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The Problem With Estimating Linux Desktop Market Share
jammag writes "It's long been one of those exceptionally hard-to-quantify numbers: exactly what percentage of the desktop PC market is held by Linux? Doubters suggest it hovers around a negligible one percent, while partisans suggest it's in excess of 10 percent. Bruce Byfield explores the various sources of estimates, dismissers' and fan boys' alike, and guesstimates it might realistically be 5-6%. Still, he admits, 'the objectivity of numbers is often just a myth.'"
Seriously, how to you define desktop today? Linux holds a decent share of the POS/retail market. Are point of sale devices desktops? How about thin-clients? Some have a small Linux OS that RDP's to a Windows server. Is that a Linux or Windows desktop? I just finished a project where the thin clients were diskless and hosted totally on servers. Do I count the servers or the thin clients as desktops? At home I'm 80% Linux, 10% Mac and 10% Windows, but from the outside how am I counted.
It would be foolish to count downloads for this purpose. However, Canonical could surely count update requests to repositories, for example.
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Actually, on the Desktop side, Ballmer during a investor meeting said biggest competition to Windows on Desktop is pirated Windows. Linux and Apple are blips and while they continue to make headway, it's extremely slow and not that large of a threat.
Partisans suggest 10%? WTF? That sounds like someone needs to get out of their parent's basement and start living in reality. Perhaps they know nine other people in the world, and so assume that 10% of everyone uses Linux. But it' simply not true. 10% of the people my company use Linux. But we're a Unix development shop! In my circle of friends, 2% use Linux, and we're all geeks and nerds.
You simply cannot extrapolate your narrow slice of the world onto the whole.
But on to the good news: It doesn't matter what the market share for Linux is. All that matters is that you choose to use it. I don't use Linux, I use FreeBSD. It doesn't matter to me that fewer people use it than use Windows, or Mac, or Linux. It's my choice and that's all that matters. I don't have a need to use the same software everyone else is. I don't need to drive a car the same color as my neighbor. I am free to be an individual. So choose your own operating system, your own distro, your own pick of packages. Build it all from source if you want. Use something polished like Ubuntu, or hardcore like Slackware, bleeding edge like Arch. Or think outside the box ad try FreeBSD or OpenSolaris.
The key is to put yourself in charge, not the market share.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I worked in Web analytics, so I can speak to this somewhat. One problem with Google Analytics is it depends on Javascript and Web bugs to get it's numbers. Linux users are more likely than others to have things like AdBlock Plus, NoScript, Webmonkey et. al. installed and configured. If the scripts don't run and the Web bug isn't fetched, the Web-analytics firm has no idea the browser's hit the page. The result is systemic undercounting. Oddly, it can be compensated for by log parsing, but few firms actually do that.
To give you an idea of the scale, we can look at cookie-blocking stats. Right now about 17.5% of users block or delete third-party cookies, and about 7.5% block or delete first-party cookies. The nasty part is the "or delete". That's those users who have their browser set to accept cookies but delete them when they close the browser window. That completely hoses Web analytics stats in all kinds of ways.