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.'"

Comments

Guesstimates?

[FredFredrickson]

Estimates are already a form of guessing. The word 'guesstimate' make me want to puke blood.

Re:Guesstimates?

[Akido37]

Estimates are already a form of guessing. The word 'guesstimate' make me want to puke blood.

When I was in school, I was taught that an estimate was the same as rounding (As opposed to an "educated guess").

Now, every time I hear the word estimate, I assume that the number started from some actual data, rather than from someone's rectum.

Re:Guesstimates?

[sopssa]

The main problem with linux desktop usage is that all the games are made for Windows (some of them also work on Macs). I for one cant change to use linux as desktop, even if I want to and use it as server, because I like to play the games aswell (no, the freeware games on linux dont count for obvious reasons).

Problem is that game developers neither want to develop games for linux because it doesnt have enough users, and hence it goes round and round.

So the question is, how could we get the gaming market to linux aswell?

Re:Guesstimates?

[bodger_uk]

There it is! The most intelligent 1st post ever created.

Although the analogy of the consequences of using a, admittedly daft, word is a little over the top.

Re:Guesstimates?

[Chrisq]

Exactly. If I see someone I can estimate their height and weight. If all I know is your name, all I can do is guess based on sex, nationality, averages, etc.

Re:Guesstimates?

[HermMunster]

There are many Linux games. The Unreal tournament series for one, the quake series, Enemy Territory, etc. There are some solid full featured free games but I would have to say that frozen bubble isn't a game for obvious reasons as it is just an incomplete toy demo of some 3d graphics.

One has to ask why there are no games? Would you as a developer not want to target potentially 30-50 million world-wide users?

There are a couple of reasons for this.

1) Commercial developers don't understand the license--GPL and others.

2) Microsoft created a series of "lock in" technologies. Sort of like what we went through with the OOXML/DOC thing. For nearly a decade the government and large entities public and private required that you submit your electronic files in .doc (or some other office format). This meant that say, when the court system wanted you to submit pleadings you had to submit them in .doc and that meant that you the attorney and everyone in your office had to use a proprietary tool.

See the lock in? Well, Directx is the same way. Developers create based on Directx even though there's a near feature complete comparative technology in OpenGL. If developers developed for OpenGL then they'd have a basis for cross-platform gaming development. Some do, such as the guys that do the Unreal Tournament series. They know the value of it. Some day we may see that users are using Linux for their day in and day out tasks and switching to windows for gaming. You'll dual boot into windows like you would start up your console just so you can play the game, then you'll go back to Linux to do everything else.

This puts us in a position of the chicken or the egg. Wait for a market to grow to justify mutliple APIs for gaming development from the standpoint of the gaming industry leaders or develop and hope you can build a gaming following.

Yes, many of my friends have said that they play games and that's the number one reason. They won't commit to Linux unless they can game on it and it looks as good as it does under Directx.

I personally loose site of the quality of the graphics and tend to focus on game play after the initial WOW when I first begin a game. It doesn't mean I loose track completely but my focus is on playing and not so much on the beauty of the surroundings.

I have played some with wine and gaming and though it can work often times it has 2 failings. The first is that the games just don't look the same as they do under windows and aren't good performers. The second is that they can be problematic to get up and running. This isn't to say that all are this way. A popular game called Guild Wars is totally windows, but runs flawlessly under Wine.

I've taken and connected one of my Linux computers to a 47" TV going from DVI to HDMI. The resolution is 1920x1080 and looks utterly awesome as a desktop. I installed wine and then Guild Wars. After a few settings adjustments it looks just as good under Linux as under Windows and it is an incredibly beautiful on that 47" TV.

This is a tough battle to win. Only through gaining market share with Linux can we get gaming going. That's tough when dealing with a criminally convicted predatory monopolist such as Microsoft.

Re:Guesstimates?

[Mad Merlin]

The main problem with linux desktop usage is that all the games are made for Windows...

Not all games, Game! for example.

Re:Guesstimates?

[Poltras]

Now, every time I hear the word estimate, I assume that the number started from some actual data, rather than from someone's rectum.

Except for estimates of colonoscopy, I guess.

Re:Guesstimates?

[Skreems]

It's not that people don't want to develop for linux. It's that the GPL is viral. If you use a GPL library for part of your game engine, you have to GPL the whole enchilada. Game content can be closed-source, but with the engine you have to go one way or the other: all open, or all closed.

Come on now... this was solved decades ago with the LGPL license. Any changes you make to LGPL libraries are included in the viral behavior, but any proprietary binary that links against the LGPL libraries can be whatever license you want. It takes a little effort to understand the solution, maybe, but the solution is there.

