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New Numbers on Linux Market Share Soon
prostoalex writes "New numbers on Linux market share are due this week. As far as global PC market is concerned, Gartner claims 5% of all PCs shipped this year ran Linux OS, although by the time the PCs were actually on the user's desk, only 2% of them run Linux. In the server world IDC estimates that Linux-powered servers comprise 28.3% of all server sales in 2004."
The best hope for linux is in getting new users from the pool of non-users instead of from the pool of windiws users. Once people use windows, they believe for some reason that they will be unable to switch.
Bah! Gartner's fabricated estimate is totally unnecessary for this. Actual usage measurements, like the Google Zeitgeist are more telling. Linux has never broken 1% and as a desktop system I really wouldn't count on it passing the Mac any year soon.
Funny. Last time I installed Windows, it was 3 hours of putzing with driver, and the onboard ethernet STILL didn't work. Mandrake worked ou of the box.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
In past 10 years, I bought a total of just a dozen PCs. Every one of them is now running Linux, completely eliminating all brands of Windowses bought with them.
That's 100% of current userbase over past 10 years now. And 6 of the 12 are actually desktops. That's 100% of my desktops running Linux.
Well, within above I do not count Linux replaced a toy WinCE in iPaq PDA, gaining a desktop capability in my pocket too.
There you are, staring at me again.
Wish I could edit my own posts - just as after I sent this I found an interesting article by Tim O'Reilly. He suggests using book sales to measure market trends.
I don't know if this will turn out to be accurate, but it's at least somewhat objective. A neat idea.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
FYI windows does have a command line. Start-> Run -> cmd.exe on windows xp boxes. To my knowledge it does support pipes to some degree. It also has tab completion. To be honest I think it is a great improvement over command.com. Bash still ownz tho.
Have you ever installed cygwin on an XP box? It has a nice little shell.
I don't believe that terminal is always faster either. I generally find a GUI file manager a much easier way to select, group and move specific mp3s around my hdd. Each to his own I guess.
That may be true for the average Joe Desktop linux user, but it is certainly not true for business. Much of the inroads linux has made in the business world (both desktop and server) has been based on pure cost. Businesses want a solution that 1) Gets the job done 2) Costs the least amount of money. The CIOs and CFOs of the world don't care about which operating system is the "best", they care about the bottom line. In most cases when Linux beats Windows in the business world it is because it is "free" not because it is "Free".
why on earth do you people want to take over windows??
simply build the best os you can
anyway, the command line doesn't have to be way beyond the ordinary desktop user... i'm sure they'd have little trouble (if any) learning it
I've sorted their numbers a bit:
Win95 1%
Win98 16%
WinME 3%
WinNT 2%
Win2000 18%
WinXP 51% (that's a lot of XP)
Mac 3%
Linux 1%
Other 5% (What are these OS's?)
Really, aside from all the Windows versions listed and the "Mac" category, what other OS's are out there? There must be at least 6 of them with marketshare just below Linux's. But I don't know what they are. Any ideas?
Not that I don't trust Google's numbers (I'm cynical) but that 51% looks awful high too. At work we have about 3% XP machines (95% Win2000 and 2% Linux). That's an awful lot of XP that's been deployed, particularly when you see the 16% of Win98.
22% of the Windows machines are pre-Win2K
Win2K accounts for 18% (so far I see no problem)
WinXP is 51%?
Are all WinXP boxes shipped with google as the default?
Same here, have 32 i look after and i know they werent counted. Any admin worth his salt will turn off any identifying tokens on his network fringe servers, and as for the inner network - they have no idea. I know Our linux boxes/windows ratio is 3/1 (thats linux to windows) and we are rolling the windows stuff out as quickly as we can.
Well, not to disparage the idea, but I started using Linux exactly because it was free. That, for me, meant nothing to lose if I didn't like it. That was almost 8 years ago, and I've found that I like it enough to financially support as many OSS communities, projects, and good distros as I can.
With Linux, it's not the amount, it's how you feel about the amount. When I donate to a project, community or distro, I know what I'm getting, because I'm already using it. When I used to plunk down for Windows and other peices of software, half of what I spent was a disappointment, at best.
