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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."
That's because desktop linux is making gains in the real world. Desktop linux: "It's not just in your parent's basement anymore."
This is in _desktop_ linux usage. Not server, workstation, render farm, etc.
When you use linux, you participate in a communist scheme designed to prevent
software professionals from being compensated for their work. So switch back to
windows xp you scumbags.
It's great to see quality products from Mozilla having not only critical acclaim but also (hopefully) emperical usage data demonstrating how quickly these products are being adapted into online users' every day routines. I see good things for 2005 and beyond.
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.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
Overall, it does not look so bad for Linux. I wish you all a great week ahead.
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?
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?
Real World: "Where marketing makes the IT decisions"
-------
Chunky Bacon
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.
Any old user can access the CD-ROM drive, and a masters degree in comp-sci isn't required to get a fucking printer to work. My wife is taking her shiny new Linux computer into the shop tomorrow to have Win-XP installed on it instead so she can actually print some stuff. Oh well. Subtract one Linux desktop user from that total.
Whatchu talking about Willis?
Their final stats indicate about 17% each for Mandrake and Suse, and 15% each for Red Hat and Debian. Basically,
As they point out though, Debian has suffered from creep to these Debian-based distros that are so popular these days. Basically, almost everyone is evenly divided between the big 4, with a strong minority using the source based distros, and everything else attracting dribs and drabs.
This is I think less interesting than some of the other results; 61% for KDE vs. only 21% for Gnome, Mozilla still holding 30% of the browser, the lack of any clear favourite e-mail client.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
They're only showing distributions they surveyed in 2003. A quick visit to distrowatch.com tells me that Ubuntu is #1 by a very large margin. What we're really seeing is lots of users switching from one flavor of Debain to another.
KDE gained double userbase while GNOME drastically reduced. Wow. Looks like GNOME is really in deep shit now.
Distrowatch counts downloads, not installations. People are testing it, but no proof that they are continuing to use it.
While your criticisms are correct, this survey is much better than most. They freely admit how it was done, and that it isn't perfect. Most surveys don't go into nearly as much details, and practically state that they are useful and represent the broader people as a whole.
The numbers also seem reasonable when considering what I know of linux users in general. So I'm willing to believe them for my purposes, which are unscientific. If I needed real results I would hire a qualified independent survey firm to do it right, but that is far more expensive, and there is a reasonable chance that the results would be within the margin of error of this poll.
I've been personally seeing a lot of Gentoo boxes (specialized servers), but most people I know stick to Debian or Red Hat. I toyed a bit with Mandrake and wasn't very impressed with it, though it did look a bit purtier by default than the other distro's I tried. Interesting to see a good amount of XFCE showings though, I always thought very few people used that, and given that I don't see it default on any distro I am frankly very suprised.
No, it doesn't. That's a "page hit ranking" on DistroWatch. All that tallies is how many times that distribution's DW homepage is accessed.
"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 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.
I think that 3,080 in the linux community is probably not the greatest amount to come up with statistics regarding linux usage. I just don't find a survey of 3,000 computer users online to be useful.
What they need is a graph to show the incredible (~25% drop; 4,151 to 3,080) of people taking part in this stupid poll.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
You're a dickhead.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
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.
Well, users visiting that site may be inherent of their distribution/Linux personality. Anyways, this site covers a larger swath of Linux users anyways (~ 140 000 people versus ~ 4 000): http://counter.li.org/reports/machines.php Heh, get counted! http://counter.li.org/
"Want a free iPod?"
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.
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...
Open Source Sushi
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)+
She would get a better deal by marrying someone who is Linux literate. Either that or figure out how to conceive a child and let him/her set up the printer.
I hate the argument that Linux isn't ready yet....... or until...... this or that.
Linux is never going to be perfect folks! Stop eluding yourself thinking that it has to be perfect to be accepted. Or that in 2 or 3 years it will be "just right" and Joe Average will slobber all over it.
The more users that get converted now, the more folks will sit up and take notice. The more that take notice, the more that flock to linux. The more that flock to linux, the more the developers take notice and eventually be forced to make software for that market.
But it will never happen with "in two or three year's time" attitude. I heard this attitude 2 or 3 years ago. And also 2 or 3 years before that. Ad infinitum. (Actually only 1998-ish.)