Re:Guesstimates?

[TheRaven64]

I'm no fan of the GPL, but this is just plain nonsense. If you use a GPL'd library on Windows (or OS X), then your game engine has to be GPL'd too. It's true, but completely irrelevant. Linux is GPL'd, but from the point of view of an application developer, this is completely irrelevant because you don't link against the kernel directly. Things like X.org, and all of the OpenGL stuff are all MIT licensed, SDL is LGPL'd, and so on. It is trivially easy to develop on Linux and *BSD without using any GPL'd libraries.

Re:Guesstimates?

[Exitar]

Except that gamers are usually more interested in *playing* games that in writing and/or porting them.

Re:Guesstimates?

[Ginger Unicorn]

you dont need to understand free licences - there's nothing to stop you releasing proprietary software that runs on linux.

Re:Guesstimates?

[mutu310]

How about this? The EU decides that it wants to stop the monopoly of Windows for PC gaming and defines that game developers would need to follow certain criteria which would allow the games to be played on different OSes. This would be the ultimate blow to Microsoft, as gaming is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) excuse people give as to why they won't migrate from Windows to Linux. Such an influx of users would also mean that there are more 'hands on deck' to improve the Linux experience.

Re:Guesstimates?

[BetterSense]

I prefer the term "swag". Scientific Wild Ass Guess.

Re:Guesstimates?

[Toby_Tyke]

1) Commercial developers don't understand the license--GPL and others.

2) Microsoft created a series of "lock in" technologies.

Whilst I'm sure both of those play a part, they are by no means the main reason. After all, if MS lock-in was such a huge obstacle to porting games across platforms, the 360 would have more system exclusives. There is a far more simple reason why there are so few commercial Linux games. Market share.

Not market share in the conventional sense though. Let me explain.

Generic Blockbuster Games inc are planning to release their new game, Mediocre First Person Shooter VII: The Shootening, this summer,and are considering investing in porting it to Linux. Is this worthwhile? Only if the investment will bring in more revenue, by selling more copies. Now on the face of it, sure it would, because Linux has, according to TFA, 2.5 percent of the desktop market. If GBG port MFPS VII, they can all buy it, right? Wrong.

For a start, only hardcore gamers with expensive rigs can play the latest games, so only a sub-set of the 2.5 percent are potential customers. Now, ask yourself a question. How many hardcore gamers with expensive gaming rigs do you know who only play games with native Linux versions?

You yourself are playing a game with no Linux version. How would NCsoft have stood to make any more money from you by providing a windows version of Guild Wars?

30 million Linux users are irrelevant. The potential market for Linux video games is vanishingly small, if you discount the people who would buy the windows version in the absence of a linux port.

Re:Guesstimates?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would point out the John Carmack changed his stance on DirectX a few years back.

In January 2007, John Carmack said that "DX9 is really quite a good API level. Even with the D3D side of things, where I know I have a long history of people thinking I'm antagonistic against it. Microsoft has done a very, very good job of sensibly evolving it at each step - they're not worried about breaking backwards compatibility - and it's a pretty clean API. I especially like the work I'm doing on the 360, and it's probably the best graphics API as far as a sensibly designed thing that I've worked with."

I'm sure he knows a thing or two about the technologies and the difficulties involved with both.

OpenGL is designed as a general purpose 3D API. DirectX is a low level high performance 3D API which is ideal for making games. OpenGL can match DirectX performance but it takes a lot more work to do it.

And Guildwars was released 4 years ago, I can't imagine any computer or emulation layer having issues running it. Not to say its not a good game, but hardly a good comparison when discussing gaming.

Re:Guesstimates?

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

I believe there is another phenomenon at work that you didn't mention. In my experience, Linux users will shy away from the latest, most powerful hardware for the simple fact that it is less likely to work properly or be fully supported. Afterall, what point is there in gettign the absolute latest NVidia card with 512MB ram and however many bajillion stream processors they have these days when it isn't going to work particularly well. For years the message I always heard was "Go Intel, it'll mostly work." Intel can't run demanding games though.

Re:Guesstimates?

[Anonymous Coward]

you dont need to understand free licences - there's nothing to stop you releasing proprietary software that runs on linux.

That's the part that publishers don't understand!

Re:Guesstimates?

[houstonbofh]

If you are more interested in playing than in linux, then linux is not your OS. Linux (and OSS in general) is to scratch an itch, to do it yourself, and it has not yet enough people to support the next layer of users.

No, Linux is a tool. For you it is a tool to scratch an itch. The problem is that many developers feel that they way they want to use a tool is the way that everyone should use that tool. This is not just a Linux problem, by the way... But you will notice that the most successful software projects (or products) actively try to find out what itches others.

