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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."
Both my current and previous employer has supplied me with a Debian desktop. No Ubuntu so far...
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www.linuxfoundation.org appears to be some kind of domain search squatter.
Update the link in the original front page post.
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/ is NOT http://www.linux-foundation.org/
The first is just a traffic collector page.
The Linux Foundation mentioned in the story is at
http://www.linux-foundation.org/
Thats where you will find the article/survey.
I myself have started using Debian sid,
can't do without apt-get but Ubuntu is going the wrong way (for me)
Family? I guess that make sense. Ubuntu of the Debian Order, Linux Class, UNIX Phylum. I guess that would make the Genus the particular type (server/home), and the species it's version number.
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.
It's official, 2008 will be the year of the Linux desktop.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
Current results
The results say the current number of respondents is 10941 (and counting). Where did the figure of 20,000 come from?
if linux is going to get anywhere, idiots must be able to use it, as they are the dominant portion of the populus.
If you'd RTFA, you'd have read that you could pick multiple distro's. The question was 'which Linux distributions do you run in your organisation', and apparently lots of organisations run several different distro's, instead of standardising on one.
That performance or control over the OS isn't what drives adoption, but instead, it is bloat. Ubuntu could be claimed to be less bloated than RHEL and SUSE (both of which drip with bloat), but overall, I was surprised that among corporate offices and IT places that do Linux, not many are really using Gentoo or LFS or some such OS with a higher degree of control over what goes into the final installs, etc.
Oh well, guess its best to be among the few, than among the many.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Am I the only one who sees a problem with the math here?
Yes. If you bothered to RTFA:
Linux users are - amazingly - capable of using more than one OS at once. I know this is anathema to those who believe that the only alternative to white is black, and for whom anything less than perfect logical symmetry causes cranial asplosion. But hey, we got into weird territory right from the moment we put 'Linux' and 'Desktop' in the same sentence, and left out both 'doesn't belong' and 'the year of'.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
This time twice as many people filled the survey, so instead of 100% like last time, this one goes up to 200%!!!
please excuse my apathy
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
I keep reading how this MS/Novell agreement is gaining customers but here I can see that:
in 2005 Novell/SUSE got 28%
in 2006 Novell/SUSE got 16%
in 2007 Novell/SUSE got 11.7%
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
If you fill out the survey, it asks you about anti-virus, and specifically porting bigname AVs to linux.
A few questions I pose:
1) Why do we want the bloaty, slow, pieces of crap that are windows AVs ported to linux?
2) Why do we want to port these, encouraging turning a blind eye to security and letting the AV do the work(such as it is on windows)?
3) Why not just improve support on say, ClamAV?
WTF kind of math is that? Shouldn't it really be:
Ubuntu = 2/4 = 50%
Red Hat = 2/4 = 50%
No, it should be just as it was written. It's the percentage of *users* who answered the survey, not the percentage of all answers that were a particular answer.
Given your sample data, ~67% of *users* use each of the operating systems.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
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.
linuxfoundation.org appears to be a domain squatter site.
./? Hits on these types of sites just encourage domain squatting.
Whois shows:
Last Updated On:26-Oct-2007 19:57:38 UTC
Which is not the same day and month as the creation date, so I'm suspecting either someone has taken this domain over or it wasn't legit in the first place (I don't know as I don't think I've ever been there). Maybe check our links before we post them to the front page on
"And then I visited Wikipedia
" I have boxen that run all three."
You maybe have three Linux boxen but by the very use of the word "boxen" you already showed you own no common sense so your opinion is moot and ignored.
but gets only 5.4% in this survey. I don't understand what's going on.
I just took this survey earlier today, and after looking at the results it is obvious that it is totally biased.
I'm writing from my phone so I won't go in-depth, but two things that bug me the most:
1: It looks like many home users took the survey, but are being categorized as SOHO's
2: At first it looks like the survey adress both desktop and server usage, but then the questions begin assuming repondent are using Linux on the desktop workstations. This isn't the case in my company, but he results to these questions are being used to show Linux desktop penetration.
I also responded to some questions thinking "servers only" but it end up being both servers and workstation. In an organisation with more employees than servers, all running Windows, this obviously change the result!
I'm not a Linux detractor, quite the opposite, but I'm being honest here. When you do surveys, please ask the right questions and make sure anyone responding to the survey won't bias it if the're not the targetted audience. To me this survey says almost nothing...
But does anyone else here see the irony of a Linux survey being hosted on an IIS server?
No single year will have credit because the change is happening slowly but surely.
Is Linux ready as a desktop? Hell yes.
Are all the 3rd party apps necessary for every customer available on Linux? Hell no!
Is that changing day by day, app by app? Yes.
It's only a matter of time. Standard consumer needs are already being met by desktop distrobutions. Before long the application base will increase and fringe cases will be covered. At that point, an OS will actually have to give you a reason (not "all the apps you want only run on our OS!") to spend money on it. Wouldn't that be nice - them having to earn their money.
The commandline isn't about "hardcore" or "my dick is bigger" it is about efficiency. Likewise vim vs. notepad (or vi keybindings vs. mouse). Freshman and sophomores all want visual studio or eclipse. Juniors/Seniors/Grad.s start being more concerned with how fast they can work than how easy it is to work slowly.
And one hundred minions testing for subtle and not so subtle bugs that arise on each of those compilations.
.rpm or .deb.
What are you talking about? It's not like compiling from source is some black art only known to gurus and initiates.
Using an ebuild that's been marked stable in portage is no more risky or unreliable than using an
*sigh* back to work...
If you never educate the users about the fact that they have a choice, how the hell do you expect them to choose? That's the beauty of Linux: Freedom. You're not tied to a single GUI. It's not about desktop environment competition (even if some few people seem to think it is), it IS about choice. The problem is, the regular public is not educated to choose, they're educated to use whatever comes with the PC. It's no wonder that Microsoft's greatest strength are OEM retailers, because people don't choose: they buy whatever comes with the "Computer". Hell, they don't even know what an OS is, and most Joe Averages that have ever heard about a Mac seem to believe there's some kind of voodoo magic that makes them not a PC (and, sadly, Apple exploits this and makes use of it in their advertisement campaigns).
People need to be educated. They must learn there ARE choices.