Desktop Linux Usage Statistics

Ahkorishaan writes "Desktoplinux.com has put up their December 2004 survey results. Debian has fallen from their top rank as preferred Linux distro, and newcomers Thunderbird and Firefox have an impressive showing in their respective genres."

Comments

One important detail...

[ThatGeek]

The survey was done on the web site's own readers. Unless we can assume that the readers represent the Linux community as a whole, this survey is largely useless.

Re:One important detail...

[BoldAndBusted]

Yeah, this is really a *poll*, not a survey, and, as evidenced by the Yoper stats, is very easily corrupted and skewed. And it isn't a poll of all Linux users (I didn't get an e-mail asking for participation...), it is a poll of this websites users. Sorry, worse than valueless, it is not what it purports to be. Love to have more statistically powerful data along the same lines, tho!

Re:One important detail...

[ajs]

"Unless we can assume that the readers represent the Linux community as a whole, this survey is largely useless."

Well, there's a few other reasons as well. The one that jumps out at me is the fact that they compare desktop systems to window managers. A few of the WMs that they list are, in fact, quite capable of running as the WM for KDE, Gnome, or both.

Then, of course, there's the fact that they split up the Debian distributions, but insist on calling Fedora, "Red Hat" which is too bad, because I'm curious how many old "Red Hat Linux" desktops there are vs RHEL Desktop vs Fedora.

*shrug* Just more bad data.

very un-scientific

[bogaboga]

This "study" really, is very unscientific and somewhat disturbing to a statistian like me. Do people believe in these numbers? Sometimes, it reminds me of pundits (especially in the computer world), who might know so little to even know that they do not know anything.

Overall, it does not look so bad for Linux. I wish you all a great week ahead.

Re:very un-scientific

[jesterzog]

This "study" really, is very unscientific and somewhat disturbing to a statistian like me.

I don't disagree. To its credit, however:

• The article never claims to be a "study". It claims to be a survey, which is essentially what it is even if it's not well conducted.
• The article is completely up-front about stating that the results should be taken with a grain of salt. The concerns are stated very clearly in the second paragraph of the article before any actual data is given, and are quite strongly repeated again, at the end. The text goes as far as asking readers for feedback about the survey's accuracy in the forum.

I think the greater danger is when data, such as this, gets picked up by the media in ways that are completely out of context. Most responsible people who I know are very cautious about stating limitations with data that they're presenting. That aside, I've repeatedly witnessed the very same people being cited out of context by overzealous and lazy media who want an attention-grabbing headline, and pick out whatever words or data that matches the story they've decided to tell.

If anyone's to blame for anything here, it would be the slashdot editors for presenting it as if it had some kind of authority. Even then, though, following the link from slashdot to the actual survey makes it pretty obvious... which is something that a lot of journalists in the real world won't even bother to provide.

Skewed results

[lakeland]

With so few entries, it looks like a single post to the (debian, yoper, sylpheed, whatever) mailing list would significantly skew the results in this test.

Our readers were quick to report a fishy smell, and a trip over to Yoper's homepage today turned up evidence of a well-intended but survey-busting tendency to encourage Yoper users to boost Yoper's standing in online polls.

We complain about Microsoft only surveying their customers and then claiming people think windows is as secure as linux but here we have (potentially) the same problem. Is yoper really the most popular distro, or just the most manipulative?

Not a very serious study

[cyrax256]

I think that the article in general is a bit too skewed. You could forgive them the fact that they don't really have a system to check double submits in the survey, or things like that, but some phrases like: "Third, and verging on dangerous over-generalization, open source software is a fast-moving and competitive market. Sharing code really can stimulate business growth." Are quite far from what the article wants to tell: what are the most popular applications in the linux environment. These are the kind of things that make linux users look like zealots, and take away credibility to these surveys. Next time these guys (or anyone who wants to do a similar survey) should stick to what the survey says.

Ubuntu?

[poofyhairguy82]

I have to ask, where is Ubuntu? The article says the Debian spinoffs are not counted in Debian's totals and seeing as how Ubuntu the top distro on distrowatch it seems unlikely that is has such a small percentage of the desktop market as to not matter. I mean, it doesn't even have an option for Ubuntu in the poll. Distos like Peanut and Elx (which are fine distros by the way, but are less popular than Ubuntu) are on there for cripes sake... Debian's lost position could be due to the fact that Debian desktop users have gone to Ubuntu en mass, but this survey has no way to even try to figure that out.