Re:Guesstimates?

[FictionPimp]

I opted to stop playing computer games.

I used the money to interact more with the outside world. Took up hobbies that improved my health and introduced me to new things and culture.

Then I broke down and got a 360, wii, and ps3. My gaming itch is not scratched on a 50 inch screen from my lazy boy.

I'll still buy mac games when the mood strikes. But quitting pc gaming allowed me to get rid of windows in an instant.

A much more tangible side effect? I'm off the upgrade mill. I don't have to spend money on new video cards every year, more ram, bigger processors, etc. I recently upgraded my notebook (my wife needed a new computer). I doubled the ram, gained a ton of cpu power and a much larger video card. The net effect is that I can't tell a god damn difference. This is very exciting to me. It means I might not need to spend hundreds of dollars a year on my computer.

Re:Guesstimates?

[asdir]

Actually, you can also estimate based on sex, nationality and other averages. Imagine making a regression of many people, randomly sampled, with different heigths, sex, nationality and so on. The resulting coefficients would be called "estimates". Based on those, you might try to make a prediction based on the variables you know of a person apart from the name, like sex, nationality, and so on. Since this prediction is based on estimates, it could also be called an estimate.
What I am trying to say here is, that as long as you have a method which objectifies (yes, according to my professors that's a real word) your results, it is not guessing, but estimating. Pure guessing would be without method and therefore unscientific. However, that does not prevent an estimate from being wrong and a guess from being right.
Based on this, a guesstimate would be something, which follows a method up to a point, but is thrown together with something guessed, like assumed data (bad!) or a theory based on guesswork (acceptable qua falsifiable).

Re:Guesstimates?

[someone1234]

Linus did it, and i'm eternally grateful for it.

Re:Guesstimates?

[commodore64_love]

I bet the number is only 1/10th as large as Apple's MacOS share.

Last I heard that's somewhere around 10%, so figure 1% for long term Linux users. The reason I suspect it's so low is because many, many people have TRIED Linux but few have stayed with the habit. Just like marijuana. (ducks a spitball). I had Linux on one of my laptops, but I wiped it with the original XP Restore CD. Counting me as a "Linux user" simply because I tried it last month would be a mistake, but I suspect it's a common one made by many estimators.

Re:Guesstimates?

[A.K.A_Magnet]

Unfortunately this will be buried in the mass of posts, but I'll go anyway.

If a game developer releases his game for Mac and Linux as well, maybe that's 10% market share but it's not the same market share! It's really disappointing to see this fact so often overlooked. Because not all users are the same. Mac and Linux users are DYING to play games. Meaning that a lower market share could still have higher game adoption.

For instance, take MMOs. There are no decent MMOs running Linux natively. As a former Ultima Online player now reconverted into a Free Software enthusiast, I would love a good MMO to play. But I will not use Windows.

The market for MMOs is *saturated*. If you publish yet-another-MMO, whether it's for a niche market of players (hardcore MMOs such as DarkFall of Mortal Online which I would love to play) or another WoW theme-park-MMO clone, you still have to convince Windows players to buy your game and pay the monthly fees. The Linux desktop usage may be lower, there is NO competition for MMOs. Meaning all suckers for MMOs like me would play if the game is any good.

In fact this applies to most games because the market is saturated. It is better summed up by the Lugaru game developers.

IMO, game developers are only missing opportunities. Once they release for Linux and Mac, desktop usage will raise and more people will favor their games over their Windows-only competitors.

Last argument is that "Linux users only want free". This is wrong. Windows users are a lot more about cracking and pirating. If Linux users see something of value, they will no doubt buy it to encourage companies to continue. Most Free Software enthusiasts have no problem with proprietary games because it can be considered a piece of art rather than a piece of software. At least art resources (graphics, music) need not be free, even RMS says so :). And we *are* desperate for good native games.

So (to game developers), stop depending on DirectX! Use abstraction layers between DirectX and OpenGL. UnrealEngine 3 works with both, and considering how advanced it is, I don't want to hear shit about how OpenGL is not as good. It will only get worse if game developers let it die. And release NATIVE support for Ubuntu and Fedora. The community will make sure it works on other distributions.

Re:Guesstimates?

[sexconker]

Why the fuck would you link to wikipedia for the definition of a word?

Re:Guesstimates?

[PitaBred]

New message is "Go ATI, it's working pretty well". Anything X1xxx and below is fully accelerated with free drivers, the HD2xxx and above are on pace for having free acceleration within a year. If you value open-source that is. Nvidia cards till perform very well with the closed source drivers, and are the de facto standard for OpenGL on Linux.

