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Desktop Linux Usage Statistics

Posted by timothy on from the change-is-in-the-air dept.

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."

25 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Debian falls. Well duh. by Neil+Blender · · Score: 4, Funny

    That's because desktop linux is making gains in the real world. Desktop linux: "It's not just in your parent's basement anymore."

  2. The problem with linux... by timecop · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:The problem with linux... by PocketPick · · Score: 4, Funny

      Ahh, gut, Comrade. Gates, Yah, vee is good thinker, but you see: You do not capitalise on de useful of idiots like da OSS veel. Ve vill crush you!

      Gut! Gut!

    2. Re:The problem with linux... by Technician · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

      --
      The truth shall set you free!
    3. Re:The problem with linux... by gunnk · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Life is short: void the warranty.
  3. One important detail... by ThatGeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?.
    1. Re:One important detail... by BoldAndBusted · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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!

    2. Re:One important detail... by provolt · · Score: 4, Informative

      Its completely useless because it's a self-selected survey, rather than a random sampling. Self-selected survey's are basically junk if you want any good data.

      The results of this tell us nothing more than if it were nothing more than a large, well-written slashdot poll. Mostly because it is nothing more than a large, well-writen slashdot poll.

    3. Re:One important detail... by ajs · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "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.

  4. very un-scientific by bogaboga · · Score: 4, Insightful
    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.

    1. Re:very un-scientific by Xarius · · Score: 5, Funny
      This "study" really, is very unscientific and somewhat disturbing to a statistian like me.


      I don't see what coming from statistia has to do with it. Unless, of course, you mean statistician?
      --
      C17H21NO4
    2. Re:very un-scientific by jesterzog · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  5. Not surprising by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  6. Skewed results by lakeland · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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?

  7. Mandrake by dj245 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Mandrake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Where does this impression of Mandrake being the 'new to linux' linux stem from?

      Sure, I recommend Mandrake to windows-converting friends, but that's basically because it has very good hardware detection and a first-timer-friendly installer (in non-expert mode), and (now) x86_64 support.

      I've been a long-time linux user (I have the redhat 5.0 box set), and I originally migrated from RH because Mandrake had i586/i686 compilation, plus (nice bonus) KDE support. (Remember MDK was originally a RH fork) - ahead of the game even back then!

      I've stayed because they've kept up the bleeding edge hardware support, with loads of 3rd party drivers in the stock kernels, plus have a large contrib repository (plus plf!). For me, they are a pretty good trade off between stability and cool-new-stuff.

      I don't know how people come to the 'dumbed down' impression, though - MDK don't castrate Gnome and KDE like redhat do, and you aren't forced to use the pretty GUI tools to do sysadmin, and they have lots of 'secure-by-default' setup.

      Perhaps you should actually try it for a while...

    2. Re:Mandrake by swv3752 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
  8. Re:Mandrake? Really? by biglig2 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?
  9. Not a very serious study by cyrax256 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  10. Re:Well umm.. by sn00ker · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  11. KDE by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  12. Ubuntu? by poofyhairguy82 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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...

    --

    Open Source Sushi

  13. Re:Interesting, but not statistically accurate? by iggymanz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    that's not the anectdotal stuff I've been hearing & seeing: people getting disgusted with RedHat moving to SuSE and a few going to FreeBSD for server, and alot of developers taking up mac OSX for fun. No one I know runs Debian anymore.

  14. Re:People leaving the sinking ship. by fux0r · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  15. I like spatial nautilus (and other GNOME features) by arthas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.