My TCO is technically higher with Linux (supporting MSs marketing in a strangely perverted way), but only because I wouldn't have explored many of the things that Linux/OSS community has allowed me to become a part of.
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
"So while there are a small number of users purchasing their computers with Windows pre-installed and migrating to Linux, that number is effectively buried by businesses doing just the opposite."
MOST users running linux don't purchase a computer with it preinstalled. Since linux requires far less in terms of hardware to get the same or better performance usually they put a little memory in the computer they have and install linux on it. That includes businesses.
But what dwarfs the linux factors one way or another is the windows site licenses. For every desktop that an alternative OS was purchased on there are hundreds in which it was not, where they simply paid the MS tax despite their site license (like they've always done before).
Of course the difference in the numbers should be obvious, this could well constitute a pretty big chunk of the market, significantly reducing what is believed to the size of the market. This means x number of sales is really a larger percentage of the market than it is portrayed to be.
When it comes down to it, compared to legitimate copies, there really aren't that many pirated copies of windows... there just aren't. While they are common among techs, giving us the impression they are rampant, in reality I'd be surprised if techs and their families amount to even 1% of the market.
The kid/teenager of the house isn't an OS installer anymore than his parents or grandparents. He is wise in that he can successfully work the mouse and install most programs... a far cry from a pirated OS installation.
With linux on the other hand, there is a strong prevalance of technically literate users (the reasons for this are debatable and not the issue here). Almost every linux user can install the OS. Couple this with the fact that companies normally act as if linux is a "cheap and inferior" solution. Normally the pc's that come with linux preinstalled are in the $200-300 range and worth more like $150, they are usually crap a literate user wouldn't touch.
Aside from the price on the pc's, I fully admit I'm educated guessing the numbers. But from what I've seen... well I've never actually seen a system with linux preinstalled on it. I've seen lots of linux systems mind, many I've setup and have lots of friends using linux. Most of their computers are homebuilt (but not all). All in all, among desktop users I'd guesstimate about 200 linux pc's. Not a single one of them would be counted in these numbers.
In the businessworld it's much the same. Support contracts are an issue for obscure software only in small businessland. Corporations want accountability, small business wants it to work and wants someone to call to fix it when it's broke, they don't care about fingerpointing.
On the business side I've setup countless workstations and several hundred linux servers. Out of all of them only one was even a purchased license, all the rest were download editions of the software. A support contract would be pointless, if they have a support contract it's still us they call if they have a problem, we are local and can fix the problem before they finish holding.
You also don't need to buy a boxed version for updates. Really using the vendor update mechnism is probably the last thing I'd recommend to a customer. With redhat distros in particular, redhat drops support too fast and is slow on the updates in comparison with well known and trusted 3rd parties (*cough*freshrpms*cough*) who still provide updates for redhat version 6.2 last I checked.
5% of the desktop market, I doubt it's that low. 5% of oem preinstalls, perhaps. As for whether it had that OS on it when it hit the desktop, if you consider that, you have to consider all the rest I've mentioned above and more and the result is the desktop market, not the OEM preinstall numbers gartner is claiming.
"Google's zietgeist"
That's a pretty poor metric, it goes by the user agent string. I can't say I know any linux user (or any nonIE user for that matter) who doesn't change their user agent string to be IE 6sp1 on windows. They do this for a simple reason, 99% of the pages that don't load in alternative browsers, magically do load if the browser claims it's IE.
I still sometimes get a little pissy about articles/reports/surveys like this. Then after I spout my peace, I can't help but laugh. Linux has an advantage that most commercial desktops can't even approach. See, if I sell Windows, Solaris, Mac, or any of the other commercial operating systems, I know exactly how I'm doing.
We all "know" MS has 90-95% of the market. The numbers shipped, the dollar amounts, all point to this "fact". Same with the others.
Linux doesn't come close. From a dollar perspective, most distros pale compared to the others. From a "shipped" point of view, well, who counts little Linux shops in their numbers? This is about Dell and the big folks. And there is the dualboot/wipe issue.
