux has StarOffice".. Oh come on! It's a shaky, overweight kludge that still doesn't work! I was being a bit too enthusiastic one day and tried do my documentation work with SO, but it failed so miserably in all tasks and ate my memory right away, so I sighed and switched back to Windows.
Also, being a UI designer most of my paid work time, I notice that Linux hasn't got what MacOS and Windows has: widely adopted interface design rules and principles. It seems that most Linux application programmers are too pride to copy directly from Windows' etc. UI design. Now there's a lot to learn from there..
My conclusion: tweak and use the xterm with Linux desktops, use others for real work.
Well the article seems like it was written to be kind of hostile to Linux, and I doubt the number is really accurate, but nevertheless... I'm surprised at the /. readers who think it is too low. I actually wouldn't be surprised if it was too high. I did cable modem installs here from about a year and a half ago to 6 months ago. So basically I saw 5 different peoples' computers a day. During that time I saw ONE computer with Linux installed on it, and that system was dual-booting with Win 2000. And yes, it was required to have someone come out and do the install, even if you were capable of doing it yourself. So let's see...that means one out of 1825 systems I saw ran Linux.
I am the only person I know personally who runs Linux. (well, I've got a Debian install on my gf's system as well, but she can't use it because I cannot get her DAMN USB DSL MODEM to work with Linux...)
Until recently, that number was around .005, so I'd say a 5000% increase is pretty good in only a few years. Unix has never had a desktop presence outside of tech/academic settings, so getting even .24% is significant.
Also, the sad fact is that Linux desktops are still a long way from actually competing with M$ in terms of usability and UI performance. Having just installed KDE and Gnome on my 800MHz laptop, I can attest to the fact that performance is an issue, and a lot of applications have UIs that look like bad Java applications even though they're not.
What someone said about Java applications applies equally to Linux desktops - they're like pod people - dogs bark at them, they make grownups feel a little queasy, and kids aren't fooled at all.
The only valid statistic they can call this, is the number of percentage of people which viewed the sites in question (yes, I know they quote a figure of 125,000), using a browser which identified itself as running under Linux.
There are several problems with the statistics, as supplied:
Between .25 and 1 (according to the mac site) percent of all web surfing computers are linux-based. Boo hoo? Quite a low number?
.25% is a paultry million and a half (or so) people. 1% is five million people. These numbers don't seem that far off to me.
According to the first site I could lazily pull off of Google, http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/, roughly 500 million people are hooked up to the net. If we ignore that many people have multiple computers and multiple OS's,
Think of the number of people you know that own a mac, love a mac, and are basically normal, non-technical people. Think of the number of non-techie musicians you know that run Linux. I could easily see 10 times more people running macs than struggling to download and compile their graphics drivers into their kernel (and don't tell me it doesn't happen).
Likewise, I'm writing this on a Win 98 thinkpad because the Linux box sitting next to me is having X issues again (and the Mac next to me isn't multitasking, the Win ME box is lacking ethernet drivers, the Win 2k box is out on loan, and the other Mandrake box has been stripped to solve the X issue. Oh, and the NeXT stations aren't plugged in, the NeXT cube is noisy and slow, and the Sparc Station was never designed for this sort of thing.) Even if you *have* a linux box, which isn't the sort of thing that most people can have yet, it doesn't count unless you are actually bothering to boot the thing to just read ZDnet. I'm sure a lot of dual-booters surf on the dark side at least some of the time.
So, if we accept that the macintosh has about a 4% marketshare, and that linux users get the shaft when it comes to dual-boot counting, a 1 in 400 rating for the number of linux boxes doens't seem all that far-fetched.
The ______ Agenda
I just found the best discussion of linux and open source. It provides an insightful overview of the whole field:
0 1/ 12/16/145311/35
http://www.adequacy.org/?op=displaystory;sid=20
I don't think that a survey of the O/S behind web-browsers is an accurate description of 'desktop' penetration of Linux. I run Linux as my main os, both at work (on a desktop) and at home (on a desktop and laptop). The laptop however is dual-boot to XP. If I want to browse the web and get a 'full' experience then its bye-bye linux, hello XP as none of the browser/plugin combinations in linux can yet compete with I.E. 6 & media player in windows.
This doesn't necessarily make linux a worse desktop OS than windows, it just reflects the fact that most web designers tailor their content to display in I.E. Therefore people (I suspect/hope I'm not alone in this) will ditch linux for windows when they want to surf the web.
I host web sites. Here's a webalizer chunk on User Agents from a piece of November I called up just to see if it was close:
Top 15 of 5486 Total User Agents
# Hits User Agent
1 200870 9.80% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98; DigExt)
2 169779 8.29% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98)
3 161822 7.90% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x
4.90)
4 73991 3.61% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)
5 72181 3.52% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)
6 70011 3.42% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)
7 63082 3.08% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows 98)
8 54560 2.66% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; Win 9x
4.90)
9 46702 2.28% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
10 43299 2.11% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
11 41167 2.01% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 4.0)
12 37536 1.83% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Mac_PowerPC)
13 33620 1.64% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 95)
14 29224 1.43% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98)
15 28778 1.40% Mozilla/3.01 (compatible;)
Ok, #12 says it is Mac, and #15 doesn't say at all. I host the primary site for the UNIX Socket FAQ, which you would expect to bring in a significant chunk of Linux users, but it isn't even in the top 15. Maybe users are masking their user agent? Maybe some, but not many.
Take from this what you will, I just thought it was interesting...
One thing that I don't think is taken into account is that some Linux Browsers will actually look like another Browser on the net. For instance, I believe that Opera can be configured to look like IE to a web site. This may give false readings when it comes to surveys based on information gathered from surfers.
What about people on a dual boot who, being stuck with a winmodem, can only use windows for internet use?
At the moment, I only have linux on my machine, but last year I had linux and win98, using win98 for the net since I had a winmodem. Most linux users I know use a dual boot (for games) and many are just starting out and having already got a working (win)modem see no need to spend £50 or more (about US$75) on a modem to let them do something they already can (only with out quicktime etc.).
If I'm using windows to surf its because I couldn't buy a computer without it and they threw in a free modem.
It doesn't mean I don't use/appreciate linux.
I'm a Linux user, however to browse the web I have to use Windows on account of having a Winmodem. I wonder how many other Linux users are in the same situation??
"They misunderestimated me"
Many new Linux users don't bother to change the :-D.
browser string in junkbuster
another timothy story to get people all riled up into a "THERE'S MORE THAN THAT!" war. This isn't even news. It's not scientific, they even say so on their website. I can issue a news release saying that the sky is purple, doesn't make it necessarily true.
As a marketing professor once told me..."85% of all statistics are made up on the spot"
it seems to me that headlines and press releases like this are simply Websidestory and Statmarket's way of getting their names in the news.
here's the ploy:
say something inflamatory (even if wildly inaccurate) about linux. get story picked up by web news services. get linux users up in arms. reap benefits of "even bad publicity is still publicity" reality.
slashdot is such a tool...
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
The webpage I manage (has nothing to do with OS - it's about digital cameras), scores about 3% linux hits...
& site=s10g2links&report=19
see: http://sm6.sitemeter.com/default.asp?action=stats
It would be nice if you could make the complete list of browser id strings along with count once in a while (each month :)) available.
And of course, perceived country of origin would be interesting, no matter how inaccurate.
Yeah, this is the same setup I have here. Web browsing on linux leaves a lot to be desired (like having web pages designed with IE in mind look the way they are supposed to).
...starts with a single quarter of one percent.
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Unless I'm mistaken, .24 percent.
%0.24 < %1.0 < %24.0 < %100
The article is claiming less than a percent. They say apple & windows have a 98 (w/o the decimal) percent usage, and linux only
-- Eric
P.S. "Mr. Baggins, I find your lack of cowardice disturbing.."
--
The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
It looks like they (the site that posted the story) are simply trying to get some press. They present themseleves as the originator of the data. They knew this would have some impact. They also proclaim to be "the world's leading provider of outsourced e-business intelligence services". I don't know about you, but i've never heard of them. I don't doubt linux has a small small percent of the desktop market. Who cares? The money and glory is in the server room - not on the desk.
I use konqueror and have been feed up with sites not recognising my browser and compliant with certain technologies, so now alway browse with it to report as IE 5.5 running on Windows 2000.
Yes I could spend time setting up different settings for all the sites that don't like konqueror, however this solution took a few minutes.
1st of all: /. before, this upcoming 'rush' will probably be the time when M$ anounces their own Linux-Distro. Mickeysoft isn't dumb, y'know?
Until about 3 Month ago (until NS 6 and the newer Konquerors) surfing with Linux was a mucho-ultra-grande pain in the anus. And it still sux enough to get any non-Linux-biassed user to drop it like a glowing charcoal.
2nd of all:
Linux has reached desktop-parity (quality wise) with Mickeysoft OSes only about half a year ago - kinda around the release of KDE 2 (but not only due to KDE 2).
3rd of all:
As someone pointed out allready: that makes one out of 400 Users. Which isn't that bad, given that the 'desktopability' and specially 'surfability' of Linux was a bad joke just about a year ago.
4th of all:
Just about that half a year ago Mickeysoft raised the 'OSS-infection' and licencing issues and got dork-ord attracted to the issue in the first place. It' a mere 2 Months ago they released an OS that has a pricing and registration policy attached to it, that will have the actual Linux-rush still coming. Since every standard user has the geek-friend or two who keeps pressing the issue of the 'Pro-OS' Linux (at least in germany that's so).
As I said on
5th:
Servers. Who in holy hell's gonna build an IT startup nowadays using M$ for the backend stuff? Look at the VCs dropping out left, right and center and you'll gather: Nobody! M$ cost a shitload of money it you wan't to use it legally. At virtually no gain. Linux has 93,5% (in words: thirty-nine point five !!!) grouth on the servermarket (Computerwoche) - M$ only about 25% - and that been causing Billyboy and Balmer headaches for more that a year now.
So chill out everybody.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I suggest you educate yourself by reading about new stuff within XP and its kernel and OS services.
While novice users will only see eye-candy like you say, the kernel is very modern and surrounded by a very rich set of services. This is one reason explaining the platform success.
I think that filtering may also play a (small?) part in this.
If you're on *nix, wouldn't you filter places like hitbox.com to get the most out of your bandwidth (especially modem users)? I certainly do, but most Windows users are people of convenience, and wouldn't go through the bother...
I run a supermarket chain's website, in the Washington D.C. / Baltimore / Northern VA corridor. I tend to think my site logs are very representative of the general public, more than, say, here. .14% of total users to my site.
We get about 5,000 users per day on the site, and the logs for November show Linux as being
I am sorry everyone knows that linux is a toy, Mac is a joke, and Windows is productity
When I am at school, I am forced to use WinNT w/ MSIE. When I am at home, RH 6.2 w/ Mozilla. I do a lot more browsing at school (due to unchallenging classes) than at home (due to my responsibilities). Statistics . . . never quite right unless MAJOR (impossible) research is done. Query 100% of entire population, allow scaled answers, and give estimated error. Then hope to be within that error. :)
If you don't like this . . . MOD someone else up.
What's the point of posting an article like this to slashdot, where 99.76% of the readers are so rabidly pro-linux that they aren't even reading the article before flaming the author for posting what must be false information. I don't agree with the number myself (I think it should be much closer to 1%) but at least I'll give it a chance.
-Space for rent
Hum, I get 4.2% linux users by IP address to my server. OpenBSD got .05%. Windows has a ton of different browser tags that I haven't gotten a clean number for them yet. I don't care either.
I've been using a Linux desktop RedHat 7.x, KDE, Mozilla, Opera, and StarOffice since the summer and aside from the fact that printing from Mozilla isn't great, I have no problems to report. I can't say that the software installs were any worse (or better) Windows. StarOffice has a different set of bugs than MS-Office, but doesn't seem much worse (it's certainly better than Lotus Smartsuite, which I was forced to use once-upon-a-time).
