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

The problem is..

[Rosonowski]

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?

Re:The problem is..

[MSG]

The problem is that users don't really know what they want, they only know what they're told they should want. The parent post may be a troll, and it may not, but it's full of frequently posted bullshit that people need to stop believing.

don't try and convince me that an almost 20 year-old architecture is going to bode well these days

OK, why are you even considering Linux then? It's a 10 year old OS replicating a 30 year old architecture. It can't *possibly* be any good, right?

Modular, extensible software isn't new. X11 was designed that way years ago. The only problem has been the proliferation of slow, monolithic implimentations. XFree86's implimentation is much much better than many in the past. X11 itself is a fine drawing layer, even if libx11 is a bitch to interface with.

There is no compelling reason for people to use Linux on the desktop

Maybe not. I don't know. My mom's been using it for 3 or 4 years, since before Windows had ICS. That was the killer feature. Even after that, Windows didn't have a good personal firewall. Even still, it's vulnerable to about a million virii that will never affect her computer. Everyone has something that they desire from their computer...

Xfree86 my ass, move off that clunker and have a nice thin layer at the bottom

There's that frequently quoth bullshit. X11 IS THIN. Thin == little memory: X11 works on Compaq iPAQ's in something like 2MB of RAM, and provides better services than the Linux frame buffer. Thin == low level, which is what most *real* X11 programmers bitch about. X11 is so thin that it provides a mechanism without any policy! That's its design goal. It's just the mechanism, so policy can be decided by anyone who needs a graphical environment without rewriting their drawing layer from scratch. As GUI's evolve, and their internal designs change, X11 will always be there for them to be built upon, without rewriting the low level hardware interface bits.

Why does everyone bitch about X11, but no one ever thinks that Linux should be replaced with something that isn't 100MB of source, and 20 MB of binary? What? No one thinks that an OS would be much faster if it were "thin"?

Remember, THIN == few features. X11 provides all of the features that you need to draw in an extensible architecture, without anything that belongs somewhere else.

Linux needs a completely IE compatible browser.

Compatible in what way? If browsers on Linux aren't compatible with IE, then the fault lies not in the Linux browser developers; it's with MS. There *IS* a standard for this crap, you know? It's all written out, and anyone should be able to understand it. Mozilla and Opera are far better at being standards compliant than IE, so why don't you bitch at MS. Why should we have to degrade from written standards to implimentation standards that are likely to change as IE does?

Fonts suck

*GOOD* fonts are really hard to create, and therefore very expensive. Perhaps you would like to develop some? Or maybe fund their development? Not that you're wrong here... The fonts we've got would be a lot better if they were scalable and hinted, but that's where we loose out.

Re:The problem is..

[jackbox]

Does anyone recall how NT 3.1 was supposed to be the desktop follow-up to Windows 3.x back in... like, 1994? When did NT finally achieve notable penetration on the desktop? Maybe around 1998? Maybe only last year with Windows 2000?

I don't have exact stats. My point is: it's taken at least 4-5 years for Microsoft to push their own "industrial strength" OS onto the desktop. (Win 9x was a stopgap measure because people were sticking with Win 3.x and not moving to NT.)

Whoever is doing doomsaying on Linux by claiming "it's been years and it's not on the desktop yet - therefore it's a loser" has been brainwashed by the MS PR spinners.

These changes take time. And Linux has made incredible progress considering the many hurdles it has to overcome in the marketplace. Now is no time to stop.

Here we go...

[forgoil]

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.

Lynx will never show up on these stats

[andyr]

Since the stats are gathered in one place, a hitcounter, my lynx-browsing will never be tallied, as I do not download those little GIFs. Even under Galeon I flag it to not download pictures from other sites - so I will not show up there either.

Cheers, Andy!

Survey says...

[adubey]

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%

Circular circle? :)

[ishark]

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 %?).

Re:Where they get their stats.

[zmooc]

Still, that doesn't have to be a guarantee at all. It is very well possible that the sites that use hitbox are for some reason visited more by windows users (newbies?) than other sites. Sites with content that's more interesting to us geeks usually don't use hitbox (slashdot, google, blah). Porno sites for example work much better in windows (movies!). I'm not saying that Porno sites use HitBox more, but it's just one of the many examples. The only way to do such a survey right is by picking a few people randomly and then contact them by telephone. And then it's still possible that users of OS A are more willing to cooperate than users of OS B:)

B.F.D: There's still a monopoly out there fellas

[Locutus]

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

NVidia dosn't get Linux

[Royster]

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.