So, why do I laugh? Because, using these statistics, nobody will realize how many people actually use Linux until it's right in their faces. In other words, theoretically, MS could still ship 90-95% of the market, only to turn around one day, and find out that only 10-20% of users actually use Windows (with a few more using it occasionally).
So, realisically, the better way of measuring this would be to measure the "other" sales related to Windows. Antivirus software wouldn't count, neither would Office software, or games. (These are necessities for dual booters, or things that might only be available for one OS.)
My pick would be the "cheapy" software that people tend to buy for their computers. The productivity stuff, or "make your computer easier to use" kind of stuff. Better yet, if you want a long term guage, try the "educational" aisle.
In other words, to guage an OS's success, compare it's market. Find something unusual about that OS, something that no other can share, and use that as a guage. Exact numbers don't matter, but trends can point out a lot.
If money/users seem to be disappearing from these markets, yet the hardware folks are actually doing pretty well, you might want to bump up your Linux/OSS numbers a little.
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
Granted, that's a lot better than Win 98 where I lost count after 8 or 9 reboots to get all the drivers installed and updated on a machine I built.
Only 8 or 9? I think when I used to run Win98 it was something like:
1. Install Win98
2. reboot
3. install driver
4. repeat steps 2 and 3 about 10 times
5. windows spectacularly crashes after installing a particular driver, totally refuses to boot even after removing that driver again
6. Wipe and reinstall Win98
7. reboot
8. install drivers in a different order
9. repeat steps 7 and 8 about 10 times
10. A different driver spectacularly breaks windows
11. Open computer and rip out all the PCI and ISA cards
12. Wipe and reinstall windows again
13. reboot
14. install drivers for all the onboard stuff, rebooting between each
15. shutdown
16. plug in 1 PCI or ISA card
17. boot up again
18. install driver for hardware you just plugged in
19. repeat steps 15 - 18 until all your hardware is back in the box
After this you've just about got a working machine until you have to reinstall it 6 months later. Admittedly I did have all the PCI and ISA slots absolutely full, but its been my experience that if you've got a moderate number of cards in your machine win98's installer really stuggles to install a working machine.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
As a Mac user who gets games months or years after they are released for Windows, yes, market share for your OS is something you can directly profit from. More market share means a bigger market for developers, so you will have more applications available for your OS.
Funny, the reason I stay on Windows is exactly that, time. Yes, I have to use Windows update, or let it run in the background. Sometimes I have to wrestle with a graphics driver. As long as you keep WU and AV stuff up tp date, and avoid horrors liek IE and outlook, I find Windows XP very low maintence.
Generally though, software and hardware work pretty well. When I look at the time people using Linux sometimes spend getting thier hardware to work, getting the Windows programs (and games) to work, if at all, that keeps me away.
I use NIX at work, and I'm no big Windows fan, but valuing my time is exactly what keeps me off Linux.
True, plus the people who build their own computers witho no OS preinstalled, and don't tell me there are few, anyone who knows how to screw things and plug in IDE cables knows how to build one.
I know nobody who has had linux preinstalled, OTOH, I've had quite a few friends install it beside windows (of course they still want to keep their games, but they use Linux for everyday tasks)
So how do you get your Linux installations in the tally? Is there an online survey you can fill out? How about a small/clean application you could install that would let you define what data should be sent out. It could keep a database updated with "specs" on kernel version, CPU types, CPU count, etc etc etc.
I thought Dells running Linux costed more than Windows, at least that was the case when I last checked several months ago.
So if your plan is to install pirated Windows, it definitely makes way more sense buy a machine with no OS installed.
I have never encountered anyone who buys a linux pc intending to install linux on it.
That's fine if you want (like someone else said) to type your letters to Grandma. If, on the other hand, you want a middle-high end machine, you'll generally get the best value from DIY.
Those who do this generally realise that there's often no point in having the latest and greatest graphics, processor etc, because you're paying premium, so instead of getting a machine that advertises "cheap" but is actually "crippled" or one that advertises "high-end" but is actually "exorbitant" you put your own pretty decent but reasonably priced computer.
These days you can generally expect that a machine you put together will work, mostly first time. Sure, for the type-the-letter-to-grandma, you don't want to faff around with the bits AND risk it not working, but for many, it's half the fun.
im in ur