That's not exactly an enthusiastic endorsement ("it's no worse! Wow!") but after spending thousands of dollars for one desktop on the Microsoft money-train over the years it's really a pleasure to use this alternative. Sure there are quirks and frustrations to deal with, but it's no worse than before and now I'm not paying through the nose for the priviledge.
By the way, for products that have a purchase option (like Opera, for instance) if you use it and like it for God's sake buy it and support the authors. After spending a decade paying for software I hated but had no choice to use (thanks to my job) it's a pleasure to pay reasonable amounts of money for something I like (Opera again).
The point is that Linux is ready for the desktop, I think. I don't find X too slow or Linux too difficult as long as I stay with the defaults. It's just a matter of getting the word out, I think.
I'm interested in re-creating a proper survey that would more truly show Linux desktop usage. One of the statistics that I'd like to get would be based on removing the ISPs (like AOL) that are out there that you can't use Linux with directly. This may be because they have special software that only works on Window or Mac. Or maybe it's because they outright block it.
The survey can't work since I can hardly ever seem to get Linux to utilize my cable modem. And I can't be the only guy filling out his ID-10-T forms at tax time...
I'm primarily a Windows user who advocates Linux, because it's where I'd rather be. I end up in Windows most of the time because I live in one of those remote, underdeveloped places that don't have their own ISPs, and I'm stuck using a major provider for Internet Access who does not provide Linux versions of their dialup software. However, I still end up using Linux for a longer part of my day than most Windows users use their OS. (I do most of my web design, desktop publishing, and programming in KDE) But I'm only counted as a Windows user! I think there are a lot of other Linux users out there in my situation, and that it's another possibility that should be considered before saying Linux has practically no home user marketshare.
- Shadow, the Laughing Orc
http://bomns.sf.net/
With the most used productivity software and 99% of the GAMES on windows only the uber geeks are going to put it on their desktop. Hell I am a pretty big geek but I like to play games. Since Windows 2k and XP has come out my primary gripe against Windows, instability, is gone (goodbye Win95 codebase).
My forays into using linux/xwindow/gnome/kde as my workstation alwasy end up with this or that not working and my having to hack to fix it. Now dont get me wrong I like to hack but I get plenty of that at work administering sun and linux servers. I don't want to waste time hacking my workstation, and figuring out how to interact with the rest of my company who do not use linux(opening and creating excel sheets and word docs and so on).
Did I mention games?
Linux will never beat windows as a workstation on today's x86 hardware. The best we can hope for is to make a big dent in the server market and maybe be the OS for the nextgen PDA's that replace our workstations.
I like traffic lights
It's a common misunderstanding that X is slowing everything down.
X is certainly *not* as slow as what everybody tells you.
Let's see... XFree86 uses local or remote sockets to connect with X programs. Linux has one of the fastest socket implementations. Especially when it's a local socket, there's little or no performance loss. (who cares about 0.01 milisecond anyway?)
I watch all my movies and play nearly all my 3D games on Linux with XFree86 4.1.0, and performance is excellent, especially with XXA (an acceleration extension, outside the client/server system).
Extensions such as XVideo and DGA allow programs to utilize hardware acceleration or write directly to the framebuffer.
Again: X is not as slow as what people want you to believe.
Is it really supprising to see all the anti-linux marketing going on?
Lawrence Lessig did an interview on vision.yahoo.com this Dec 18th "Who's Killing Innovation On The Internet?"
Of course the stats are biased. It's the only hope the competition has to slow the OSS/GPL/Linux side of the spectrum down.
Let me suggest that this side of the spectrum is going to be attacked by all other sides because ultimately this is where the genuine foundation of computer science and general use is going to settle down to. You can't beat it, but only try and slow it down by throwing distractions and deceptions in it's way.
What has yet to be widely understood is that there is a limit to computing under the corporate model of proprietary control. To go beyond that limit requires open non-proprietary models. IBM recognizes this in autonomic computing directions. But be careful and understand this is comming from the leading US patent holder and obtainer. Do understand that they do recognize the limitations of the corporate proprietary model and intend to corner the open side as best they can.
You can expect more and more distractions and deceptions being throwing into the path of this side of the computing spectrum. Consider what has come so far and that's with what, less than 2% (at best?) of the internet browsing Desktop market...
I never trust these kind of statistics. They can be so flawed as to be practically meaningless.
I saw an article in a UK paper a couple of days ago about the most popular web sites in the UK. About six of the top ten were Microsoft sites. But it included sites like passport.com - come on, who actually visits passport.com? The reason it scores so highly is of course that everytime someone, for instance, goes to read their hotmail email, it makes several accesses to the passport.com server (as well as others). This completely distorts the statistics, and makes them practically meaningless. If you ask a man on the street what are the most popular web sites in the UK he would say something like Friends Reunited (a site for finding old schoolfriends) and man on the street would be absolutely right. Friends Reunited (and loads of other popular sites) didn't even appear in the top ten.
Did you know that one in five new desktop computers have Linux? How do I know this? Well, Google tells us that 4% of its visitors use XP, 1% Linux. We can assume that all of these are relatively new users, so therefore 1 in five of new desktop computers are Linux. Of course this is crap too, but it shows you can distort stats to prove whatever you want, and I am sure that MS are a master of this.
I think they were right on not using stats from a site like slashdot but instead more generic sites. The argument that Linux users don't frequent Windows hosted sites is a load of BS.
You go where the info you want is whats hosting doesn't even come into the mind of more then 1% of the web surfing population.
I think the stats seem prety on for the entire computer using population. 80% of which have no idea about thier OS.
This compares with Microsoft's Windows and Apple's Macintosh operating systems, which hold a combined global usage share of more than 98 percent.
I made my own comparison and found that Microsoft's Windows and Linux hold a combined global usage share of more than 91%.
What's with not breaking out the Windows and Mac numbers? Oh that's right. This is a bash Linux study.
Even very low numbers may predict future growth. The best model is the Fisher-Pry substitution analysis formula (more information). Unfortunately there are few online references to this, and they are mostly academic.
Quite frankly I don't care if
.24% (or whatever) Not really.
Linux becomes mainstream or not.
I like it, I use it. If other
people don't like it and don't use it,
it does not affect me.
Does it matter that Linux desktops
are
It's not like Linux is going to die
because its not profitable. As long
as there are developers writing
free software for it, Linux will
still be around.
Expert Java EE Consulting
I'm sure a good number of Mozilla/Konquerer/Opera users have thier headers forged as IE for Windows just so they can bypass a lot of those browser detection schemes.
While it's possible they did OS fingerprinting, it's highly doubtful.
Total sample: 10000 hits
Windows 98 is way in the lead with 46.5%.
ME comes in at 15.9%
95, 2000, MacOS and NT are all roughly equal at 9.1, 8.8, 7.4 and 6.1 respectively.
XP has 3.6%.
Linux has 1%.
(there are a few others, including "Unknown" so those won't add up to 100)
Considering the differences between some of those Windows OS's, that's fairly diverse. What's more disturbing to me is the following:
IE has 81.3% of the browser stats, Netscape has 16.8%. "Unknown" and Opera together have less than 2%. WebTV brings up the rear with a measly 8 hits (0%) and that's it. No other browsers.
Considering that desktop OS is largely irrelevant to the Internet whereas browser is VERY relevant, this points out a disturbing trend: Microsoft Owns The Client-Side of the Internet.
324006
It wouldn't matter much to Microsoft if even 20% of users chose open source software systems--as long as the sites they browsed continued to use Microsoft servers. Microsoft already gets licence money from the PC vendor for most of the new PCs that ship worldwide. But when an IT operation doesn't choose Microsoft's closed systems, it loses the power to command the market in the long term by imposing lock-in at the protocol level.
What's with that spacing?
324006
According to the following demo and install helper, Linux is hard to install./ Install/
.NET developers conference.
h tm
http://www.mandrake.org/en/demos/Demo/
http://www.mandrake.org/en/demos/Demo/Mandrake8.1
Facts
1. Anyone telling the truth about Linux is a preacher, anything they said should be regarded as hype. So help me god.
2. Microsoft is the whole and nothing but truth: money talks. Recite them by heart, write them down in a note-pad, keep them around and show it to your comrades.
3. Linux is a threat: there has been documented case of FATAL food in mouth disease when a victim found listening to a Linux zealot preaching. You will be safe in your comfort zone as long as you don't miss your yearly subscription to Microsoft central.
4. You won't want to change, you are so used to it you will change your mind about changing to it. You should contribute to Microsoft by buying the same software twice, or a third time if you wish, you will be praised in the next VisualLogo
5. You won't want to learn anything non Microsoft either, even in school. They should not have expose you that. You are beyond learning, you are above it.
6. Remember: the unbiased truth is always towards windows. Anyone say anything about Linux is evangelism marketing lunatic.
7. Avoid superior competitor products, nobody is perfect. Use Microsoft instead.
8. Microsoft products are flawless, they have a whole team of problem support, thou shalt not question about their quality or cost.
9. Windows don't crash. Microsoft certified drivers crashes badly with a blue screen - blame the vendors. They produce bad and incompatible Microsoft certified hardware - blame the hardware. Thou shalt not blame Microsoft, ever. Get used to the unscheduled coffee breaks.
10. Cheapo Linux saves billions, yet incur higher "Total Cost Of Ownership". Use your creative freedom given by Microsoft: add the cost on top of Linux, such as baby diapers, toilet paper, Aspirin, mortgage and the cost of your last trip to the psychiatrist.
11. Your PassPort belongs to Microsoft: anywhere you go, anything you buy on the net should be reported to Microsoft so they can tailor to your buy pattern to maximize your purchasing items.
To avoid the FATAL food in mouth disease, visit the trendy, therapeutic website http://www.texasonline.net/langley/columns/drink.
Enjoy.
P.S. I would be more than happy to donate the therapeutic drink for free.
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2001/December/os.p hp shows Linux below even Windows 3.x and WebTV
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." -- Mark Twain
The contents of this message have been doubly encrypted by ROT13
93 is ninety three, not three-and-ninety and certainly not thirty-nine :-)
P.S. Have fun with changing all your money in 10 days time...
93 + 4 + 1 + 4 = 102%
Well, there's only 4 different sources and the accuracy is still off by 2%, I don't think google can be representative of much for something which supposedly has 1%.
Discrimination? Oh give me a break. Tell me a site that would discriminate based upon a users geography or geopolitical location, apart from fringe sites like the KKK.
In any case my advocacy is that the user has complete control over what information is sent, and whether it is sent at all. The truth is that both sets of information can be used to pump billions of dollars into the net to revive the state of content on the net: i.e. Imagine if the state of California could advertise advisories only to people with a geopolitical location of US-CA? Imagine if local restaurants and pool halls could launch an ad campaign with Google for users within 10KM of 43.32635/-79.79426? Such criteria doesn't currently exist and it has barred the Internet from any locality, despite the fact that 95% of our lives are still based upon locality. Local computer stores can easily compete with internet stores when you factor in shipping costs, but they are excluded from advertising on the net because of their local scope.
I seriously see the lack of localization of the net as being a major impediment to its growth.
Written it in Arexx yet? Haven't found a lackey to do your work for you?
How the most popular websites like yahoo and google never have statistics on the Operating system of browsers used to visit them?
Google's Zeitgeist often has what language and what country surfers are from, but I have yet to see the 'operating system' of browsers shown.
I wonder just how much money paid and/or legal threats microsoft has used against them to keep these numbers quiet.
If any one site can reflect the demographics of a true internet experience, then Yahoo would be that site. And as such knowing what browser or operating system people Really use would be dangerous, because Microsoft dosen't command as much of a monopoly as they would like to, in the browser space.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
In fact, the only people I know that use Linux on the desktop are all developers (myself included) except for one guy.
Not that this is a problem. For us developers, Linux/KDE is a wonderful system to use. It all comes down to needs. Does the average user need multiple tabbed sessions in Konsole? No. Does he need to be able to play Dark Reign? Yes.