Re:Guesstimates?

[Mister Whirly]

Wikipedia is only an estimate of the real definition of the word.

Re:Guesstimates?

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

You just demonstrated my point though. How old is the X1xxx series? I can't remember, but still, the latest ATI cards still aren't up to par yet. So, its worth shying away from them.

Re:Guesstimates?

[BrokenHalo]

Have you ever gone to any Linux forum and seen a beginners question answered anything less snarky than "RTFM"?

Yes. Many times. In fact, I have only seen the "RTFM" response on BSD forums.

Maybe it depends on the forum you pick, or maybe it depends on how you ask. I and many others have been through the learning curve, and have found that although a google search is ample to meet trivial requirement, few experienced users are that cranky about answering "newbie" questions.

Re:Guesstimates?

[techno-vampire]

Have you ever gone to any Linux forum and seen a beginners question answered anything less snarky than "RTFM"??

I use Fedora, and am a regular reader and poster on FedoraForum.org. In the several years I've been following it, I've never seen a question answered with RTFM. I have, however, seen newcomers told that their question has been asked and answered a number of times, and that a simple search of the forum would have found the answer, sometimes with a link to an example. I've also seen links posted to the appropriate faq, with the implied offer to explain anything that still isn't clear. I've also had occasion to surf both the Ubuntu and Puppy Linux forums and never seen anything like that in either of those.

Re:Guesstimates?

[Carewolf]

I bet the number is only 1/10th as large as Apple's MacOS share.

I bet you're wrong.

And by all estimates, my bet is safer.

Re:Guesstimates?

[HermMunster]

Your argument does nothing more than bring up the question of the chicken or the egg. Which comes first?

Development for Windows, when DOS was preeminent, had these same influences, and the costs were as high (in a relative sense). If target audience size were the case and the size of the audience wasn't large enough and it was an important factor, we'd have no Windows. There were other, a lot of other, influences back then and a perception that to fail to develop for Windows now meant failure in the future even though there was no real evidence of it. The same goes for Macintosh. If marketshare was the only key factor we'd have no applications other than those provided by Apple.

Apple had a few tricks up their sleeves. They had a couple technologies that would become indespensable to the future, those being Postscript (WYSIWYG) and laser printers. Those two alone drive Apple's success for a while. Microsoft tried to counter with their own font technologies and HP came out with PCL. But for the next 5 or so years it was Apple on top of it all. When truetype became widely available and mostly free we had a change occur.

Unfortunately Linux has no hidden trick up their sleeve as the industry has simply degenerated into a series of oligopolies and monopolies where almost no new ideas or technologies are making their way to the desktop in order to entice consumers. We all pretty much read our mail, chat, browse the web, write, calculate our spreadsheets, manage our friends and consume content (play music and videos).

Apple's implementation of the GUI was revolutionary and from that point forward we have had nothing but evolutionary change. Once the key apps were written and everyone else copied them there wasn't much variation on new ideas.

Suffice it to say, Microsoft had to know this and had to be planning on the day when the development of technologies flattened out to the point that they needed only keep their product lines up to date in order to hold dominance, of course, all the while, trapping everyone into proprietary document formats.

The first thing tought to me in marketing class is that your USP can't be money. It need not even be audience size. What is a USP? USP is your unique selling proposition. If you base your USP on money over the long haul you will loose. You can't succeed over the long haul by trying to sell the cheapest product. You have to have something other than money as your USP.

no way of knowing for sure

[FudRucker]

since most all Linux distros can be downloaded anonymously for free from many servers/mirrors around the world there is no way of knowing for sure...

Re:no way of knowing for sure

[Dystopian Rebel]

It would be foolish to count downloads for this purpose. However, Canonical could surely count update requests to repositories, for example.

Re:no way of knowing for sure

[LWATCDR]

Or you could be like me and have 8 differn't ISO that you run in VMWare just to keep up with what they are doing.
Heck I don't even know where you would count me. I run Linux and Windows on my desktop. If your a Windows Fan I guess you count me as a Windows user if your a Linux fan I am a Linux user.

Re:no way of knowing for sure

[ausekilis]

Just ask MediaSentry to look up the number of *nix distros flying around torrents. Then we'd have a good 30% market share.

Re:no way of knowing for sure

[Rary]

Plus that one download could be used to install an unlimited number of computers, so even counting people that complete the download might not be correct.

Plus there's people like me who download multiple different releases of multiple different distributions just to try them out, or to use them on servers, but still use Windows on the desktop.

Re:no way of knowing for sure

[Tribaal_ch]

I did set up a mirror for all of our company's workstations (32), so canonical would see us as one user...

