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Is Linux's "Overall Market Share" Statistic Meaningful?
ruphus13 writes "Linux recently achieved 1% market share of the overall operating system market. But, does that statistic really mean anything useful? This article makes the case that it doesn't. It states, 'Framed in the "overall market share" terminology, the information (or how it was gathered and calculated) isn't necessarily questionable, it's more that it's meaningless. It's nebulous, even when one looks at several months worth of data. [How] Linux is used in various business settings answers an actual question — and the answer can be used to ask further questions, form opinions — and maybe one day even explain to some degree what 1% of the market share really means. ... Operating systems aren't immortal beings, and by rights, there can't be (there shouldn't be) only one. ... No one system can be everything to everyone, and no one system (however powerful, or stable) can do everything perfectly that just one person might require of it in the course of a day. While observing trends and measuring market share are important, the results (good or bad) shouldn't be any platform's measure of self-worth or validation. It's a data point to build on (we're weak in this area, strong in this area, our platform is being used a lot more this quarter, where did all of our users go?) in order to improve and stay relevant.'"
What? This directly contradicts the widely-known fact that Linux is The Highlander of operating systems.
slashdot, missing the point as usual....
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
To the developers, at least, marketshare is absolutely irrelevant to their efforts. With some exceptions, the GNU/Linux systems is largely built to benefit the developers themselves, and if other people find it useful, good for them.
both reveal some interesting things but may hide the essential."
These statistics seem to a be a bit flawed. Windows has 90% of the market, Mac OS X has 9%, and Linux has 1%. However, Linux is heavily used in servers, handhelds, and other devices. Not to mention, the fact that there is no way reliable way to track Linux installs (100s of dstributions with users installing everywhere and no phoning home to report it).
I don't think this statistic is meaningful. I think Linux should keep chugging along and show the world that freedom, volunteers, and good will can equal money. Something to tip the scales...
The market share is not fragmented so evenly as the summary suggests. The majority of the market share is composed of people who only check email, browse the web, etc. I have heard plenty of stories of these people moving seamlessly from Windows to Linux. Linux should be aiming specifically for this group of people because they do not need the proprietary software that musicians/artists/etc. would otherwise need. All their needs can easily be satisfied with Firefox and Thunderbird. There is not much more to the data point than how many people have experienced Linux and found that it satisfied all their needs without the heavy price they must otherwise pay to Microsoft. What Linux needs to do is get itself out there through advertisements, etc. There needs to be more commercials on television like this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwL0G9wK8j4
I blogged a bit about this a while ago. The direct link is http://josephbrower.com/2009/05/13/whats-up-with-market-share/ . I'd be interested in hearing what people think.
The quote from TFA misses the point entirely. It's not about there "being only one," it's about there being enough users to make Linux (or any OS that isn't from Microsoft) a viable alternative to Windows. If a particular OS has 0.0001% or 0.01% or even 0.1% market share, very few developers are going to develop for that OS. You won't be able to connect your machine running that OS to anyone's network, even if it's technically capable of making the connection, because IT will be paranoid about this unknown platform. Etc. But if you reach 1% or more, that's kind of a magic number. You may still be seen as kind of weird for not following the crowd, but you'll be able to use your computer for the same tasks for which everyone else uses theirs.
I'd say 1% is about what any non-Windows OS needs, as long as the aggregate of "alternative" OSes stays above 5% or so, as is currently the case with Linux + OS X. When the number gets significantly below that, as it did in the days before Linux took off and when you couldn't say "Apple" without first saying "beleaguered," things are pretty rough for anyone who's not running Windows on the desktop, using IE for the web, and writing everything in Word.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistically_significant>
"In statistics, a result is called statistically significant if it is unlikely to have occurred by chance. "A statistically significant difference" simply means there is statistical evidence that there is a difference; it does not mean the difference is necessarily large, important, or significant in the common meaning of the word....
The significance level is usually represented by the Greek symbol, (alpha). Popular levels of significance are 5%, 1% and 0.1%. If a test of significance gives a p-value lower than the -level, the null hypothesis is rejected...."
just has sour grapes because they couldn't figure Linux out on their first (or second, or third..) go around and now they're spewing why it doesn't count. That being said, 1% is a pretty pathetic number. Lets hope this new found high point only leads to better things in the future. Maybe they'll be the proverbial Mozilla of an IE / Netscape consumer market struggle. We all know how that played out now, don't we?