Unfortunately, the "games" problem is not one that can easily be solved. Most software you buy at the store is only for Windows, and I've heard more than one person say that Linux can't succeed with normal users without it being able to run Windows programs. IMO, making it a requirement of Linux to run Windows software (a la Lindows) is too much to ask. Not only is reverse-engineering difficult, but companies these days are making it harder to pull off. And sometimes, it can even be illegal (see DMCA).
So is all hope lost? What can anyone do? Linux is basically done.. Linus said so himself. Now the focus is on the user. Well, what is left for KDE? It is already more configurable than Windows. Ok, so that's done. Now what? If we're done, but we have no users, there is obviously a problem somewhere.
It's the apps. Linux is not scary anymore. The "one guy" I mention above knows nothing about coding, but uses Redhat just happily. But why can't he play his games? And where is Adobe?
We've done all we can do. I think it's just a waiting game now. I'd like to see some improvements with more general (non-distribution specific) software installation. And for video drivers to be kernel controlled, and have X just ride on the framebuffer. But issues like these won't stop average users from using Linux. Just ask a normal Windows user why he would not want to switch to Linux. It will come back to the apps.
Linux has only become more popular, not less. More companies join in the game as time goes. Sure, some have left, but at the end of the day the number is bigger. The general computer user will get his games and his apps.
In the meantime, everyone just continue doing their thing.
I'm noticing a disturbing trend of lots of media outlets quoting bad statistics from companies with extremely flawed methodologies like HitBox and MediaMetrix. This company said:
"While the 125,000+ Web sites worldwide that HitBox monitors are self-selected, StatMarket's figures are culled from more than 50 million unique visitors who visit those sites every day "
Now, what's the first thing you learn about in statistics class? That any survey where the group being surveyed is self selecting is *wrong*. The standard example of the workers who worked better when the lights were low is the perfect example. They knew they were being surveyed, so they worked harder and harder as the lights got dimmer because they didn't want to get fired.
That this company exists is sad. But the fact that the media (even serious media off of the web) is quoting their very bad science is disturbing.
-D
Check our statistics - Linux has been holding steady at about 16-17% of our user base since the end of 1999.
Energy: time to change the picture.
I read this article after I've received about four email messages with strange macro-virus-looking attachments in the past 24 hours (is there some epidemic again)? O sancta simplicitas!
Bush Lies Watch
I have page on CAD apps for Linux
( http://pfrostie.freeservers.com/cad-tastrafy/ ).
3 out of 4 hits are from windows machines.
I think that's GREAT!
That's that many more people that are considering Linux.
I'm not trying to be redundant to the "This can't be true", but at least I read the article ;-) They didn't mention any numbers, and I don't even trust their math.
There's about 190,000 Registered Linux users, and most people (including the creator of counter.li) understand that it's 10-20% of the number of actual users. I'd really like to see how many desktop systems there are, and perhaps the percentage of Mac users.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
If thesame survey was conducted with Slashdot's audience, we'd have Linux on 98% on all desktops.
I did find that in november they did have the browser OS shown, but that hadn't come up as default in the past 3-4 times I went there.
I guess I missed it.
Other posters brought up the important issue that browser strings need to be forged to get into many sites. Only way I know that can absolutely determine version is a javascript applet -- which leaves out non-java browsers.
I guess browsers need to make sure that google always gets the correct browser string. Put an option 'exempt search engines' from the the custom browser string.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Apple, Microsoft, Sun, and every other commercial OS vendor has fleets of sales and marketing people to push their individual agendas. SALES and MARKETING people! These are the people that determine what OSes come preloaded on the machines you and corporate america buys. Yes, Linux does have some advocates, but these are usually technical people, not CEOs, not average consumers, not sales people, and definitely not marketing people.
Commercial linux vendors need to compete with everyone else in the marketing arena. Redhat needs a sales and marketing plan to put linux in the consumer's mind, the developers mind, and the box builder's mind.
-ted
If linux was good enough for Bilbo it's good enough for me.
I used to wonder what was so holy about a silent night, now I have a child.
Reading this thread and the KDE3.0 this morning really made me wonder - Is there something that will prevent me from running Linux on the desktop? No, so I do, what's the big rush to indoctrinate the planet?
...
Some of you are acting like these kind of surveys, ZDNet 'studies', and clueless sysadmin students are going to ruin Linux on the desktop.
It's not like KDE and GNOME guys are going to wake up one day and say, "Well geez, 'Computer Expert' on ZDNet talkbalk forums thinks that our stuff is hard to use, we might as well stop development, someone call Mathias!"
Stop for a moment and look at the pace of development that GNOME/KDE have achieved in the last 2 years. It's amazing how far they have come.
People have this twisted perception that because it's Not Windows(tm) that it's difficult to use.
Well guess what, these are the same people that can't use Windows either! For those of us who do desktop support (It's an additional duty of mine which I abhor), how many times have you seen some clueless user do something totally absurd on Windows? Wether they use Windows or KDE, they will find a way to break it. How many times have you said to someone 'right click this' and they look at you like you are from another planet. These people remind me of my mother, bless her soul, but no matter what, she will never be a good driver, that doesn't make cars hard to use...
Personally, I don't care if Linux on the desktop ever makes it mainstream. If you want a toy, recommend XP to someone, if you want a power system, linux comes in. At the rate we're going, it will provide me with what I need, and that's what Linux is about. It fits MY needs, if it met your needs, then that's great to
I use Linux as my desktop because I am a geek BUT I use Linux to host my site because it CAN.
Linux as a desktop / workstation is hopeless. Let's be frank here.. all the window managers stink! I love Linux as a web/mail/DNS/etc Server.. but I would never have it as my exclusive desktop. Unless something happens for Linux like it did with BSD when it went into Mac OS X, doubtful because of Linux's restrictive commercial licensing, it's a lost cause. The only people that use Linux as a workstation are hardcore geeks.... I know this is going to attract flames of examples of people that use it as a desktop.. but remember most of the people on /. are hardcore geeks, just like me :P
DrVPN
www.t3link.com
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
I think, there are much more than 0.24 % of all users working with linux but most of them surf on Windows - virtually with vmware or something like that.
BWAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.
You guys are really changing the world, alright. Winning those hearts and minds over, one at a time. GO LINUX!
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
Who cares what they say. We all know the truth.
Take this logically...
How many 'surfers' get their online packages from either coverdiscs or random free rubbish that falls through the door or at supermarket checkouts etc etc etc. (Most of these people are newbies - statistically (sic) they have to be, cos the boom's been recent)
Now, how many of these CD's (1zillion free hours of AOL! Eternity free on compuserve!) have you seen with Linux setup utilies on them? Where is the ISP number and connection details on the CD packaging? Nope, I've not seen any of this either.
Now step on a bit further. Is a new (or maybe even not so new) user going to start up his windows machine and just put the CD in, or start up his (or her) linux box and try to work out all the settings? Okay, it's been a long time since I last tried to install linux on my machine. It's been on there about three times, from slackware 0.9 on an old 386 with 4 meg of memory and an 80 meg hard disk (downloaded X on the disc sets, got it running too!) Through three versions of Red Hat and one version of Corel that wouldn't install. All of these versions, I gave up trying to set up the net connection, cos it was too much hassle and I could easily dual boot.
(It wasn't the only thing that annoyed me - anyone else get fed up by having to umount an audio CD before you could eject it?)
I wouldn't call myself a computer newbie by any means. I've still got my ZX80, BBC B and my C64 and Amiga and various others. I program for a living, using SCO unix every day of the week, but it was just too much grief to set up. I didn't want to be a linux matyr that much though I'm sick to the back teeth with Windows ME and I suspect a lot of users will find themselves in the same position as me. It would be nice to use linux all the time, but until it has the ease of setup that windows does I'll wait thanks.
-Never argue with an idiot. They drag you down to their level, then beat you with experience-
websidestory.com and statmarket.com are basing their statistics on their web tracking technology through the use of advertising. The problem is, they use web bugs (see here, here, and here) to accomplish this. Windows users typically do not take actions to inhibit these web bugs, but Linux, BSD, and even many other Unix users do. There's software out there to help, too. Those who do block these web bugs, or all the hitbox.com sites, as I do, won't ever be counted.
Statistics based on web bugs should never be counted to determine platform penetration. Instead, actual HTML loads from a wide variety of real sites should be used, and the distribution variations show, too. I'm sure Slashdot gets more Linux and BSD just because of what it is.
Find out what other sites that /.ers visit, then get platform stats from those sites, and only for their main page HTML hits (not for images or ads or anything else). Then check the variation of that.
I had to go remove them from 6 different blocks in my network to just to view the linked page.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
0.24% of the desktop rifraff are are running Linux? I feel...common! What can I run to be 1337 now!? Slackware is out the door this very day that's for sure!
;-)
I'm gonna have to go Plan 9, QNX or something. Or install HURD even. A decade of almost no followers means it's not likely to suddenly gain a whopping 0.24% following overnight!
Now off to practice snotty "I run the HURD myself" remarks
I wouldnt mind a bit more user friendlieness, but the day linux becomes an OS for newbies, Im moving to BSD.
80% of computer users are newbies.
5% are intelligent, developers or enlightened people, and its only natural that 5% use linux, or any other unix`y alternative (BSD, Be, whatever).
Also, if you want a copy of windows for games etc, use kazaa - you can download any MS OS en pirate in seconds (they mistreat me - I mistreat them, maybe this attrition will be the death of MS).
HTTP_USER_AGENT: Mozilla/3.01Gold (Macintosh; I; 68K)
MACHTYPE: i386-pc-openbsd2.8
the ever helpful hawk
it depends on what the site caters to. slashdot will have a higher lin artio then microsoft.com will.
averaging 30 e-commerce sites I maintain
win 82.5%
mac 4.8%
lin 12.6%
now e-commerce sites may have a higher win ratio then linux, I dont know or care. just my 2 cents.
Chris Lee
lee@mediawaveonline.com
...all those who use Opera or Galeon (or Konqueror?) with a spoofed HTTP-AGENT, just because certain braindead webmasters won't let "Netscape" users into their sites?
Slow down your sister in law's computer so it runs maybe 3/4 as fast as today when she runs her applications. Keep the same apps she uses today. Will she have any reason to complain?
You don't have to be a computer wonk to notice fast vs slower.
I feel the apps are already "almost there" for Linux. But as long as the desktop feels sluggish compared to Windows, your sister in law, and my sisters for that matter, will want the snappier Windows configured machine.
They won't know how it was configured or care, but they will care that it is responsive at their level of expectation.
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
For most of the /.'s, Linux couldn't be more perfect as a computing platform. Freedom to do anything you want. But for the common mortals, Linux is just too much of a hassle to install in the first place.
I'm writing this with netscape4.77 with Zoot updated kernel 2.2.20 -- not bad :)
is that web browsing under linux just plain sucks at the moment. Duh.
This is fine with me, web browising would REALLY REALLY suck if there werent a million linux apache servers pumping out the content.
I submitted this story early yesterday... and it was rejected. ah well. try and try again.
Processer speed, so much as how fast your video card is and your X configuration. With a G400 Max and AGP/DRI set up, my 700 MhZ Athlon has no problem driving the GUI, except when 4 or 5 programs are taking up 50% of my CPU (200% CPU Utilization does tend to have a negative impact on graphical performance.)
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm not saying I think the survey is wildly wrong, but I do think it is low because of the fact that anyone who sends Linux as their user agent is shooting themself in the foot. There are a whole lot of websites that will tell you that you need to be running a certian browser or Operating system, yet if you change your user agent the site works perfectly. I don't know many people that haven't switched thier user agent to something onther than linux.
Like many of us, I'm sure, I run everything thru junkbuster, both on my home network and at work. So there's 12 linux boxes, 3 solaris boxes, 3 macs, and an assortment of win98, 2K, and XP boxes that identify with:
:)
HTTP_USER_AGENT="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.01; Windows NT Sucks)"
I remember reading a study a few years ago about 'net usage being really high in beverly hills, cuz so many people entered '90210' as their postal code in surveys. Um, I'm from canada, that's the only postal code I know.
