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.

Comments

Representative data

[Cpyder]

well, as the mac article points out, the Hitbox users aren't really representative... But what about Google??? About everybody uses google... So let's see what they have to tell:
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)

Where they get their stats.

[Carnage4Life]

According to their Research methodology page

StatMarket publishes statistics based on the combined data from tens of millions of daily Internet users visiting the tens of thousands of sites that use WebSideStory's HitBox Enterprise and other HitBox Web audience analysis services. HitBox is an outsourced Web site measurement and analysis service that provides real-time statistics about online visitor behavior.

...

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

Their stats are wrong ... here's why:

[Skapare]

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.

hitbox ignores client without javascript

[gregor_b_dramkin]

from the FAQ at http://www.hitboxcentral.com:

"HitBox will record nothing if:

• The referring site does not link to the page containing the HitBox Main Code or you have not installed the HitBox Main Page code properly (Free HitBox V5 only).
• The HitBox code does not fully execute.
• The reverse DNS lookup is unable to complete.
• The visitor's JavaScript is disabled. "

I'd say that a Linux user is much more apt/able to turn off Javascript in their browser than an IE user.