Bye!
Operating systems aren't immortal beings, and by rights, there can't be (there shouldn't be) only one.
Love the highlander reference, but does this mean there will be no "Quickening" then? Damn, I thought Windows 7 was gonna work on that...
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I mean, how is that measured? I mean it certainly must be way more. Do they measure commercial sales of distributions? Well that's certainly misleading. For example I have a laptop which came with a Windows XP license, now it runs Ubuntu. Few Linux users actually buy their distribution and the amount of them has decreased over the years. That would also explain why the market share of Macs seems to be so large. There they simply could count the sold machines.
Measuring the user-agent strings of web-browsers also isn't verry precise as different sites tend to attract different kinds of users.
Because there are sound commercial reasons to do so.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
and your basing this on what? i have no trouble believing only 1 in 100 computers has linux on it
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Macs are at around 10-15%. How many Macs do you see in public? how many Linux notebooks?
Granted, it's much easier to spot a Mac than a Linux PC, but from the screen side it's easy, and I've never seen a Linux notebook in public that wasn't someone I know. Otherwise the total would be two. And I have to go back 15 years to get that number.
... it's how you use it.
Overall marketshare? I'm highly doubtful that a 1% marketshare includes servers, much less all the Linux-powered devices (like my router) out there.
I don't think I've ever seen an OS marketshare report that wasn't flawed in some way.
For some intuitive, illogical reason, I feel as though 5% is probably a reasonable current number where desktop Linux is concerned.
Virtually the only major growth going forward is going to be with Ubuntu. There simply isn't any other distro out there which mimics Windows closely enough for the Lloyd Christmas demographic to be happy with it. So in mainstream terms, we're going to have a Ubuntu monoculture; to the uneducated, Ubuntu and Linux will become synonyms.
I think however that it's too early to tell, at this point, what longer term effect Ubuntu's mainstream success will have on the broader Linux community. I've already seen some vague suggestions online that in some cases Ubuntu acts as a gateway drug for Linux; Ubuntu is used at first, and then as a user learns more, and develops more confidence, they sometimes move somewhere else, distro-wise. I don't think this happens a lot, though; something tells me that with most people, Ubuntu's long-term retention rate will be high, with most staying in GNOME and avoiding the CLI more or less completely.
The overwhelming mainstream demand of Linux is that it become as much a clone of Windows as possible. I believe that this will greatly damage Linux's technical integrity long term, which is why I've moved to FreeBSD, which I am hoping will remain relatively immune from the insistent screaming of Windows refugees for a monetarily free XP clone. I had one Ubuntu user inform me on IRC, only a few hours ago, that Linux's primary reason for existence was to apparently provide users like her with only a marginally more stable Windows clone; it is interesting just how arrogant and forceful Windows refugees are becoming with this demand.
Of course, what I still haven't figured out is why those people who consider it important for Linux to become mainstream, do feel such a desperate need for that to happen. The one thing I can promise you is that mainstream adoption will not ultimately do good things for Linux; it is a fundamental law in my mind that the quality of any given thing is inversely proportional to its' degree of popularity.
Apart from anything else, Windows refugees generally have absolutely no clue what they are doing where serious software development is concerned. As more ex-Windows users migrate to Linux, there is, I feel, sound cause for therefore believing that Linux's overall code quality will begin to drop. The only thing Windows users care about is that computer use is, "easy." They don't know or care about stability, security, or hardware efficiency, and they also don't understand that a severe tradeoff nearly always exists between robustness and usability at the best of times.
The facts that Slackware is a rock-solid server distro, but not used much on the desktop, while Ubuntu is a nightmare in technical terms, but is the primary desktop distro, are not coincidences. Robustness and extreme usability are virtually mutually exclusive. For one to be present, the other must go by definition.
Actually, there is no meaningful way to accurately measure how many people (or businesses) are using Linux, or Windows, or BSD. So "market share" is meaningless. Its just a statistic that marketing departments can twist to sound however they want it to sound.
So...
We trust the guy who "just says so" over the guys who collect and analize the data and compare the results for a living?
Sorry bro "just cause" doesn't cut it when there are mountains of data proving you wrong.