User-configurable info is kinda useless for generating real stats
Well, I do used Linux to surf but seriously, it is impossible to surf certain sites without IE. On the other hand, I can do nearly all my desktop stuff in Linux. Except when I am forced into a certain situation that requires me to use only windows, i.e. sites that can be surfed only using IE. Anyway, let us TRY and be positive and not think of unfair practises of others. Let us take this opportunity to examine what more can still be done be make Linux is a better platform for web surfing. Let everybody do our part and let the ideas roll....
The biggest reason for which I use Linux as a desktop is X-windows. As a home user, MS-Windows is not powerful enough to me. I need network transparency, otherwise my kids coul dnot use the two old 486 computers fof anything useful.
The X-windows network transparency, multiple X-windows on single machine, multiple desktops is what puts Linux years ahead of Windows features.
If it needs something, its smooth installation of DRI and true type fonts.
Petrus.
I don't know how close to the truth that figure is (it could be spot-on for all I know) but one thing I do know: that number could not have possibly been computed in any reasonable way. If their estimate happens to be correct, it is only due to coincidence and dumb luck.
Any time I see "percentage of web surfers" I know that I'm going to see bogus statistics. They're probably checking user agent in http request headers or something. This is very stupid and useless, because
- Minority platforms (in terms of both OS and browser) are much
more likely to intentionally send incorrect user agents, for compatability
with incompetently-programmed web apps.
- Whatever web site(s) you use, will likely have a bias toward some
particular selection of users.
Slashdot should not lend credibility (ok, I know that's a joke, but I hope you get my point anyway) to such poor logic by linking to stories that use it.As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
the worst thing that ever happened to Linux was that geeks/neerds(from here on gerds) adopted it.
Most people don't want to have anything to do with gerds. Do you know how many peole hate Star Trek and have never seen an episode of it?
Star Wars wasn't completely adopted by gerds, so it remained cool for the masses. Star Trek was doomed as soon as the gerds picked it up.
OK, so Star Trek is still moderately successfull, but I swear that it would be as big as Star Wars, if gerds hadn't taken it over.
Gerds and other people don't mix that well. I'm mostly coming from the other side here, big time jock in high school/college, had lots of friends and girlfriends and all those other perks of being cool. And yeah I have to admit that I picked on my share of gerds in my youth. People don't want to be associated with gerds. Linux screams "I'm A Geek and A Nerd", "I've Never Seen A Girl Naked".
What real people want and what gerds want or so far away from being the same that Linux is doomed on the desktop. It will probably continue to cut into the server market, because...well gerds run servers, not real people.
Desktops? Get a grip. That will happen at the same time the computer geeks are popular in high school and are getting all the attention and girls. Its not going to happen.
If you aren't fighting a holy war vs. Microsoft, there is no reason to run Linux on your desktop. Gerds approach the desktop market as a war vs. Microsoft. Real people could care less, they don't care what OS they run, they just want it to work. Here come the WinXX crashes 10 times a day, so it doesn't work! Blah, blah, blah. How stupid are you if you can't configure a windows box!
To sum it up, when real people start developing Linux GUI's, routines, and applications for real people, then it has a chance. As long as gerds are developing those things for gerds, it is doomed.
That was the genius of Bill Gates, he's a nerd, but he knew that real people aren't. When that realization comes to the Linux community, then it stands a chance. Don't make it a geek OS if you are looking to move into the desktop market.
I believe the survey reflecting the reality. I use W2K for desktop stuffs.
:)
On the other hand, I'm running Linux server at home to serve my families, helping friends' companies to setup inhouse secure email servers with Linux, implementing Linux network at work and taking freelance jobs setting up and maintaining Oracle database on Linux.
It doesn't matter. Linux has already found its home, and we are all happy about it.
Of course, it'd be much better if I could see Linux desktop dominate the desktop market before I die, but nothing is perfect.
I've talked to almost everyone in my lab and at least 20% are using Linux.
In a lab, sure. I'd expect >20% to be using Linux on the desktop. And if I asked my friends in the fine arts department of my university I'd probably find a 60/40 split between Mac and Windows with no *nix to be seen (no OSX here... most are running System 8 or 9). It all depends on who you poll.
Your claiming Linux has a 20% adoption rate is like me claiming Mac is at 60%. They're just meaningless numbers taken out of context.
On the otherhand, the lower bound of most estimates for Linux on the desktop seems to be about 3 million users, which seems like a healthy user base.
Who cares if more people use Windows anyways?
-Mark
I use Junkbuster and alter the browser info headers to fool sites into thinking I am using IE 5.5, instead of Opera on Linux. I do this because lots of sites have the annoying practice of thinking that a non-Microsoft browser won't render their pages correctly, but it usually works fine.
--It's Pimptastic!--
Let me begin with the comment that the figure of 0.24% is statistically suspect, and that the Google statistic of 1% is also probably unrepresentatively low. The following is an attempt to illustrate why.
The majority of Linux installations are done in multiple boot configurations.Most mainstream distros, and even some of the more obscure ones presume that and are designed accordingly, and quite a lot of the online documentation and commentary seems to be slanted toward that assumption. I'm not saying that's a bad thing per se, nor am I suggesting that platform interoparability is trivial, but there's a downside.
When I first installed OS/2 here in 1994 I got rid of Windoze. If I wanted a m$ operating system I wouldn't have deleted the damn thing. Getting away from it was the whole point. I installed Linux for the first time at the end of 1999 onto a separate physical drive with much the same motivation. The whole idea was to learn the damn thing, and the only way to learn something is spend time with it. Incidentally - on compatible hardware, installing Linux with no multiple-boot issues to complicate the picture is a lot less effort than installing Windoze on a virgin HDD.
I spend a lot of time on IRC: In addition to discussing beer and girlies, a lot of those dialogs are taken up with details of software installation, includng many first-time Linux installations, and I can tell you of countless times where someone I've been helping comes online, reports the installation successful, collects his l337t haxxor certification and then boots straight back into windoze.
This posting got me thinking about "dormant penguin syndrome", and it's evidently a big-enough factor to be taken into thoughtful consideration for marketing and promotion purposes. (Or advocacy, for those of you reading this who are staunch anti-capitalists) M$ traps are all around - from preloaded bundles, to proprietary file formats, to ISPs like NetZero (and many others who charge steep fees) to websites that won't render right without IE, to games.......I don't want this to turn into an outright rant so I'll just make the comment that there's a lotta Windoze-centric aspects to the present computing infrastructure viewed in macro - and that's not an accident: M$ planned it that way.
Does that mean life without Windoze is impossible? Hell no, but the reason I know that for a fact is that I've been resisting and avoiding it long enough to know how to deal with the obstacles. It isn't usually even that difficult.
Take most of the "Linux isn't ready" postings on this thread and s/Linux/Windoze, or Apple or any other alternative. Ya kow what? The validity of the comments holds. Demand this morning a desktop operating system that's truly intuitive, fast, effortless and crafted to a standard of pure perfection? There aren't any - but why be impossible when you can be totally over the top? Insist on a flawless user installation onto multiple-boot systems m$ spent millions of dollars developing to engineer deliberate incompatibilities into.
Linux is ready - and the applications are ready, at least for those of us capable of writing a letter without an animated paperclip, but it's simplistic to think that a successful Linux installation == marketplace conuest.
Users with Linux installed need to spend more time using it at length, and the Linux community needs to spend more effort encouraging this. How well this all goes will determine the direction of computing in this decade. M$ is already upset enough about the trend to Linux to start whining and mouthing about it. Time will tell.
give me a
Even if the statistics are true, which I doubt, I don't see how this makes one whit of difference. Penetration of Linux into the desktop market might be slow or stalling, but it's penetration into the server market is it's real strength. There Linux is doing extremely well, to the point where M$ is in dreaded fear of it. Most people in the Linux community forget that for the average User, Linux is not easy to either install or use for the average user (I use MacOS X, and use the command line frequently, it's nice to finally have a Mac with a command line). I applaud the Linux community for their efforts in making such an excellent stable OS, but for Joe and Janey Sixpack, trying to figure out how to configure it can be daunting.
I'm too stupid to figure out how to surf from my Linux box. Add one to the count for me....
is, that the percentage of Linux-users they found visiting the sampled Websites is steady between .2 and .3 Percent since nearly three years. While the sample is obviously biased, the bias has less effect on overall trends, than on the actual percentages.
So apparently there is no overall trend to switch from Windows-Desktops to Linux-desktops, or to be more precise, there is no such trend among the visitors of the sampled sites (assuming they measured correctly) in the past 2.5 years.
Still the whole statistics only tells us something about a biased sample, about which we sadly don't know enough to put the numbers into some perspective.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
I submitted this one YESTERDAY!!!
WTF?
I thought it was the Browser and not the OS that mattered to web sites.
Considering everything that stops people from using Linux on the desktop and the huge lead that MS has in established customer base and marketing, 0.24% isn't at all bad. It is a lot higher than I thought it was.
Truth is that there are huge barriers to using Linux that can only be blamed on Linux. A simple example. I recently installed NVidia graphics cards on both my Win98 and Red Hat 7.2 desktop machines. The hardware installation was the same of both machines. The software was another story...
Even though NVidia included binary RPMs for linux drivers on the disk those drivers were useless because they were for a different version of the kernel. So, I had to down load the drivers from the NVidia site and install those. Of course, even though they claimed to be compiled for the same RH kernal as the one I was using they didn't work either. So, I downloaded the source tar.gz files and compiled them and the installation went just fine. Then I had to edit the XF86Config-4 file and then figure out that for some reason AGP just wasn't going to work... and most of an afternoon and an evening later I had a working high performance OpenGL monster of a Linux box.
The install of the Windows drivers took about 5 minutes, but since I was at NVidia's site anyway I down loaded the newest drivers, installed them, and started playing games. Total time, counting the down load, about half an hour.
Did I mention that I spent 5 years as an X server developer in another life? So, I have an above average knowledge of the server. Did I also mention that I have several computers all networked so that after I lost my desktop and web browser (no graphical interface == no browser for most people) I was still able to access the NVidia web site and down load drivers and help files? And when they lose their desktop they are completely helpless.
All in all, just the hassle involved in loading an accelerated graphics card made by the most pro-linux graphics card manufacturer in the world (MHO) is enough to keep anyone who is not a hard core geek from even considering using Linux.
Lets face it folks, right now Linux is still actively hostile to the average human being. The fact that drivers have to be recompiled to match the kernel makes Linux actively hostile to all device manufacturers. And, that makes Linux hostile to all software developers that depend on specialty devices.
I'm about as pro-linux as anyone I know, but that doesn't change the fact that a company like NVidia needs to provide a 68 page installation manual with the Linux drivers for a card and doesn't need to provide any instructions for the Windows drivers for the same card.
Like I said, 0.24% isn't bad. On my web site I see closer to 1.3% Linux, 1.9% Mac, and 91% Windows.
Stonewolf
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/zeitgeist-no v.html has it.
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
isn't a permanent link, maybe that would explain discrepancy.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
The real problem lies in US law which allows third-party payoffs to publishers for running advertisements disguised as legitimate news.
The way it works is very simple. Suppose some Large Corporate Monopolist wants slanted commentary or phony "news" articles to appear in many different publications or web news sites. LCM hires dozens of public relations / advertising companies around the world to write the phony "news" articles and send them to the target news sites, magazines, television etc., to be published verbatim (or nearly so). LCM is billed for "Public Relations Services" by the PR companies, with the bills being large enough to cover payments to the target publishers for "Public Relations / Advertising Services"
Skirting the "Payola" law by funneling payments through PR companies is legal, at least in the US, since the only prohibition here is on *direct* payments to publishers. For instance, it would be illegal for Microsoft to pay news sites directly for running anti-Linux BS disguised as real news, or some commentator's "opinion" (commentators themselves can, and have been complete phantoms).
MS does seem to have hired dozens of PR companies, which I think we can assume know how the phony news game is played.
In radio broadcasting, third-party payola schemes have been the standard way of doing business for a long time. It's merely been transferred to other markets.
