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

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.