There will always be a learning curve.
With all the spyware/malware problems with Windows - now is the time to strike. Don't think Microsoft is resting on their laurels - maybe (probably) they won't fix the problem - but as the software they bought recently (last year?) and redubbed MS AntiSpyware it shows they will come up with a solution that's good enough for most users as to excuse them not to switch (Let's face it: people are lazy when it comes to change.)
Requiring a Comp.Sci. Degree for Linux just because you couldn't get the printer to run? Save the 200 or so dollar XP installation and buy a compatible computer!
You have to be kidding me with ease of use.
Windows users practically need a degree to get rid of all the spyware/bloat/malware on their computers now, let alone hack the mystical registry when a program doesn't play nice when removed.
Read this:
http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Rants/spyware.html
And then decide if you really want Windows.
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.
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...
man, you're not kidding! All the desktop linux users that I know (and all the people that they know) the are either running gentoo or Fedora on their desktop.
Perhaps it's just an "area" thing. It seems that in some geographical areas, certain distros or apps or more prevalent. As an example, I was in Sweden recently and had a group of Swedish linux enthusiasts watching a small learning tutorial I was giving. When i launched vi to edit a file, they all started giving each other strange looks. Finally, one of them asked me why I didn't use nano. I told him that I prefer vi. They all looked at me like I was nuts.
I left there and travelled a bit north. I was working as a linux security consultant for a large firm that did have a linux admins, but wanted a second opinion on security. Again, I launched vi to do something and the linux guys there looked at me like I was an oddball. Sure enough, they absolutely could not believe that I didn't use nano for an editor.
Now, I don't know a single person that uses Ubuntu or any Debian based distros. The only people I know using Mandrake are a couple of friends that are new into linux.
However, I know that many people are using Debian based distros for desktops, but I just don't know any. Perhaps I don't live/work in that part of the world where they are as popular as Fedora or gentoo.
Any debian using moderator will mark this as a troll, but I'm really just giving an honest account of my experiences. Perhaps the debian users can all mention where they are from so we can get an idea what part of the world Debian is so popular in.
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.
Well, for lots of us who were born before the 80s (or the 70s for that matter), we've been using vi or emacs for so long that running nano really feels like we're back on some kind of braindead DOS box (especially the "are you really sure you want to save this file, and what name should I save it to, and should I really save it to that name, and press "y" to continue, and really do it Y/n...").
When I first installed gentoo and the documentation said I had to edit this and that file, I actually spent ten minutes looking for an editor, trying all the variants of the names of vi and emacs I could remember. Turns out that the editor that comes with the gentoo live CDs is nano. I'd never even heard of the damn thing before. The only fancy newbie curses editor I knew of was pico (which I didn't like much either).
But the crux of the matter is that vi (and to a lesser extent emacs) is the standard editor. You'll find it on every machine. So you just have to know how to use it. Ideally you even have to know how to use it on a broken or on a dumb (without arrow keys) terminal (navigating with the hjkl keys). Because it's everywhere and when the fancy shit is gone to hell, chances are vi will still be there. Likewise when you start your new job and you find yourself logging in for the first time to that SunOS box that's been chugging along for the past 12 years which certainly won't have nano or kate on it.
And emacs is still useful to know a bit of because of all the key combos that found their ways in a number of other apps. I can't believe the number of people I meet who don't know how to edit a Bash command line (which by default uses Emacs commands). The basic Emacs commands like (C-E to go to the end of line) also work pretty much everywere (except in Windows which is a bit of a bug IMO). Besides it's still a nice editor because a lot of it's modes are relly very well made. Like all good tools, tou have to learn how to use it though.
Anyway, if you wondered why some of us don't use nano, that's why.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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 :)
Well, for lots of us who were born before the 80s (or the 70s for that matter), we've been using vi or emacs for so long that ...
:p
... I put set -o vi in my .bashrc (when there is no ksh arround ... how do you search for a string in your bash command history using default emacs-ish keys? And how do you tell it you will be replacing the next N words with some input text? Is that to the beginning of the N+1th word or to the end of the Nth word?)
And here I thought ed was the de-facto editor on all unices (It sais so in the man page)
I can't believe the number of people I meet who don't know how to edit a Bash command line
I must be getting stupider and stupider
--- Abnormally normal.