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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."
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.
[sarcasm]It's okay, Debian's in the Ubuntu family of Linuxes [/sarcasm]
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
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?
From the linked article:
:-)
"Debian (22.2 percent)"
So looking good...
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.
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?
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.
But does anyone else here see the irony of a Linux survey being hosted on an IIS server?
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.
Maybe not