If you think this sort of thing can not occur, pay attention to your local evening TV news when tobacco-related material is in the picture. Often, the camera will be held on a tobacco product's logo for an unusually long time. Some of the comedy/drama programs on US television openly advocate smoking. Whenever you see any tobacco-related material in television or movies, you should be able to stop and smell the payola.
Remember, 75% of all statistics are made up anyway :-)
If the manufacturers were allowed to do this of course they would! Linux is a low-cost "differentiator." Computer makers all make the same thing - a box with a processor, hard drives, video card, etc... and they sell their brand by saying "you get more from me because..." but of course all you really get is another Wintel box. So if they could also say our computer also comes with Linux they would sell a few more boxes. A few is all it takes. Yes, they would put Linux on the computers. If they could.
However, they can't. Microsoft's illegal monopoly enforces that they can not sell a computer that has Windows and another OS. And even though the courts have said this has to stop, corrupt campaign contributions have allowed them to continue this illegal activity.
Turns out that we get about 80% of our usage between 8AM and 6PM, Monday through Friday. That tells me that the bulk of our users are hitting our site from work. The reason is that people have faster access from work than what they have from home. Some might even forego having home access because they know they can get on the Internet from work. And I'm sure that the same goes for other sites used in the survey.
Now, since most businesses make their workers use Windows PC's and a Linux (or Mac) box is as rare as a solar eclipse, it stands to reason that the numbers would get skewed in Window's favor. Hell, I even surf more from work than from home. So on most of the sites I hit, I show up as a Windows user, not a Mac user. The Mac numbers are probably skewed for the same reason.
Managers
^^^^^^^^
'nough said
Genius doesn't work on an assembly line basis. You can't simply say, "Today I will be brilliant."
in view of the recent warez busts.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
Come on now, how is anybody supposed to get Linux out on the desktop if nobody worth a hoot can pre-install it? Not even in a dual boot configuration. I've got two friends who went out and bought $1500 PC's to do email and web surfing. Only some of the fringe players like Ellisons company,etc. do Linux such that consumers could use and how do they compete in a Windows-only press world?
Hell, OS/2 had/has a much higher usability rating, IMHO, yet only in one country in the world could IBM get pre-installs, Germany. I'd heard that OS/2 had 25% of the desktops in one year. BeOS was available for free to anybody who wanted to pre-install. They couldn't. Can you say monopoly?
BAD Monopoly?
Linux will remain out of the desktop space as long as Microsoft can hang anybody who lets Linux get close to a pre-installed Windows box. PERIOD. No operating system in existance today or tomorrow will break this strangle hold cause users take what is pre-installed.
IMHO
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
How do search engines disguise? Does the said article recognize and remove all of them from the statistics?
For Linux to prosper on the Desktop, it will need a PC-Aware keyboard/Mouse driver that allows full use of the std 101 key keyboard.
Many DOS and laboratory testing legacy programs do not fly well in a GUI. The POSIX CLI sux.
I'm not smart enough to write such a driver, but I have written Gadgets that allow the keyboard to operate in non-raw mode and have ported my file browser & text mode multi-window editor from DOS to Linux. The needed driver should act like these Gadgets.
Earlier studies showed that most web surfing is done while at work. This study shows that most web surfers use Microsoft browsers to visit primarily non-business sites.
Combine the two results and the only conclusion you can logically arrive at is that 98 percent of Microsoft users are fucking off at work.
Here's the solution as you see it. Take away all the options and force everyone to use your dumbed down desktop that looks and acts likes windows. Though you did have a good point about unique applications, but I believe if you search freashmeat a little more you'll find plenty. It is true that XFree86 is big and slightly difficult to configure, for a newbie, but that's why a lot of distributions are including automated configuration tools that are getting better and better. Plus XFree is not slow, its actually the best implementation of the X protocol to date. And that gives users options, such as the ability to execute their GUI apps remotely. But let's face it, Linux is an anarchist's OS, and you don't appear to be an anarchist from your post. Perhaps Windows or OSX would be a better OS for you? .25% of the population using Linux. Linux is my OS, and it also belongs to a few of my friends. But Joe American is an ignorant moron when it comes to computers or any type of technology or anything else. I would prefer to keep them as far away from my desktop as possible. Heh, here I'm writing this on a wintendoze box. But as you can see I know how to make software work for me, not the other way around. That is why I'm one of the select .25%, not the sheepish 99.75%. I guess you could say we're the top .25% of the technological foodchain. Most people don't want to understand their hardware, let alone their software. GNU, baby, yeah!
I personally don't want more than
I was using Mandrake 7.1 (downloaded through FTP) and let the installer configure it with all the defaults. (This was about a year ago, so I don't recall all the details.)
The graphics card was good (cannot remember the name) but the PC was a high-end Dell Dimension (4100?) with 256MB RAM. Everything in the box came pre-installed by DELL -- originally loaded with Win2000. I had two of them. (No longer have them.)
Not sure how to explain it, but the same Mandrake build was unusable in KDE and GNOME on my home 100MHz machine. (Win95 on the same machine was almost tollerable.)
--- -- - -
Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
I'm running Junkbuster, which by default reports my browser as "Mozilla/3.0 (Netscape) with an
unremarkable Macintosh configuration"
Yeah, but what % was FreeBSD?
Slackers like me only surf the web at work. At work we're required to run Windows....
But it won't happen until either
/etc is your config files, /usr is your programs and so on. Well gee, why isn't your config /config then, or your programs /programs? Ok it's longer, and once you know what it is it's slower to type, just like CLI vs GUI (and just like this is shorter if you know the abbriviations, more annoying if you have to look them up). But most people don't want to learn. They want to instinctively understand what they are doing (or at least what button to push even if they don't know *exactly* what it does), or if not get some good context help. In linux you get to hear RTFM too much. WTHSIHTRTFMTDT? (Why the hell should I have to read the manual to do this?)
1) M$ invents an effective copyright protection. Running off WinXP now, ask me how much I'm willing to pay for it.
2) Windows will only play your DRM approved Secure Audio / WMA / SSSCA files, not your average (= pirated) mp3 / DivX dvdrip.
But what it needs mostly is userfriendlyness. I read a post in the previous slashdot post about the harddisk concept. It went something like: Learn unix, / is root
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Almost everyone who uses linux is on the web, but what proportion of windows users are? I'd say about half. It doesn't appear that that was taken into account. So even if the distribution of web sites favors windows users, the fact that many windows users don't use the web skews the results the other way.
Why did this get a 1 rating? Not only did this poster get the percentage wrong, he went entirely off-topic and spouted some irrelevant pro-linux rubbish.
Oh, wait... answered my own question. Irrelevant pro-linux rubbish with misinformation automatically rates at least a +1. Wonder why this didn't get a "5 - Informative"?
Can you say, "It doesn't make economical sense to disrupt our assembly line to produce a different kind of machine when only 0.24% of customers want it."? I knew you could. Now, can you blame them?
Slashdot isn't just viewed by linux geeks. Many many people just surf this site as Yet Another News Site, on linux, mac or windows machines.
Think also about the people who come to this site from their school and work computer. I know that although I love linux and use it at home fairly often, i'm still stuck on a win 2000 machine in my network engineering classes...
How many of you are running a web browser that doesnt claim to be on a windows machine? Anybody?
Web-Collected stats assume honesty in the web browser, and I think that many default to dishonest. Maybe I'm just using weird install options, I dont know.
.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
You my friend are the exact reason why Microsoft will own the world... They count on people like you to keep Linux to a point where it will never mature.
It'll be forever a server platform without support for the desktop, is that what you want?
The whole argument about the study being biased leads to a related question of interest: how segregated are the Windows, Mac, and Linux crowds? How much do their web viewing habits overlap? Not only the obvious ones, like Linux folks reading Slashdot and Mac folks reading Mac-related sites. But do e.g. cnn.com and yahoo.com draw similar proportions of Linux people? Do Linux vs Mac people have more overlap in the sites they view than Linux vs Windows people do, or Mac vs Windows people?
It would be interesting to use e.g. some biological measures here. E.g. the Shannon-Weiner diversity index (used to measure species diversity), although that one mainly just measures total diversity, not actual segregation. I suppose even better would be something like the Fst statistic from population genetics, which measures how segregated various subpopulations are.
I worked at a *HUGE* e-commerce company that did *not* run on a microsoft platform. The site was and is very Linux/Netscape friendly.
About one year ago, AGENT strings with the word Linux accounted for only 1% of all AGENT strings.
Since most folks do the majority of their shopping/browsing from work (based on the time of day it occurs), you can make a very strong argument that this stat is still flawed:
Corporate desktops are still Microsoft.
This stat does not single out a percentage based on individual users. It is merely the percentage of all transactions.
Corporate pipes are fatter - so those Microsoft corporate desktops are going to hit more pages.
Well, I've been in a few psych and stats classes. Well, what does psych have to do with this? Well they do a lots of surveys. Many people grumble how 'this survey is bad' or other tripe but don't give any ideas on how to DO IT RIGHT.
/dev/null
1: Buy a spammer's mailing list. I ASSUME that equal percentages of OS users use email, so there would be windows/mac/linux/amiga/... users on this list.
2: Choose a certain number of users to email a list of questions (eg: what Operating system are you running? what is your browser and what is the version?). These should be fairly through without going into 'debug-like' detail.
3: Have some sort of reward for completing this survey. If you do go this way, having a college webpage will surely help (you probably won't get any respondants if you don't). Surveys usually have a 'dollar for your time' or some such trifilng amount of 'payment'.
4: Compile your data to a usable form and include % of error by compairing to the thoeritical max number of users on the web.
Be aware this will likely cost money, but at least gets fair results.
Josh Crawley
ps: This is nowhere complete, suggestions are GLADLY accepted. Flames to
It's just the others that run it on their desktop have yet to figure out how to config their modem or get tech support from their cable provider. ;^)
...
It's fourty below and I don't give a
Identification string is not part
of the cookies thing.
Imagine if next windows worm is a worm that change useragent of IE to
Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.0.1 (Linux i586; U;) Gecko/20011120
-- Hasbullah bin Pit (sebol)
I'd say that a Linux user is much more apt/able to turn off Javascript in their browser than an IE user.
You can never equivocate too much.
How many linux users change their browser string so that a given webpage will appear properly? How many of us reject cookies and allow only very limited java and javascript permissions? I don't believe there's anything wrong with the population sample, but I question the effectiveness and correctness of the collecting mechanism. Sure M$ has the dominate marketshare in desktops. Who will dispute that? But this kind of article goes from insult to injury. Websidestory should ask themselves who's story they're really telling.
A just as scientific and much more amusing rating can be found at Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter
main(i){(10-putchar(((25208>>3*(i+=3))&7)+(i ?i-4?100:65:10)))?main(i-4):i;}
you can't disrupt you assembly line. Microsoft won't let you. Even if you can make more then $40 on each machine by eventually selling Linux on it. You can't.
Would it disrupt your assembly line to provide a dual boot to Linux OR Windows on your machines? Just a small upfront cost to get the diskimage verified and then there is nothing extra except the customers have a choice. Oh, wait. You can't do that.
Saving $40+ on the Microsoft tax doesn't make economical sense?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I bet if that survey was posted here , the stats would tell a different story.
Instead of measuring Linux vs MS in desktop use, lets measure them but the criterea of brain power.
.2% * 200 (IQ) = 100 Points
.2 * 6801 (IQ) = 1360 Points
Lets see:
(Numbers pulled out of me bum)
Microsoft
Windows 98 : 45% * 56 (IQ) = 2520 Points
Windows XP : 3% * 3 (IQ) =9 Points
Windows NT SP 1,2,3,4,5 and 6: 11 * 90 (IQ) = 990
Other
Linux : 1% * 140 (IQ) = 140 Points
Emacs :
Tenet On Port 80:
Amiga, OS/2, Be, Ti/99a, C64: 1 * 201 = 201 Points
Windows Users Behind a Unix Firewall 'cause Windows Has Bugs and Sucurity Holes: 38 * 57 = 2166 Points
Thus, one can see the 'Other' represents more brain power than the Windows crowd.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Web surveys are not a good measure anyway. Linux users may have something better to do than surf comercial websites all day. Consider the number of Sun users reported. Linux is used by the physics community for workstations. I doubt any of those "desktops" got counted. They might not even have a browser (gasp!), or a GUI for that matter.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
From the stat logging of www.babysmasher.com, which I think is pretty demographically neutral as far as OS's are concerned, I think:
UNIX (Linux) 0.90%
UNIX (Other/Unspecified) 0.32%
UNIX (SunOS) 0.15%
UNIX (HP-UX) 0.01%
Compared with:
Windows 98 45.79%
Windows ME 16.43%
Windows 2000 13.51%
Windows NT 7.21%
Windows 95 7.12%
Macintosh (PowerPC) 4.60%
Unknown Platform 3.08% (maybe some linux in there?)