Re:no way of knowing for sure

[greenbird]

It would be foolish to count downloads for this purpose. However, Canonical could surely count update requests to repositories, for example.

Why? That's how Microsoft counts their Vista sales. Units sold no matter how many were down-graded to XP. Oh...wait...you said it would be foolish.

Just wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't wait until Wolfram Alpha goes online. This question will finally be answered once and for all.

I Am Completely Happy With Underestimating Linux

[eldavojohn]

While you may claim it prevents the self-fulfilling "tipping point" of everyone switching to it because everyone else is using it, I have no complaints with Microsoft and Apple thinking that they have nothing to worry about from Linux until it's too late. What do big dogs do when small dogs start to threaten their dominance? They try to kill them. I actually prefer the "slowly but surely until it's too late" scenario.

Confusion

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Sadly the article seems to confuse install share and market share, not just confusing the phrases, but using them concepts interchangeably. For some uses, this does not matter, while for others it matters a great deal. That and the fact that the article ends with a cop out, "We have no way of knowing which is closest to the truth" makes this pretty useless.

Re:Confusion

[value_added]

Sadly the article seems to confuse install share and market share, not just confusing the phrases, but using them concepts interchangeably.

I'd go farther. The term "market" is sufficiently ambiguous and using it invites all sorts of connotations that simply aren't applicable, or are relevant only in narrowly-defined circumstances. For the vast majority of downloads and installations, there is no money changing hands so there is no "market".

Easy solution

[MyLongNickName]

Go out on the street. Talk to about 1000 people. Ask them what operating system they have on their home computer.

My prediction on the results

Huh?: 45%
Windows: 25%
No Computer: 20%
Mac: 8%
Linux: 2%

Re:Easy solution

[downix]

Mine would be:

Windows: 35%
Mac: 9%
Dell: 3%
IBM: 4%
What's an Operating System?: 40%
Linux: 2%
I don't have a computer: the rest.

Re:Easy solution

[Big Nothing]

My prediction would be:

Huh?: 50%
Word: 10%
Internet: 10%
Windows: 10%
No computer: 10%
Mac: 8%
Linux: 2%

There probably should be an option with ISPs in there, but I can't be bothered.

Re:Easy solution

[Jestrzcap]

Man did this make me regress. Back when I was doing tech support and I had to ask what ISP people used I tended to get all kinds of wonderful answers.

Me: "I just need to ask you a few questions to better understand your problem"
Them: "Ok"
Me: "What internet service provider are you using?"

Them1: "Netscape"
Them2: "Internet Explorer"
Them3: "Windows?"
Them4: "I don't have one"
Everyone else: "AOL"

Me: "What operating system are you using"

Them1: "Dell"
Them2: "Netscape"
Them3: "AOL"
Them4: "I don't have one"

Re:Easy solution

[Americano]

Most likely because a surprisingly large number of people equate their computer with what it does for them - the application is important to them, not the OS.

Re:Easy solution

[noundi]

Not to forget: "Operating System? No wait, I'm not a surgeon."

Hmm, wait, it's 1.02%

[hattig]

It's just tipped above 1% for consumer systems that are used for internet usage. http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16860

Munging together servers and clients is a pointless benchmark. Linux could have 30% of the server ecosystem, but that would make a 0.001% indent on client share.

Regardless, 1.02% is a far cry from 5 or 6 percent, never mind 10%. Who would even say that a Linux machine makes up 1 in 10 machines on the web, haven't they seen all the Windows machines, all the business machines, etc?

Re:Hmm, wait, it's 1.02%

[gbjbaanb]

Or you could use these stats, which show 4% from browsing OSes.

You'd think this showed more desktop usage, as most people don't use a server OS (that's used for servers) to browse the web - hence the Windows 2003 server showing at 1.7%

what's a desktop?

[xzvf]

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.

Re:what's a desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, how to you define desktop today?

On a typical day, when you sit down to surf the web, what operating system is your browser application running on top of? That's your desktop OS.

Linux holds a decent share of the POS/retail market. Are point of sale devices desktops?

No.

How about thin-clients? Some have a small Linux OS that RDP's to a Windows server. Is that a Linux or Windows desktop?

It's not a 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?

Neither.

At home I'm 80% Linux, 10% Mac and 10% Windows, but from the outside how am I counted.

As a nerd.

Browser Percentages

[geoffrobinson]

If you took reports from major websites (Google, ESPN, Yahoo, MSN, etc, etc), I think that would be the best metric for filling in any gaps.

That would give you a percentage of an OS actually used.

