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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."
I guess I'm just ignorant. Seems strange that according to their stats that Mandrake makes up the same user base as SuSE and RedHat COMBINED...
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
given the degree of GUI integration that SuSE provides. It's by far the closest thing to Windows in that sense, and the funny thing is that it's still not really even close to Windows. That is the only way that Linux has a chance of improving marketshare beyond it's current levels, is to increase the trend of providing GUI integration and support. There shouldn't be *anything* that you *have* to do use the command line to do other than very advanced sysadmin tasks.
That said, does anyone know to what extent YaST is being used beyond SuSE?
Its interesting that Mandrake is just as big as the other big 4 (5?) distros, but it sees little mention on /. Is this because it is a "new to linux" linux and because of this is too basic and dumbed-down for most of the /. crowd? In any case, they've got a lot of ambition, and seem to have a stable business model.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
"Distrowatch counts downloads,"
Not even this. They count visits to the "home" page within distrowatch for a given distro.
So take a new distribution with good marketing and you will have your #1 disregarding ENTERILY its user base numbers.
It might not be indicative of the community in general, but if the readership demographics haven't changed much, there might some trends in there that can be extrapolated and compared on a larger scale.
Case in point: Amongst that community, vanilla debian has fallen from its top spot, but if debian is lumped in together with the various deb-based distros, it takes its top spot back. It certainly seems to jive with the attitude that a lot of people here on Slashdot have about debian.
I don't mean to disparage your point. It's just that it'd be really difficult to do a proper survey given how international a phenomenon linux is right now, so we're stuck with these sorts of surveys for the moment...
I find it more than a little strange that the following information gels into one picture.
It's an interesting report, but the statistical significance of the whole thing might be a little suspect.
Certainly for Firefox/Thunderbird, it's rather a tenuous link given their wide platform support. But with stuff like mutt and pine, the link is very clear - the userbase is almost exclusively OSS-OS.
It's note-worthy that these surveys never investigate the penetration of BSD (not OS-X!) to the desktop. I'm using FreeBSD on the desktop, having given up on Linux as too much effort (wasted a day trying to get Linux installed on a box with ICH5 SATA, and then spent an hour downloading a FreeBSD ISO and installing it without any dramas), and I'd be interested in seeing how the BSDs rate against the various Linux distros. Does anyone know of any surveys that look into this?
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
no fedora? or does fedoa == red hat on the survey?
Software Wars
Nobody hasn't mentioned yet that KDE in a year went from 44% to 61%. Every other destkop environment/windows manager lost users in favor of KDE, except XFCE. That's the most interesting result of this poll IMHO, since it is.. well, unexpected.
There is always error, it's unavoidable. However, considering the budget that was used to conduct this polling
Budget has nothing to do with the statistical accuracy of the report or the value that the report provides. The question here (and the question that is being asked) is how flawed is this report and what is the margin of error. It may not be completely useless, but using this report as proof of a trend for the entire Linux community should only be made with heavy qualification.
had the info of the distribution.
( KH TML,+like+Gecko)+(insert Distro)
you could collect via some website
it would be less skewed i guess.
Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Konqueror/3.3;+Linux)+
Ubunto is.. very VERY coool :)
:)
i think it didn't 'make it' into the graph (poll) because it is SO new. the survey DID mention ubuntu however-- as part of the reason deb #'s went down.
a reason it didnt' make the survey could be that; this survey was done around last december.. and i think ubuntu has only been released recently (at least i never heard of it until sometime last year.)
Ubuntu is definitely making head way, because i had a local computer company try and give me a copy of it!! they had a stack of them for all to take as you entered the store!! soooo someone at ubuntu (in marketting) is really on the ball to pull this off!!
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
What's the matter here? I'm seeing a lot of Slashdotters arguing whether this statistics are worthless because it represents the users of that particular website. But it's almost certain that when the statistics exceed the 10 thousand surveyed users it pretty much represent a whole community (That's why they are statistics!) And it represents it more, since it's a desktop Linux website, it doesn't represent a particular window environment. I don't understand why all the whining. People get mad when what they use "isn't winning". NEWSFLASH: Shut the fuck up, take a Xanax and relax pal, this is not a race, and it is merely a survey. Be happy, the overall growth that they show is good; it means more people have adopted Linux in their desktop.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Yes, many Hardware on the major Distros "Just works" out of the box nowdays, while on Windows Systems you have to go and switchs cds, reboot, repeat, for most hardware. Also with hotplug, dbus and hal projects many periferals, like usb, work like a charm :)
Gnu/Linux may have less drivers and/or have less support from the hardware companies but what is there works and it works better than in Windows IMO(for my hardware at least).
They've been in deep shit for a long time. Mostly since the developers decided that they are smarter than their users. Does anyone like spatial nautilus? what about that red-headed-bastard-stepchild called gnome-control-center? Sorry for the rant, but I used to use gnome and have really grown to dislike it. I guess I shouldn't bitch though, I wouldn't have started to use the gem that is KDE if not for the recent stupidity of Gnome.
I think being forced into a "spatial" file manager with *no way to turn it off* (there's been some rewriting of history here by gnome people, but 2.6.0 had spatial nautilus and the only way to turn it off was manually editing the registry, I know, I was there) was the last straw for many. Either that or the stupid reversed confirmation dialog with no way to turn it off. Or the incredibly cramped new file selector that gives you about 4 pixels to browse your filesystem once you've clicked an expansion button, with, again, no way to turn it off. The KDE way of adding options whenever some random person thinks someone might want to change something is far from perfect, but gnome needs to start giving preferences when they make big contentious changes. They add the preference after x.y.2 or so with all the user outcry, why don't they give users a choice from the start?
I am trolling
Actually, given how superior KDE is to GNOME in virtually every way (from developing for it to easy integration with KParts to the file manager to ... well ... ervything, really!), I wouldn't shed a tear if GNOME just died off completely leaving KDE as the One True Desktop. Plus, the GNOME developers seem to be arrogant, insular cocks - whereas the KDE team seem to be glad to incorporate any of GNOME innovations that are actually good (e.g. HAL, DBUS), you see no such flow into the GNOME camp, who assume they know better than everyone (including their users!).
A dumb example of this comes from the latest release of Ubuntu where the developers completely randomly decided to ship Nautilus with default settings that are so mind-bogglingly awful (think ordinary spatial nautilus with all of the "benefits" removed) it simply ... well ... boggles the mind! There's a huge thread on the forums where about 100 people criticised the move saying it was dumb and *not one* non-developer voiced any support for it at all. The GNOME devs, of course, said "fuck you" to the users and carried on with their utterly retarded plan.
It's just a shame that the build of KDE that comes with Kubuntu is so completely fucked - their half-assed implementation will probably put people off what is otherwise an extremely good DE. Plus, there's that whole "upgrading kdelibs is impossible because it conflicts with kdenetwork" which has been unresolved (and not even commented on by the developers) for about three weeks now.
Anyway, I've started ranting incoherently. I'll stop now :)