WebTV 0.47%
Windows 16-bit 0.27%
Macintosh (68K) 0.05%
Windows 32-bit 0.05%
Windows 3.1 0.04%
OS/2 0.01%
Amiga 0.00%
---
Doesn't look like there's a monstrous departure from the stats in this article.. It claims that linux holds less than 1 percent... Even if you add the stats of all the other unix-flavors, that's not all that far off...
I don't see why it's a big surprise, really. When not all your friends are computer geeks - it's really easy to think "if I ask 100 random people if they use linux, it's likely only 1, or even 0, will say yes"... After all, who goes to the effort to install it unless they're pretty enthusiastic about computers? It's just too much trouble for a society that wants things working out of the box, and doing everything they want it to...
Until the time comes that Dell and Gateway are selling Linux-installed machines with good packages of software on them (which requires good software that competes with its windows equivalent well), I wouldn't expect this percentage to jump significantly either. For those into it - linux can kick ass, I don't disagree. But it's pretty obvious that it's not going to go anywhere with consumers until it's insanely easy to use, and has great software support.
There's my 2 cents...
http://www.babysmasher.com
http://www.openingbands.com
"Linux Web Usage Share Still Less Than 1 Percent Worldwide" from the StatMarket website proclaims:
"With StatMarket, you don't need to guess. That's what makes StatMarket such an invaluable resource. By providing the most accurate global Internet user trends, StatMarket lets you know exactly what standards to support in order to maximize your Web development efforts."
I wasn't aware of any Linux "web standards"... That should be an indication that the author doesn't know much about his subject.
If you (a Linux user) masquerades as an IE/NT user, it will just convince web developers to develop *only* on IE.
I wrote two e-mails to ATI because their site didn't support Netscape 6.x. I told them I was a paying customer like everyone else, and that I used Netscape 6 on Linux. They eventually re-designed their site to support Netscape6/Linux.
Do us all a favor: show the developers your true colors.
I suspect the numbers for Windows are inflated in a number of ways: browsers disguise themselves, browsers may deliberately not give out any OS information, Linux users use Windows machines (I'm typing this from a Windows machine right now, not because I like the desktop or use it primarily but because Microsoft's monopoly meant I had to buy one to use proprietary software), and the sites they are sampling may be biased. If they rely on cookies in some way (Hitbox uses them and perhaps doesn't count people who don't accept them), many Linux users are probably not counted as well.
I suspect that Linux is on a few percent of desktops. It is also on the desktops of people who have lots of disposable income for tech gadgets. Advertisers, take notice.
Anyone who usese IE is a fool. Oh wait, I'm at work and HAVE to use IE.
Let's think about how useful that makes web counters. I spend 10 hours a day at work, 8 hours sleeping, 2 hours getting too and from work. That leaves me with four hours each day to do things around the house, two of which are usually dedicated to eating and grooming. Two hours for everything else in the world. So what browswer is most likely to be used? M$IE by greater than ten to one.
Dreams of MSIE at my house are more like nightmares. That's not where I wanted to go yesterday!
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
So the way I see it, make linux exaclly the same as windows 98 and linux will have much more success?
Oh, and I really would like to see you install Win98 in 10 minutes. Win98 is now 3 years old. Three years ago, I was using something like Red Hat 5.2 or 6.0. If you want to match up windows to linux install times, compare today's linux with today's windows: XP. XP does NOT install in 10 minutes.
Does a multi-boot box count twice or more?
What about vmware? I could count my box for like 5 oses with vmware if I wanted to...
I don't know about you, but I turn off images a lot, and Javascript all the time (except a couple of sites I trust).
If you can't run Java, you don't get my business.
And so I'll never be counted as a Linux user, even though I have at home:
1 Win98 box (soon to be Mandrake Linux 8.1 with The Sims, cause that's why it's Windows - to play games)
1 iMac with 92MB RAM for my son (not on the Net)
3 Linux servers - dual CPU boxes with 256MB RAM and nice big monitors - also serve as browsers
so they'll never record me.
-
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
In a related story 99.99% of users visiting www.linuxblowsgoats.com and www.ihateunix.com were Windows users. The wonders never cease!
Our homepage is a scientific one
http://www.nano.geo.uni-muenchen.de
so this is biased,too:
Windows 98 40.76%
Windows NT 21.55%
Windows 95 13.29%
Windows 2000 9.02%
Macintosh 8.68%
Linux 2 2.93%
They don't want to spend lots of money doing tech support for people trying to use Linux.
-All your base are belong to the man.
Hope this doesn't turn out to be a double-post.
I used to be a linux zealot. Running around screaming about how Linux would change the world, it's way better than anything else, blah, blah.
But then I started using it.
Linux sucks for the desktop. It's time we admitted it and started to fix the problems.
-All your base are belong to the man.
Eventually I gave up my attempts to get the GUI to work and started using Cygwin.
-All your base are belong to the man.
I agree, how hard would it be to fix that?
Yeah, the Mac is nice. If I talk to a non-technical user, and I won't make money supporting them, then I always recommend the Mac. Always.
The only real advantage that Windows has is its ubiquity. That's it. The main homogeneities are the name and the processor choice. The other one is that it's difficult to use properly. I do support in an office, and people still call me about the screen bar having moved. (You can drag it with the mouse, but some of these people can't learn that. So sometimes they do it by accident [well, I have too] and then they don't know what happened, or how to recover.)
Now one could say that people shouldn't be that techno-illiterate, but some people are. And this is the MS target audience. The Mac is a much better choice. (But try to tell that to my boss!)
On Linux, what are needed are better tools. Font building tools, e.g. The Mac had those ages ago. This allowed people to build fonts for any special purpose they needed. Perhaps the problem here is that Linux font specs have been in flux? Or nobody's been interested?
Also, Glade is nice, but it doesn't compete with the Screen Builders that MS includes with it's tools. And is there a decent report writer? (Probably not, since it's basically a specialized version of the Screen Builder.)
The Linux philosophy has been to build the tools, and then to use them to build better tools, oh, yes, and also to solve other problems. Now that the more basic tools are in quite good shape, we shouldn't neglect to build the next layer of tools. That's what our users will use to build the fancier applications. And somewhere in that space of "fancier applications" is the next "killer application". You don't design that on purpose. You can design good applications on purpose, but you can't design killer applications on purpose. But if a large number of people design a large number of really good applications, somewhere in there is likely to be the next "killer application". You recognize it because its use grows and becomes the kind of tidal wave that swamps the GIMP.
As to X Window... lots of people seem to not like it. But we sure don't want that in the kernel. It's huge! And nobody has come up with a better choice. (I understand that a couple of projects are in process, but I don't believe that they are useable yet.)
Quick installs: I've never been able to install Windows in 10 minutes. But it is nice to be able to start the installer going, and walk away. Still, this isn't something that many people are going to do very often. At all. Most of my Linux installs have gone as smoothly as my Windows installs. But most people never do an OS install. So that isn't going to affect these people. What affects them is what they buy pre-installed on a new computer. And I don't see any way to change that. So the only point to change is what is available to buy. And the principle way to change that is to insist that you only want Linux installed on each and every computer that you buy. (Other people may have more leveraged ways to affect this, but for people in general, that's the choice.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If that isn't a monopoly, than I'm a complete idiot.
The easiest platform on which to configure X is... Mac OS X ! Just unpack XFree86 and run. The framebuffer drive tells X the rest.
The prob. w/ using Google stats is that users of diff. operating systems are more or less likely to use Google. For example, the MacOS has a built in web-search tool that simulateously querries many search engines, but not Google. Many people just use this feature to search the web. This might be an isolated incident, but if there is widespread use of this kind of tool on other OSs, that could affect these figures too. I think that asking all ISPs to identify the OS of boxes that connect to them would be a better way of getting a fairly accurate view, but then again, many people use BSD and Linux boxes as gateways for their Win boxes. Anyways, it doesn't matter much. It's only relevant to you who visits your site, so that you can cater to that group of users. It's useless to find what the percentages are on other sites, since they will be attracting a different crowd.
Clearly, linux must be dominating the desktop market, as is shown by this poorly coded CGI script residing on a webserver somewhere on my campus. I can offer no proof better that this. ;)
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
KDE, FVWM, FVWM 95, Afterstep, Enlightnment, Afterstep, and YES even GNOME STINKS!
The main problem with X Window Managers is that there is not uniformity. You can't just say I run Linux, you have to specify which distribution and which Windows Mangers.. plus none of the window managers truly provides an integrated GUI to the OS.. it's just something that sits on top of the OS a good parallelism would be windows 3.0.. we all know that one STANK! I hate MS but I would have to admit that their GUI blows away any X Window manager... and I don't think you could get anyone that has used it to deny that Mac OS X has the most advanced GUI out today. The main complaint against it would be that it is closed source. One problem with open source is that you cannot get everyone working on a particular task (i.e. the GUI) to work on the same project.
Can I get an Amen!?
DrVPN
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
I get a little pop-up labeled:
Sorry! Yahoo! FinanceVision is only supported
under... [Windows and Mac OS]
May shit like this is why people use IE under
Windows.
More practically, it would be nice to note
sites that are broken, when referenceing them.
Come on! Linux is about choice most of all.
/too/ bad, and on mac the GUI kicks my ass.
What are my display choices in linux?
X...and...X.
That is a choice?
At least with win the GUI doesn't suck
The closest thing to a consistent GUI in *NIX is CDE...how sad is that?
M-X jihad-against-suckyness
News Break, no one gives a f*ck. If you like linux (like me) then use it, and contribute to open source. If you dont, then dont use it. Its pretty simple. Who cares wtf everyone else is using?
Home-use personal computers are a loss-leading engine for the likes of Microsoft and Apple. The reason they gave computers to schools(Apple) and are trying to give computers as payment(Microsoft) is to establish mindshare. In turn, this is supposed to bleed into the now-grown student's choice of OS software within their business environment. Given that most companies now have a policy regarding what OS is chosen, this effect is dampened. Furthermore, Linux owns from 27% of the share of servers out in the wild blue yonder(independent resources) to 9% of the share of web servers(MS funded research). Either way, the disproportion ranges from 37 to 115 times the proportionate rate, going from home use to server determination. Maybe I'm missing something, but the reality that Linux is receiving a disproportionate mindshare from the servers in the workplace is something to celebrate, not deny.
So if you agree with me that it doesn't make sense for them to offer just any old x86 operating system out there for pre-install, explain why it is they should make a special case for Linux when it's only accounting for 0.24% of the userbase.
This doesn't even address the extra huge support costs associated with offering additional operating systems, especially Linux, since these companies don't just throw systems out there and refuse to support them.
As long as people keep porting drivers, I wouldn't mind in the least.
If being mature means linux has to be dumbed down and lose half its functionality, then I'd just as soon all those people crying about linux being so hard go off and run OS X. Linux ain't supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be powerful.
I can guarantee that if linux ever lost the power and became a pretty little useless macintoy clone all of us who have been using it since the old days before anyone started this whole "desktop OS" crap would jump ship. But it won't happen - we didn't fight to get linux this far just to lose it to a bunch of lusers who don't want to RTFM.
Sorry if this sounds harsh, but some friends of mine recently started running mandrake and all of it's distro-specific config utilities make it hell to customize. Gee, sounds like windows...
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
VMWare users are far too small a minority to affect stats in the slightest.