Oh, numbers are objective. But raw facts do not come with their own correct interpretation.

try an argument with a committed partisan

[circletimessquare]

say, for or against gun control

and both sides trot out numbers, facts, that support their assertions

when the truth of course is that various quantities out of context can be twisted or misunderstood as to meaning

simply put, when dealing in the hard sciences, numbers rule. but when you get into politics, religion, sociology: numbers mean shit

but try telling this to a committed partisan when you debate them on various issues. they take your avoidance of numbers and their dubious meaning as some sort of implicit admission of defeat

when in reality, the issues are one of logic, reason, and principles, not bullshit numbers and their essential uselessness in supporting what you think they support

Re:I Am Completely Happy With Underestimating Linu

[onion2k]

It's the analysts who are (probably) underestimating Linux. You can be absolutely certain that both MSFT and AAPL are very aware of their competition. They'll both have labs full of Linux installs (plus OSX and Windows respectively) where they examine what new things are added, old things removed, what's fixed and what's left broken. These are companies with billion dollar budgets. Spending maybe a million (20 staff plus a big office) to research your competition is obvious.

Re:I Am Completely Happy With Underestimating Linu

[rabbit994]

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.

Re:I Am Completely Happy With Underestimating Linu

[noundi]

While you may claim it prevents the self-fulfilling "tipping point" of everyone switching to it because everyone else is using it, I have no complaints with Microsoft and Apple thinking that they have nothing to worry about from Linux until it's too late. What do big dogs do when small dogs start to threaten their dominance? They try to kill them. I actually prefer the "slowly but surely until it's too late" scenario.

Fair analogy, although, while we're doing animal analogies, I would look at MS or Apple as the "big dogs" and Linux as a shitload of bees holding the (important but not cruical) hive together. The difference being that even if a bee is lost, or even the hive itself, it's not over, whilst the dog is one.

Re:Measure? What measure?

[ThrowAwaySociety]

Agreed. Even the words "market share" are almost meaningless for Linux. "Market share" is the share of the market...how exactly do you count sales for something that's given away for free?

If I buy a PC with an OEM Windows license, then download and install Linux on that box, what does that mean? I've given money to Microsoft in exchange for a product, and no money to any of its competitors. Obviously, a market share point in MS's favor.

The Net Applciations numbers track "usage share" (the percentage of people using Linux for day-to-day tasks) and is probably the most meaningful if you were, say, trying to figure out whether to port your desktop app or game to Linux. (This number is skewed slightly since a large percentage of web surfing is done from work PCs...if you're a game developer, you don't care about work PCs.)

TFA also suggests counting Firefox downloads. That's a seperate quantity, akin to counting the number of Ubunto ISOs downloaded. It gives you the number of people experimenting with Linux, not necessarily using it. Naturally this is higher than the Net Applications number...my two Linux VMs both count toward this number, even though I spend less than 5% of my time playing with them.

As for USA vs. Europe/Asia...well, it kind of depends on why you care. If you're just a armchair Linux advocate, then you'll get the warm fuzzies hearing about global Linux adoption. If you're a US software corporation, you probably don't give a rat's ass.

Some stats and my own estimate...

[danhuby]

I run a couple of sites that probably cover both extremes in terms of Linux desktop market share. The stats are as follows:

Site 1: A local community site based in the UK; so the profile here is 'UK home user' (I find similar figures for other UK home focused sites I manage).

Windows 92%
Mac 6%
Linux 1.5%

Site 2: A site for an open source business application; the profile is therefore 'global IT worker / developer'. The picture is very different.

Windows 60%
Mac 30%
Linux 9%

The actual figure is between 1.5% and 9% then, depending on the ratio between home/office workers. As I imagine there are more home desktops than work desktops, my leaning would be towards the lower end of the scale.

3% to 5% seems like a reasonable estimate.

Dan

What counts?

[Cyner]

Part of the problem is also establishing what counts? I personally have 4 "Desktops" around the house with a Unix-like OS. Do those all count toward the total? Or should they count for two since only two people use them?
And what about the boxes I have that I no longer use? Most of them are also non-Windows PCs.

I can see where 1% of users might be Linux, and a much higher number (though 10% seems darn high) of boxes are Linux.

Can't we all agree

[wjousts]

The number is somewhere between 0 and 100%

This being the internet, I look forward to somebody disagreeing with me.

Ask Google

[berpi]

No, really. They know.

Something like total waste of time

[Pecisk]

First of all, there is clear notion that statistics can be "lying", or even better, people are drawing wrong conlutions from them. That's fine, because decrypting stats is daunting task and can require full-time team of specs to do that.

