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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.'"
Estimates are already a form of guessing. The word 'guesstimate' make me want to puke blood.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
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...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Can't wait until Wolfram Alpha goes online. This question will finally be answered once and for all.
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.
My work here is dung.
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.
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%
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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?
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.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
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.
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
The number is somewhere between 0 and 100%
This being the internet, I look forward to somebody disagreeing with me.
No, really. They know.
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)!
Sometimes, real fast is almost as good as real-time.
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.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
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.