Hitbox?. Oh, aren't they those gifs which I never see because I use galeon, or lynx, or opera, or junkbuster? or simply Netscape or Mozzilla without JavaScript (as I routinately surf anyway)?
I wonder how they classified by Debian box using Netscape (no cookies)/junkbuster combo.
If they are going to look at what platforms people are using to access the web, then they should do it on weekends or something.
It's like saying that 95% of policemen drive Crown Victorias because 95% of the time that they are on the streets, they are in a Crown Victoria. Nevermind that the Crown Victoria isn't theirs and that they might have 3 other cars at home which they like and would rather use a thousand times more than the Crown Victoria.
A number of posters seem to be moaning because the figures range from 0.25% (HitBox) to 1% (Google). I see wild theories attempting to discredit the figures and additional arguments trying to justify why the figures should be higher.
Wake up to yourselves. Almost 1% is great! The current estimate for the number of Internet users is 513 million people (according to NUA http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/). So even taking the lowest figure from HitBox that's 1.3 million people using Linux as a desktop. It could be as high as 5.2 million people if Google provides a better sample.
But that's only desktop users! I will claim (and I think many people would agree) that the percentage of Linux *servers* is much higher than the percentage of Linux desktops. I can't guess how many machines this equates to (I don't know the relative number of desktops to servers, or the percentage of servers that are Linux) but it's going to be more than zero.
It's brilliant news that Linux usage is this high. Every single person that uses Linux is a success story for Linux. There's no need to have huge marketshare, or be the dominant player. You just need a critical mass of users and several million users is definitely a critical mass. The early years of Linux had just a few 100 users and it was enough to propel the snowball forward. Millions of users equates to an avalanche!
Keep reminding yourself, just by using Linux you are helping to make Linux better. You are another person who can help a newbie. You are another person who might buy a book or CD and thus indirectly fund a developer. You are another person who might find a bug, suggest a feature, write some documentation, or perhaps even write some code.
You are part of the Linux community, and even the most pessimistic figures suggest that this is a community with MILLIONS of members.
OK, so there aren't that many people running linux (percentage-wise). But of those of us who do, I'd say the vast majority who do use linux also use windows. Some may have another machine. Some may dual boot. Some browse from work (of course, I certainly wouldn't be doing that right now), and most offices run windows. If I am booted into my win2k, i am not goint to reboot just to get something off the web. I also do most of my gaming in win2k. So my browsing outside of linux would mess up all of those stats.
you probably shouldn't have read this.
You don't seem to get that the OEM's technical support costs vastly outweigh what they are paying on the Microsoft Tax.
Meaning as soon as a user accidentally boots into the wrong OS and has to call support, the OEM has probably lost money on the box. That does not make economic sense.
I understand that you feel burnt over OS/2, but if you are going to talk economics, the 'rational' configuration is the one that is the most uniform and the cheapest to support (has the fewest options). That circumstance created the Microsoft monopoly far more than any dirty OEM dealings did.
It's also rather insulting to think that users are being buffooned into running Windows because the OEMs ship. Users run Applications and are mostly uninterested in OSes. They don't buy "Windows machines", they buy "Excel machines", and if you can't provide Excel (or a facimile), they won't be interested.
It's too bad that IBM missed the mark by inches. If OS/2 2.1 had been a little lighter weight and gotten a little UI touchup, it probably would have been the "supportable" choice over Windows. Linux ain't even close.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
HA, and the conspiracy threories come out already! I really don't think any one has motive to pretend that Linux has a lower end-user figure than it has, when it is such a minuscule figure - or are you suggesting that the figure is out by 20-50%???
The IDC states that 2% of corporate desktop users are using Linux. This is rouchly 8 times what this survey reported and I would think that there would be slightly more home users using it now than corporate users.
My estimate is 2-5% of users are using Linux. Still small but not as small as 0.24%...
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
As that article said. Actually know someone who got interviewed over the phone for one of these national polls, and they would not accept his answers. Guess a lot of these polls are for marketing purposes.
Matt
X is good technology, IMO. Yes, it is complicated, but when was the last time you tried to troubleshoot a Windows GUI problem?
What X needs is some better administration tools, but those even, are coming.
You are right about the office suite, but it will come. RAD capabilities in Linux are finally becomming really possible, and I am sure that this trend will extend to the office apps.
My 62 year old dad DOES use Linux with few problems, and he was lost with Windows 95. Yes, it is complicated, but try running Windows. That is complicated but the initial learning curve is a little easier (it gets harder really fast, though).
I will concede, though, that troubleshooting a mac is much more simple than Windows or Linux. At least until OS X... I still prefer Linux to Windows in this regard.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
There are a number of people that would do away with proprietary software if it were up to them. Yet many of these same people also take the same attitude that you're taking, that no one has the the right to complain about free/open source software? Well who exactly do users complain to in a purely Open Source world? Who makes sure that their needs are met? No one really.
If there's real choice, then I can understand and appreciate your position. But if you're one that advocates removing choice from the customer (like RMS), then you better at least be responsive to the needs of the (potential) users.
Often times sites will harras you for not having a sheep browser, so many people have thier user agent strings lie, so adding annother .05% to that figure would be reasonable.
As far as I can tell, you've completely missed two salient points.
1) OS/2. The UI stomped all over Windows (3.1 or later on, 95). It was simply better in all respects. It was also no 'heavier' than Win95--IBM was just more honest about the requirements.
OS/2 failed for the simple reason of incompetent marketing, and nothing else.
2) "...or a facsimile..." WRONG! You're right that people are interested in applications rather than OSes, but something with similar functionality will not convince someone to change--it has to have the same UI and the (nearly) identical usability items. If it works 10x better than Excel but looks utterly unfamiliar, then it won't get used by more than a tiny percent of the marketplace. Maybe three years ago, but not now.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I see, it seems that it's cheaper to design new hardware so that they can put buttons on the keyboards so the OEM can get around Microsofts restriction of enhancing the UI. If you don't know what I'm talking about, look at a Compaq PC. You'll see there are a number of button which launch application Compaq pre-packaged on the system. Microsfot won't let any OEM customize the product to fit their customers needs.
If OEM's follow your rule then there is NO INNOVATION. None. Because it costs too much. We'd be using stone and chisel if we follow your rule.
The reason Linux or any OS can't get onto the desktops is because Microsoft can prevent innovation there.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
All in all, just the hassle involved in loading an accelerated graphics card made by the most pro-linux graphics card manufacturer in the world (MHO) is enough to keep anyone who is not a hard core geek from even considering using Linux.
If they were really so pro-Linux, they would have Open Source drivers so that you wouldn't have to jump through the hoops that you did. Place the blame where it belongs -- with NVidia.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
X11 is good technology. It is extensible and flexible. It is thin, with a low memory footprint, and has layered features, much like TCP/IP (actually, the analogy could be followed here quite well).
The problem is not actually with X at all. It is the office suites which are useful in small settings but are not enough of a development platform for the enterprise (this is where MS rules, security aside).
I remember when the Linux desktop was clunky (that was a year and a half ago) and now it is much more smooth, without getting rid of X. KDE and GNOME have both come a long way in that time. I am waiting for the office suites to do likewise.
The basic thing is that I think that the study has underreported Linux by 8 to 10 times (still a small percent though), but I don't think that the problems are as severe as they used to be.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
every time Linux bogots get conerned in the harsh galre of market acceptance reeality they hide the heads inteh sand of anecdotal "don't-know-about-you-but-I-use-Linux" stories. Go ahead continue deluding yourself that Linux is "making it" on the desktop. Your choice. But as you continue to flog a dead horse hpoing to get back i nthe race, OSX whcih needs your support and has a real chance suffers and its chances of prevailing decrease. You'll end up using the desktop your earn/deserve. The question is will it be OSX or XP. Your actions will determine this.
Anybody else think its interesting that websidestory.com (and associated sites) run Solaris/Apache?
check it out
How do they determine how many Linux desktops there are? We have up to seventy (70) desktops looking like a single IP to the web sites. Of course, Windows can use proxies also, but is it a good assumption to assume proxy use is the same between Linux and Windows users?
The next PC virus ought to make a small modification to IE, and have it identify itself as Netscape 6.2 on Linux. If it gets widespread it'll really screw up the numbers and cause some confusion. Alternatively, a bunch of us could write a little script to randomly visit major sites with that identification, and leave it running when they aren't using our machines. Heck, just cooking the books at microsoft.com ought to worry a few people in Redmond!!
Surveys like this are inherently flawed because many proxy servers send can modify the browser type sent out to the page. For example, at my company I've got squid set up to say we're all running Mozilla 0.9.4 on Linux ;-).
So there are 4 Amigas but no BeOS and no WinME. It seems that your mechanism throws them together in that big Unknown.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
On a Danish language website about Danish traditions, we got 0,24% Linux in 70,000 hits. Windows 95 was 15% and Windows 98 was 59%. Windows XP had 46 hits in total. Webmaster and webserver operators hits have been effectively removed from these statistics (both use Linux).
:-)
The audience is believed to be home users, schools and Danes living in other countries.
The server is behind a 25kbyte/sec line, so I won't give the URL here...
What hitbox does isn't necessarily wrong. It is a useful thing to know how much of the web traffic is coming from what users. It's just when this data gets misinterpeted by hack reporters that there's a problem.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
I don't want to get into a OS/2 flamewar, but I did _specifically_ mention v 2.1 which dates from 1992 or so.
+ It needed 16MB of memory. Windows 3 could get away with 4MB. That added $500 or more to the cost of a machine.
+ The default UI was 'featureful', but the execution was terrible. Ugly icons scattered hither and fro in 4-level deep nested folders scattered randomly around your desktop, gigantic ugly oddly-colored dialogs, terrible terrible filemanager, key features like "Shutdown" hidden in obscure places, etc.
If IBM would have hired somebody with a little artistic and usability training, this could have been significantly improved in a short amount of time. However, they didn't, and OS/2 (true to it's name) had a half-done GUI until Warp 4 shipped years later, after the product had been defeated.
Windows 3? Simple. Didn't do much. Obvious options. Therefore, cheap to support for OEMs and a more 'rational' product for economic reasons.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
You didn't specifically mention it in your post, but a number of other people droned on about the lack of hardware support in Linux, or about how hard it is to install Linux and auto-detect ann their old cheapo integrated network chipsets or sound cards. Have you ever actually tried to install Winblows on a home built computer, or something that wasn't specifically configured to work with Windows? It's a freaking disaster!! I've seen plenty of hardware combinations that simply will not work on a Windows install, but when I re-install with Linux, the drivers load up without a hitch. The best part is that, if your Windows install fails, you're SOL. No errors. No diagnostics. It just sits there staring at you.
Oh yea, and then there's the, "I once tried to load a document in StarOffice and it didn't work, so SO blows!" And, I suppose the last time you tried it, you were using version 5.0, reading a Windows doc file? Have you ever even tried the latest SO version? Have you ever tried ceating a document from scratch and comparing the features? Have you spent even 0.001% of the time on StarOffice learning how it works, as you have in MS Office? Are you any different from the people who say, "Gee, I used MS Office, and one time it Blue Screened on me and I lost all my work, so Office must be the suckiest software on the face of the planet, and no one will ever want to use it."
Lets face it. Most home users want to surf the Web, write email, and play games. Linux is short on games, but the SO is just as usable as Office, as long as you aren't trying to convert funky MS formats, and the browsers are functional for 98% of the Web sites, as long as they are not specifically tailored for IE. It's a classic chicken and egg problem, but there is no reason why, if you sold a pre-installed Linux based system to a typical user, they couldn't function just as well as they do now with a Windows box.
In summary, if you're going to whine about "Linux Usability", then please at least try to come up with something original, or perhaps back up your complaints with some real efforts. Don't assume that, just because you are to lazy or set in your ways to change, that everyone else has to be like you.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
You and I think alike.
That fact remains, if you want to run a desktop environment on linux, you have to use X right now.
There is not other choice (atleast one that is ready).
excellent observation.