I personally don't care about TOTAL number, because it is not all about market share. As lot of people have already pointed out, most people DON'T care about what OS they use, they care about APPS. So question is more like - do Ubuntu has nice DVD player with Tango niceness and integration with rest of desktop? No? Vola! Afaik, Gstreamer guys works on one so it could be available commercially for OEMs and people who cares about legitimacy of DVD playback on computer. Do Linux has Visio replacement? Of course it doesn't. It is so hard to do? No! (let's be honest, it's not a web browser). So why then anyone ignores it?

Because everyone waits for some kind of grand sign to come out! :) Guess what - unless Linux Foundation don't create some kinda of OEM sales counter, Linux sales will and will stay a mystery.

Anyway, numbers does matter to check progress. But it is only one of things. We, Linux devs and active users, have still lot to do. But let's not forget that that's OS for us. We do this for us. And rest of bunch are just invited to join :)

Those numbers ar bogus! Linux is at 50%!

[filesiteguy]

I did a quantifiable survey. On my desk, I have two machines running Linux, one machine running Vista and one running XP.

2/4 machines are running Linux.

Therefore, Linux adoption is 50%.

(The margin of error for this survey is +/- 50%)

Shipped w/ system vs. installed aftermarket

[woboyle]

I somehow suspect these numbers (1% Linux market penetration, and such) are for systems that are shipped with the OS pre-installed by the manufacturer. That would seem about right to me. However, many systems cannot be ordered without MS Windows of some sort pre-installed, yet people remove that and install Linux, or dual-boot their systems with Linux. Even my grandson, who got a Windows system last year (my old Dell D600) switched from Windows to Linux after his Windows system disc blew up, and he is LOVING it! So, my best guestimate about actual market penetration of Linux is probably about 5-6%. It seems about right to me. Right now, I only have 2 programs that I must use which are Windows-only, so I mostly run Windows in a VM on a 64-bit Linux host. I have just installed Ubuntu on my laptop and will only run Windows in a VM there as well, as soon as I finish setting it up. Even my bluetooth wireless headset and Skype work fine on the Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04)!

Confusion over the GPL

[Proteus]

you dont[sic] need to understand free licences[sic] - there's nothing to stop you releasing proprietary software that runs on linux.

That's true, but unfortunately beside the point. Many product managers and the like have such confusion over the terms of the GPL that they believe any software they write to run on a GPL'd platform (like Linux) must also have a free license.

Or, at the very least, they believe that they'll be sued into releasing the source code.

It doesn't really matter that their perception is a fiction: unless people who already have these managers' attention can make a convincing case ("convincing" in the PHB sense, not the reasonable-person sense), the perception won't change. And there won't be as much commercial software for Linux.

This results in the wonderfully circuitous circumstance that consumers don't adopt Linux because the games/etc. they want aren't available for it; and those games don't get ported to Linux because there's no market share.

Re:Confusion over the GPL

[plague3106]

That's true, but unfortunately beside the point. Many product managers and the like have such confusion over the terms of the GPL that they believe any software they write to run on a GPL'd platform (like Linux) must also have a free license.

Well, it does. Not because of the GPL, but because of those pushing the GPL that insist everything must be open source. It's not good enough a company releases binary linux drivers, no, these people insist that the drivers be open source as well, or they refuse to use it.

Re:Confusion over the GPL

[PitaBred]

Most of the GPL people push for free drivers because if they don't, the drivers will break. And they can't fix them. The API is stable... write a closed source program to the API, and you shouldn't have to worry about going to the next version of Linux. The kernel ABI is NOT stable, and things change in it. A lot. And the freedom to keep doing that is why people don't like binary blobs in the kernel. If you get dependent on other companies providing necessary features in a closed fashion, you have lost your freedom to innovate and change things.

You are conflating two different things. Closed source applications are rarely railed against. Closed drivers are a completely different matter.

Re:Confusion over the GPL

[dedazo]

Anecdote time. Early last year I sat across a conference table with the CTO of a medium-sized manufacturing company (~3,000 employees) trying to nail a contract req for a custom inventory control system. They had pretty weird needs that didn't fit into any of the OTS solutions they had evaluated, so they decided to hire someone to do it for them.

In this particular case they were already using Linux for a few things, so I figured I'd go with that. It's always a risk to recommend a FOSS stack at companies which are Windows/Commercial Unix heavy, but my Postgres/Python/Apache would have fit quite well with their infrastructure. Otherwise I would have gone with the MS-based solution.

Keep in mind that "using Linux" here was essentially a few of their sysadmins deploying them as file servers and prefab CMS platform, so they didn't have any actual applications running on the OS. Everything else was Windows, but they didn't have any custom apps on that either. Their business ran, predictably enough, on Excel.