Oh well, maybe it was good that they didn' include Ubuntu. We have enough nerd advertising as it is, it just bugs me that this survey totally misses one of the fastest growing distros in recent memory....take any results that miss such a large distro with a grain of salt...

Re:Mandrake

[swv3752]

Many of us Mandrake users don't feel the need to aggressively promote our Distro as much as some other users. I can compile a kernel or other software, build rpms, write init scripts, but I prefer to spend my time doing other things.

Re:The problem with linux...

[Technician]

you participate in a communist scheme designed to prevent software professionals from being compensated for their work

Are you kidding? The software professionals get compensated regardless of what OS I choose. It's simply cheaper for me to buy a box and pay the professionals for the software that I don't use than to buy a box without paying the software professionals.

Now if only the professionals will produce software that won't run exploits as root, then I may consider using it. Why is IE and Outlook Express integrated to the manditory OS anyway?

Can you say Target?

I like spatial nautilus (and other GNOME features)

[arthas]

I used to think that graphical filemanagers all suck. I didn't like Windows Explorer, pre-spatial Nautilus, gmc or Konqueror. I used only command line for file management. The first time I tried spatial browsing was on MacOS System 7.5 running on Basilisk II Mac 68k emulator (this was a few years back) and after 15 minutes or so I found that it was something I actually enjoyed using. I thought: "This Finder thingy is insanely great. Why can't GNOME or KDE people do something like this?" And then, soon after GNOME 2.6 was released, I bought a new computer and installed Slackware 10 on it. Using spatial Nautilus and the entire GNOME 2.6 environment was absolutely wonderful! It was the best user experience I had ever had (I have used Windows, OpenLook, CDE, GNOME 1.x, KDE, FVWM, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, OS/2 Warp and Indigo Magic (on SGI O2 workstation running Irix)). Now I use GNOME 2.10 on Ubuntu and FreeBSD. I do most of my personal file management tasks using spatial Nautilus. I actually use command line only for file management related to system administration (bash + vi rule in those tasks). I have to wonder why I like GNOME 2.10 and spatial Nautilus so much?

One reason for this is that spatial nautilus is extremely simple and fast to use. For me using spatial file managers is very intuitive and natural. A good analysis on spatial filemanagers is found at: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/finder.ars

Other parts of GNOME 2.10 are also very nice. I really like the way GNOME 2.10 handles filetypes and connecting them to certain applications. It is so intuitive and effortless to use that it puts the abomination known as Windows Filetypes dialog to shame!

GNOME dialogs are also awesome. The new open and save dialogs are finally usable (again: simple, fast, effortless, efficient). They are vastly superior to the pre Gtk 2.4 dialogs. As for other dialogs, they are also extremely nice and logical. Finally we have gotten over annoying "Yes/No or OK/Cancel -dialogs should be enough for anyone". Using verbs in dialogs (when it makes sense, that is) is a huge improvement!

In my opinion GNOME has become a lot better desktop environment than anything Microsoft has ever had. I used to hate gnome in the 1.x days because it was just like Windows 9x. If I wanted to use Windows-like environment I would probably use Windows.

Re:The problem with linux...

[gunnk]

Why are OE and IE integrated?

Back in 90's Microsoft became very concerned that Netscape's web browser could end up being the PLATFORM for which software would be written. If you wrote your software to run in a browswer window the underlying OS was no longer important. Microsoft needed to push Netscape over a cliff.

To do so, Microsoft introduced IE which they began shipping free of charge with every copy of Windows (and just about every other piece of software). Netscape felt they were abusing their monopoly position by doing this and therefore sued. The courts agreed and decreed: "Microsoft may not bundle IE with Windows".

Well Microsoft has never been one to let a legal ruling stop them. They went back to the developers mandated that IE be INTEGRATED with Windows Explorer. By making it a PORTION OF THE OS, they were no longer bundling. Suddenly they were legal again, but could keep behaving the same way.

So, there is no good technical reason for integrating your file system browser with your web browser (and plenty of reason not do), but there is every reason to do so from a "crush the competition" perspective.