Oh - Point #2 -- I threw that "facsimile" bit in as a bone to the non-Windows folks. I agree with your point.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
i have win2k and would like to change - i have a free 4 gig partition on my system and i have all rhat packages ready - but, i am to lazy to install from boot disk?! - i am used to open an executable file to install everything and not to read installation steps for a boot image and disc... why is it still that difficult ?! rhat is a commercial product and they want that everybody use their distri - but the installationssteps didn't change for years! i guess this is one of the reasons, why linux is bull shit on the desktop
Just a quick clairification here.
That "story" linked above wasn't written by any reportrer, hack or not. It's a press release from StatMarket and WebSideStory. Press releases are nothing more than marketing propaganda designed to financially aid the group that makes the press release. Generally, press releases are written by a company's marketing department.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that the statistics in that release are flawed. Someone who can competently produce statistical analyses is very unlikely to be employed in a marketing department; there are far more lucrative and fulfilling employment opportunities for statisticians in other areas.
-- Nolite audere delere orbiculum rigidum meum.
Isn't 0.24% the same percentage of homosexuals in the population?
Fervent Linux fan that I am, I've given up on being able to use it on my desktop for the time being. The main reason is lack of Japanese language capability.
:-(
Linux has come far enough to where Japanese can be viewed on the screen, and with some programs input, but it's currently at about the state that MacOS/Windows was about 10+ years ago.
My home server runs Redhat, but I've ended up even doing web development on it though a Win box, just because the internationalization (fonts, input method, speed of display, etc) is sooo much better.
CC-licensed translations of Japanese fiction: http://tonygonz.blogspot.com/
I'm a Linux user in Mexico. The depth of Linux user is probably less here than in the blessed US of A. But who cares? I changed my computer, that of my wife and that of my son (age 4) from Windows to Linux and guess what? WE'RE ALL HAPPY AS CLAMS BECAUSE OF THE CHANGE! No more BSOD's, no more viruses (NOT virii, by the way, you dumbasses) and no more strange undiagnosable crashes. Yes, I still support Windows the same as I have for the past 15 years. But the hell with the rest of the world. They're not operating our family's computers. Are we included in this survey? Most probably not. BUT I DON'T CARE!! I'll (we'll) use Linux until something better comes along. If MS decides to produce a better OS, then "come on down." But until then, we'll stick with the penguin, thank you very much.
So bascially people surfing the web with Linux make up between .25% and 1% of the browser population (based on this survey, google and others) -- so basically that is between 1 in 100 and 1 in 400 users.. not too shabby given the less-than stellar focus on Linux as a desktop platform until the recent past.
.. no doubt in my mind. It wasn't until this past year that some serious RAD development tools were released for Linux (ie Kylix) .. Linux is continuing to become more and more of a desktop OS .. just give it a lil'more time..
.. but I wouldn't be surprised to see it at 10% within 2 years.
.. multiple editors, terminals, configuraitno panels, interfaces, etc..etc..etc.. while this is GREAT for the customizability and choice factor, it is rather daunting to the new individual using Linux.. Luckily there are a significant number of distros already looking into this and adjusting accordingly.
.. how can I say this!??! Well simple .. lets face it -- most functionaility (from a desktop/end user perspective) on Linux is available for Windows. So basically the hindering factor is that one application that someone NEEDS to run on Windows..Sure there are things like Wine, but unfortunately the performance hit and reliability hit are enough to make someone stay with Windows.
.. then as more people use Linux and the emulator for a companies program, it would provide the user base necessary for a company to realize they should develop a Linux native version (and with the RAD tools mentioned above, these companies will realize it is fairly simple to do so .. :)
.. As Linux evolves, it will find a balance that satisfies the larger array of end users from us more technically sophisticated to those just wanting to point and click.
In the next year we will have KDE 3, StarOffice 6, even MORE streamlined interfaces, more distro's focused on the desktop, MORE people wanting to using Linux as they are becoming more comfortable with the interface.
So the number will grow
Will it displace Windows in the next few years? Probably not.. Will it take marketshare away from Windows? Of course.. how much is to be seen
However, like others have said, there needs to be some distros that really focus on the desktop. In particular, configuration/control panels NEED to be organized, standardized, etc.. Luckily there are those RAD development tools that should make this task very simple.
Additionally, there needs to be a focus on streamlining the entire experience. Linux provides TOO much
Windows compatibility -- yikes
So if there was some insanely great Windows emulation, those people could run Linux and using the emulation for those one or two apps they need
So my final thoughts? Give it some time
Most of my friends think I'm a nerd. Linux - huh?
My arguments don't stick.
How about this:
This percentage represents how much of the functionality of all the "linux for the desktop" projects is already coded.
Think about it.Think about how many project there are and how many times those will be forked before they are considered finished.
When linux is ready for the desktop it will be 100/0.24 more functional/stable/secure than windows.
And that's why it will take 100/0.24 more time...
As the functionality increases so will this percentile.
cyfex
Moderation Totals: Flamebait=3, Redundant=1, Funny=7, Overrated=3, Underrated=2, Total=16.
Best...comment...ever.
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Let me give you the lowdown
I agree with your points about IE and the browser companies. I should clarify something: "IE Compatible" simply meant that when I go to a site that uses XSL or Flash (yech!) or Java Applet's -- it should "just work". Also, when you create some HTML/CSS or whatever in these browsers, it displays in them as good as it does in IE. Thats all. Hell, I use Konq, I like it, but there are somethings that I say to myself "wtf, why doesn't that look right...". Then I go over to my Mac or Windows box and sure enough IE looks pretty good.
Its just an observation.
Maybe I just keep up on this stuff more than you do, but I've been doing everything you list above all year with Galeon. Flash, applets, no problem. XSL? Of course. CSS? Better than IE. Rarely do I see a page render in IE differently from how it renders in mozilla. And usually, the reason is a failure of IE to comply with the spec properly.
Now here's a fine example of somebody who Doesn't Get What Linux is About.
- KDE and GNOME desktop's look like crap: I find every GNOME and KDE environment I try, just looks like junk compared to a Mac or Windows experience.
Did you stop to consider customizing the appearance? Me, I can't bear to use Windows. It feels nothing but crude to me. To each his own. Maybe you should stick with Windows or MacOS, you seem to hate everything about the current Linux desktop offerings.
2. Standardize on one API layer for the GUI, much like Win32, we should have a set of API's that are "God" when it comes to writing GUI under Linux.
No, no, no. Nothing should _ever_ be God when it comes to Linux. If I don't like how the God library works, I'm going to write a better one. If we subscribe to this "There can be only one" crap that MS and Apple dictate on their platforms, we'd be nowhere near as far along as we are now. Virtually all great projects in the free software world stand on the shoulders of other free software projects.
You oviously can't read, and have 100% no facts to anything you say. /. check out www.netbsd.org -Now to correct what you said, and to spell it right: "NetBSD the one OS which supports more hardware platforms than any other".
Before you troll on
www.netbsd.org != www.linux.com
The "market share" of an OS is something that is really difficult to measure. How about people like me who sometimes use Linux, and sometimes use Windows (simply because I haven't gotten my WinModem to work under Linux ... yet).
"X Windows: Relying on a HUGE layer for your graphical underpinnings is a big mistake. Remove X. Its too complicated to install, too big and too slow. I could give a hoot about all you so called "Linux Hackers" who say that Linux is for the elite. I look at it as I see it -- it shouldn't be this damn hard, and this damn big! Windows 98 installs in 10 mins -- nice goal to shoot for. Xfree86 my ass, move off that clunker and have a nice thin layer at the bottom... sheesh."
I find that a lot of the people that bitch about X REALLY don't know the ingeniuity and power that it contains. Those MIT guys really did an amazing job. Yes, I know that it was developed a long time ago, but the fact that it is still able to handle what we need today only lends credibility to it. It was an amazing computing accomplishment, and it is very powerful. (Consider that it implemented at that time things such as virtual and remote terminals that Windows was only recently able to accomplish.) It also means that its code is mature and stable.
Maybe it could be more compact; Maybe it be less powerful. I may not know too much but I know a good tool when I see one, and I know how to appreciate the ingeniuity and labour of others that seek to make the world a better place.
Erm, games, maybe. Not movies, though.
Unless you wanna watch stuff that uses Sorensen and crap like that...
Actually DVDs and DivX play faster in Linux (using Xine) then in Win98 (when I still had it) on my machine
Brian
I did this check Apr 16, 2001. Its for my website www.flashdance.cx. The site
/var/log/httpd/access_log | grep Windows | wc -l
/var/log/httpd/access_log | grep Mac | wc -l
/var/log/httpd/access_log | grep Linux | wc -l
/var/log/httpd/access_log | grep FreeBSD | wc -l
/var/log/httpd/access_log | grep IRIX | wc -l
/var/log/httpd/access_log | grep HP-UX | wc -l
/var/log/httpd/access_log | grep AIX | wc -l
/var/log/httpd/access_log | grep Amiga | wc -l
/var/log/httpd/access_log | grep BeOS | wc -l
/var/log/httpd/access_log | grep OpenBSD | wc -l
/var/log/httpd/access_log | grep NetBSD | wc -l
/var/log/httpd/access_log
/var/log/httpd/access_log
is much about computers and some stuff are only for Linux. But i have other
things not related to computers at all. Mac and Linux are quite equal.
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ cat
153439
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ cat
4359
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ cat
4217
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ cat
138
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ cat
40
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ cat
23
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ cat
8
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ cat
7
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ cat
7
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ cat
6
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ cat
[iocc@flashdance iocc]$ du -h
36M
> + It needed 16MB of memory. Windows 3 could get away with 4MB. .......
Sorry but I ran OS/2 2.1 on 8MB of RAM running Windows 3.1 apps and the netware client at a very reasonable speed. I went to 10MB for those users who wanted to add TCP/IP and IBM's X Server.
You seem to think you know the story but remember the thread title. I doubt that even if someone paid the support costs for the first 2 call and had an OS 10x bettery then Windows that OEMs would even consider it. They would have to totally give up on shipping Windows and every application vendor that started developing for it would have their existing apps break with the next security patch for LookOut or InternetExplorer.
It just doesn't matter. Support cost or no support costs.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Two major competing desktops is a bad thing. Thirty desktops is even worse. The problem is the deversion of talent and time needed to work on these platforms. I cannot contribute to one desktop without hurting the other.
Although my KDE apps work in GNOME and visa-versa it is hard for them to interoperate with the environment.
ie.Try loading a KDE app in GNOME it looks alien.
also: Try embedding a KDE control into a GNOME app and using an enlightenment theme in GNOME.
Even if you can find a way to do this how easy is it to program an app to do this?
I agree that competition is generally a good thing. But this form of competition has a price, the price of talentened hackers.
I believe with one environment businesses, engineers, and hackers can create a GUI platform that would rival XP or OS X.
Oh well there is nothing that can be done about this anyway but that is my 2 cents.
Microsoft had to give away Windows for several years before anyone would consider paying for it. IBM could have done the same with OS/2, but chose to sell it at a premium to enterprise customers. Much like Apple, they didn't properly anticipate the exponential growth in PC users that happened in the early 90s.
/. a few times before, and I find your worldview depressing. You bet on the wrong horse, and your reaction has been to valorize a flawed product and develop a defeatist worldview and an eternal hatred for your product's competitors (and the tendancy to spew offtopic bile about "LookOut"). I encourage you to try to take a fresh look at things and get on with life.
I think that's (part of) what people mean when they talk about IBM's "bad marketing" of OS/2.
"It just doesn't matter." is a terrible lesson to be learned from your experience with OS/2. For one it absolves IBM for a terribly handled product, and for another it implies that all Bill Gates had to was punch the clock every morning to become the richest man on earth. You might not like to hear it, but at the time of the IBM-Microsoft divorce, Big Blue should have been able to rubout those pipsqueaks.
We've crossed swords over OS/2 on
I'm no more happy about a MS Monopoly than the average slashdotter, just making an effort to understand how we got here. Not to mention that if Gates would sold out to IBM in 1990, I'm pretty sure that an IBM-dominated PC landscape would be worse that what we ended up getting.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.