Slashdot Mirror
Linux Reaches 1% Usage Share
je ne sais quoi writes "The April data is out for the Net Applications 'market share' survey of operating systems (more accurately referred to as a usage share). For the first time, Linux has reached 1%. This past month the Linux share increased by 0.12% which is well above the average monthly increase of 0.02%. Historically, the Net Applications estimate of market share has been lower than that of other organizations who measure this, but the abnormally large increase reported this month brings it closer to the median estimate of 1.11%. For other operating systems, Windows XP continued its slow decline by 0.64% to 62.21%, whereas Vista use is still increasing to 23.90%, but its rate of adoption is slowing. That is, this month's increase of 0.48% is well below the 12-month average increase of 0.78% and down from the peak rate of increase of 1.00% per month on average in January-February 2008. The total Windows share dropped to 87.90%. Mac OS use decreased slightly to 9.73% from 9.77%, but usage share of the iPhone and iPod Touch combined increased by 0.1%."
To be fair, bluetooth audio wasn't simple in Linux (and I know what I'm talking about, I've been using a bluetooth headset for some years with Linux now). .asoundrc and you were in trouble using Skype on 64-bit systems (at least so was I, had to copy some libs from 32-bit chroot to make it work).
First you had to use snd-bt-sco driver with btsco program, you couldn't avoid some console work, had to explicitly start btsco to make it work. But it did work pretty stable, however.
Then, around bluez-3, they have started using ALSA for bluetooth, you had to put your dongle ID in
Only about a month ago, with pulseaudio-0.9.15 and blueman project it has become possible for me to set up and use my headset the easy way, exactly as I want it to work, and that's without knowing its ID, without console fiddling and so on.
You turn it on and pulseaudio reroutes earlier chosen sound streams to the headset, even if it's already playing. I can pick up/end twinkle calls with headset's button, blueman's killer feature for me.
Skype on my 64-bit system has trouble with it though, but they promise a fix soon (doesn't matter for my family because we use SIP with ekiga/twinkle anyway).
Of course, there has been bluesoeil for Linux, but I haven't used it.