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."

Comments

No Debian?

[cerberusss]

Both my current and previous employer has supplied me with a Debian desktop. No Ubuntu so far...

Re:No Debian?

[yog]

Ubuntu is based on Debian so you could argue that Ubuntu has gotten Debian out to the masses. My home workstations have progressed from Redhat to Fedora to Suse to Ubuntu and I feel that they are all fine distributions with their particular strengths, but Ubuntu definitely wins on the plug-and-play aspects. I put it on a Dell laptop and except for having to manually download and configure ndiswrapper to handle wireless networking, it practically required no technical knowledge. The most recent release in fact does away with the ndiswrapper step, I believe. It's not surprising that Ubuntu wins. I hope that the other distributors learn from the success of Ubuntu and make their next releases "just work", thus undercutting one of Microsoft's main arguments against Linux.

Re:No Debian?

[cyphercell]

[sarcasm]It's okay, Debian's in the Ubuntu family of Linuxes [/sarcasm]

Re:No Debian?

[Firefalcon]

From the linked article:

"Debian (22.2 percent)"

So looking good... :-)

URL should be www.linux-foundation.org

[chrb]

www.linuxfoundation.org appears to be some kind of domain search squatter.

Bad Link in Orignal Post.

[Confessed Geek]

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.

Re:Ubuntu

[boiert]

I myself have started using Debian sid,
can't do without apt-get but Ubuntu is going the wrong way (for me)

"Family"?

[Bo'Bob'O]

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.

Server vs. Desktop

[Glowing Fish]

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.

Year of the Linux desktop

[cstdenis]

It's official, 2008 will be the year of the Linux desktop.

Links and respondents

[chrb]

Fill in the survey.

Current results

The results say the current number of respondents is 10941 (and counting). Where did the figure of 20,000 come from?

Re:Ubuntu

[Anonymous Coward]

if linux is going to get anywhere, idiots must be able to use it, as they are the dominant portion of the populus.

Re:%139.5

[J0nne]

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.

Novell downturn?

[brejc8]

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%

Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:It's still not catching on

[Belial6]

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.

This survey is biased...

[dermoth666]

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...

Re:This survey is biased...

[slash.duncan]

While the word I'd use is "skewed", I'd basically agree with you.

There was an original announcement of the survey in the Linux-covering media, and I looked at it but didn't take the survey then, as it seemed only interested in business use. Later, there was additional coverage, asking where all the North American users were, as there had been relatively few such responses to the survey at that point. Most were and still are European, altho the North American response percentage increased from about 10% to about 40%.

Anyway, since they wanted N. Am. responses, I went ahead and filled it out then, doing the "choose the best fitting answer" routine, even where the obvious answer for home users was entirely missing. The best available fit classification was small-office/home-office use, with 1-100 machines. I then had to pick an annual income range, with I think the low end being a million or less. Well, millionaires aren't as uncommon as they used to be, but that's still rather ridiculous for a low end choice on individual income. Again, it's obvious they think all Linux users are corporate, since the announcements asking for participation said nothing about business use only, only Linux use. Later, they asked a question of what my primary business was. Using best-fit logic, I think I originally chose health care, as I reasoned as an individual, the most basic purpose will be to maintain my own health and survive. That ended up conflicting with an answer later, so I went back and picked something else.

The survey is therefore incredibly skewed, because it makes an invalid assumption, that all Linux users are business users, and/or that the home-only user response will be so tiny (due to discouragement based on the obvious slant if nothing else) as to be ignorable.

The non-biz response may have been low enough that the home-user response assumption may have actually been the case in times past, due both to coverage and to obvious slant, but I think this year's was obviously skewed by the second round of coverage, asking for more North American user responses. Given the coverage I saw (including user comments on the stories), I believe it reasonable to assume that at least half of that response rate increase for N America alone was home users. That would work out to ~20% home users, minimum, dramatically skewing the results since it's incredibly obvious they were essentially ignoring the home user when they designed the survey, and didn't intend for home users to respond. Well, then why /ask/ them to respond in general community coverage?

IMO, they therefore got the skewed results they asked for and that could have been predicted given where and how the thing was publicized. No WONDER their SOHO segment jumped so dramatically! No WONDER some of the results don't follow previous trends!

Maybe next year they'll include a home user option and home user appropriate options to the further questions as well. Even if they are entirely uninterested in that segment (it doesn't spend enough money, maybe, because much of it simply downloads the free versions, and doesn't spend on the ISVs either), providing options for it would be wise, as doing so would then allow clean separation of what they consider "noise" from the signal they are really interested in, the big-money corporate accounts.

BTW, I was one of the Gentoo respondents, and put in the comments something else the ISVs etc they are apparently targeting the results for aren't likely to like -- that as far as I'm concerned, if it's not freedomware, if it doesn't allow full use of the four freedoms equally to all users and potential users, it's not a solution I can or will consider. So much for the Adobes of the world and their Linux ports. They might as well be un-wine-able MS-platform only, at a price of a trillion dollars a seat, for all I care -- if they aren't freedomware, they are that far out of usable-here solution scope. (It's a legal matter, see. I no longer sign away my rights, including the right to redress for security issues if I can't see and use the source for software running on my machine, so I can't agree to the EULAs, and the software is therefore not a legally viable solution, even if I DID wish to use it.)

Not just that..

[schon]

But does anyone else here see the irony of a Linux survey being hosted on an IIS server?

Re:Proof enough

[jlarocco]

Please stay with Gentoo I don't want users like you infecting the other distros.

I think you've got the infection backwards. If you're ever having a problem on Linux, 99.999% of the time your best bet is to ask a Gentoo or Slackware user.

Snicker at their elitism, but fact of the matter is your average Gentoo user probably knows 100x more about Linux than your average Ubuntu user.

You're right.

[Almahtar]

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.

Re:You're right.

[monk.e.boy]

I guess I'll get modded down, but in my last job we were forced to program for Windows because that's what everyone uses.

But we move from C++ to C# and suddenly 95% of our code was cross platform. I think you'll find that the more companies that shift to C#, the more software will start appearing on Linux.

Mono is a good thing. OK you may hate if from a 'freedom' point of view, but it sure enabled my program with freedom to move to Linux...

Re:Proof enough

[theheadlessrabbit]

I really hate to agree with you, but since I am a ubuntu user who knows nothing about linux, I really have no argument.

I love ubuntu. It has everything I need built right in: my hardware is detected right away, it comes with open office, the gimp (which doesn't suck anymore!) a decent mp3 and movie player (why isn't VLC the default?) and loads of games to choose from, and instalation is so easy. it has everything i need right at my fingertips, and its all free.

I've tinkered with other releases in the past, and to be honest, ubuntu is the only linux distro that IMO feels like it is 'ready for the masses'.

Im just not nerdy enough for gentoo ;)