Me: "Well, I would recommend using a database called Postgres and a language called Python, a framework called Django plus the Apache web server and yadda yadda sales pitch"
CTO: "Hmmm, Linux. We already run some things on Linux, don't we?"
OtherGuy: "Yeah"
CTO: "What?"
OtherGuy: "Well, the executive blogs and the product wiki and the defect tracking system and a few other things. It's just stuff we downloaded and installed, PHP, MySQL, that sort of thing."
CTO: "Hmmmm. But I don't want to release this application"
Me: "Release the application? You mean the code? Why would you do that?"
CTO: "Well the other stuff we have running on Linux we downloaded it but this is something we're going to create from scratch"
Me: "... and why would you be releasing the code?"
CTO: "Because it has to run on Linux. Right? So it's open source and all that"
Me: "Uh, no. You don't have to release anything."
OtherGuy: "No"
CTO: "Oh, OK then. I thought we had to let other people download it because it would use all that stuff you said and runs on Linux and is open source and all that"

I didn't get the gig, but adding up a few other experiences I'd say this is fairly common, especially at medium companies that don't have years and years of IT experience.

White box and aftermarket...

[rkhalloran]

There's two data points the surveys are likely to miss, though one is VERY small and unlikely to skew the results.

I rolled my own desktop system by purchasing the various components (mobo/CPU/RAM/...) and assembling; said box has been through three versions of Linux and never seen an MS install disk. Is this somehow being tallied in? Doubt it.

The "scrub the pre-installed Windows and reload" scenario is probably more prevalent, but still unlikely to be in the counts. I'm looking at a netbook, and probably one with an internal HD vs. flash storage. Most of those come preloaded with XP. If I get one, the first action is plugging in an external optical drive and reloading with some netbook-friendly distro. Do they count the preloaded XP I was sold, or the Linux I'm actually running with?

SCOX(Q) DELENDA EST!!

Survey Says

[webmarin]

Google Analytics shows that of the 20,000 or so visitors to my web site in the last month only .67% are identifiable as Linux. So 1% sounds about right...

Re:Survey Says

[Todd Knarr]

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.

Reality distortion fields

[SocietyoftheFist]

Reality distortion fields are very prevalent among believers. I use Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. In the past I have used FreeBSD, OpenBSD (they're dead you know!), OS/2 and others. In my everyday life, working with co-workers, interacting with friends, paying attention to machines in use at the bookstore or coffee house, I've never seen a Linux machine in use outside of work or my home. I do have one co-worker that says Linux is his primary OS at home with a Windows machine only for gaming. One thing I have noticed is a surge in Mac usage. Last weekend I actually had a period of several hours where I only saw Macs in use on a street mall. At every coffee shop or sandwich shop you'd find at least one person with a laptop and I only saw Apples, I was actually incredibly surprised. I think the fact that more software houses are writing for the Mac shows where people are migrating too.

Consider the Business Case

[Homer1946]

I think the most important reasons for a lack of games is a purely business case reason predicated on market share.

It is not that the developers are walking away from 30-50 million Linux users, it is that they look at their limited development dollars and ask, 'It is more profitable to use our development talent to create games for those 30 to 50 million Linux users, or for 10 to 100x as many Windows users?'

This logic does not require any considerations of licenses and is at least partially divorced from cross-platform development issues.

Why not ask the supermarkets

[advocate_one]

there has to be some significant penetration now if supermarkets are devoting shelf space on the magazine racks to Linux magazines...

competition for shelfspace in those racks is cutthroat... if they don't sell, then they get dropped for titles that do sell.

No way of knowing desktop usage.. but

[LurkingOnSlashdot]

we can be sure that Linux is the most used on servers (of all types, not just web servers) and in embedded devices. I have purchased at least 2 items (Sony ebook reader and dlink home san) that I had no idea were running Linux. I would venture to guess that many people are running Linux somewhere in their home without even knowing it.

10% WTF?

[Brandybuck]

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.

i am for gun control

[circletimessquare]

and whenever you argue with someone who is against gun control, they are knee deep in facts and figures. they try to use facts all the time. as for "honestly" using facts, i don't know what honesty is supposed to mean in this context. people honestly fight for their convictions, if that's what you mean

furthermore, i don't know why you think the concept of an "emotional argument" has a negative connotation. the argument for gun control is emotional. the argument against gun control is emotional. there is no such thing as an argument over gun control that is not emotional. furthermore, emotions and passions are the foundation for any social policy in the world, for or against any issue you can dream of

show me someone who can make an emotionless argument, and i'll show you someone who doesn't care about the outcome, and therefore has no business in that argument. emotion is far more important than logic in reason in any policy dispute there is. the place of logic and reason is only to sway people's emotions and passions into alignment with yours