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Linux Foundation's Desktop Linux Survey Results
DeviceGuru writes "While the Linux Foundation's third annual desktop Linux survey doesn't officially end until November 30th, the number of daily respondents have shrunk to a trickle and the Foundation is working on analyzing the results. They now have up an early look at the raw data. For starters, almost 20,000 self-selected users filled out this year's survey compared to fewer than 10,000 in 2006's survey. Not surprisingly, the Ubuntu family of Linuxes is the most popular among organizations, at 54.1 percent. This was followed by the Red Hat family — RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Fedora/CentOS) — with 50.2 percent. The Novell SUSE group — SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) and openSUSE — came in third, with 35.2 percent."
Another interesting result from the LF survey is that in most company and organizations, the Linux desktop is more commonly used than Linux servers. From almost the beginning of Linux's business acceptance it has always been assumed that Linux was, is, and would continue to be more of a force on servers than on desktops. That appears to be changing.
Is it just me, or is this possibly a misleading statement? Does "more commonly used" just mean more numbers? Or does it mean that organizations with Linux desktops aren't running Linux servers? Or just that they have more desktops than servers? Even if it is the first, I still don't think it means too much, because one organization running a gigantic Oracle database on big iron and Linux is going to probably be using Linux more than another organization running Linux and OpenOffice for word processing on 10 or even 50 desktops.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I'm not sure you get to call yourself a nerd. I'm thinking that you are just so isolated that in comparison to the few other people you've met, you seem like the one that understands computers. The reason I say this, is that at least half of the people I run into know what Linux is, and most of the other half don't know the difference between Word and Windows, so they wouldn't know what it is, even if it was down right common in the home. That, and the "apart from, occasionally, Mac OS X" line. Really, you have to be pretty far removed from society to not know about Mac.
My experiences have been exactly the opposite of yours. I considered 2007 the year of Linux when my wife was hosting a play date for stay at home Moms and their children, I came out of my office for some coffee, and there are 4 stay at home housewives discussing who is running Linux, who is running Windows, and if it was a good idea for the ones running Windows to switch to Linux. That was the defining moment for me to say that Linux is officially mainstream.
As for headaches trying to get simple hardware working, I can only relate the story that I have told many times before... My son did his first, unassisted install of Ubuntu just prior to his second birthday. The only thing I gave him was the CD, a computer, and made sure the hard drive was formatted before he started. As, always, I will accept that he is a genetic mutant that makes his intellect vastly superior to normal humans, if you insist on it, but even if he was as smart as a 6 year old when he was only 1, that still means that Linux is extremely easy to install and use. Of course if it turns out that I am an overly optimistic dad with a child that is only average, then we need to consider whether we can safely have those that are unable to install Ubuntu, out in public without a handler.