Linux extremely popular in a few areas: network backbones, pure data crunching applications (often a windows application passes data to a linux server farm for processing), web server applications where up-front OS cost is a significant portion of the cost (else the MS server product is often cheaper in the long run), web server applications that require very custom applications and very fine OS control, very small embedded hardware applications, etc. For a lot of these applications I'd wager linux has 50/50 market share with microsoft (roughly, novel still has a portion of the server market, and apple has a very small portion as well). In a few areas like embedded apps, MS has very little market share, and Linux is probably in the 50-70% range, maybe even higher.
However, ALL of those applications are trounced by the desktop PC market, and MS still owns that hands down, even with Macs at 9%. 1% is not at all unbelievable for Linux, MS has its hands in almost everything, and has very good products that are strong competitors in almost every catagory. Linux doesn't even compare, it's a niche OS used for niche applications and it is very very good at filling most all niche needs. Unfortunately "Niche" is just everything MS doesn't dominate.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
Other sources estimated the number to be 5% or even 6%. Which just goes to show how statistics can easily be used in ways that are misleading or distorted.
But this also bears examining: 1% (or 5% or 6%) of what OS market? Linux is sure as hell a lot higher than that in the server market, and if you are talking about internet servers, higher still.
So, maybe it doesn't have wonderful desktop penetration yet. But I bet it's higher than those statistics say! My bet is that Linux is the secondary OS for an awful lot of people, often via dual-booting. Just as "one and one only" voting has been shown to be inferior to "instant runoff" and other voting methods, saying that people have only "this or that" OS does not present an accurate picture of the landscape.
I wasn't aware that operating system is what end-users use for his/her daily work. I've always thought that it's the applications what matters. Glad that I'm corrected now ;)
You don't know what you don't know.
This article doesn't make any sense... How do you go from 1% usage share to "OSes aren't immortal beings"? Or "doing everything perfectly for everyone"?
The writer was smoking something while writing this, and I'm not sure it's a legal substance.
Because there are sound commercial reasons to do so.
Which vary in each specific instance, while the figure itself remains largely unchanged.
It boils down to human counting systems with only three or four distinct values: 0%, 1%, 90%, 99% aka nobody, hardly anybody, most people, almost everyone.
When you cite 1% it spares you from deciding whether to write "hardly anyone" or "a tenacious few". For exponential distributions, 1% is the glass half-full point: the optimists read that as the upward inflection of immanent domination; status-quo pessimists read that as annoying cohort who forgot to take their meds.
If you write "5% of desktops run Linux", it's like saying the glass is 5/8s full. It only complicates the knee-jerk response.
If some materials science wonk invents an exotic new material which they have absolutely no idea how to commercialize, but raised money anyway, the obligatory quote is that commercial products will be available "in five years". It's kinda PR speak for "don't call us, we'll call you, if we ever get our shit together".
There are sound reasons not to take precision too seriously.
http://www.scientificblogging.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/nitpicking_omega_b_discovery
Seriously, computing is about more than just desktop users.
How do various hobbyists, and I.T. professionals use Linux? It would be easier to count the niches that Linux is not filling. According to Netcraft, Apache still had over 50% web server market share, while IIS only had 30% in April 2009. I am sure there are some people running Apache on Windows, but I would venture a guess that it is not the majority.
Even webserver market share does not represent the whole server market share. Approximately 40% of all hardware in the server room where I work run Linux in some form, only 25% of all the servers run Linux. There are more than a dozen third party network appliances in this room. Third party examples I can think of are load balancers, spam firewalls, content servers, and NAS filers. I cannot think of one third party Windows Server based appliance in our server room, aside from servers. I am sure there are Windows appliances out there, just not in our server room. If it is part of Microsoft's mission to lock customers in to commodity desktop and server hardware, that is not something that really scales for vendors designing and selling specialized appliances and hardware.
How much Internet infrastructure runs on Linux? I wonder what the percentage of postfix/sendmail servers on Linux versus Exchange servers on Windows is? What is the number of external BIND DNS servers on Linux, versus external Windows DNS servers. What is the market share of Linux iptables/tc routers, load balancers, VPN gateways, or 3rd party appliance running Linux) versus Windows RRAS routers used in small and midsize offices? How many companies are using Asterisk versus the number of companies using Microsoft Office Communicator Suite (Not sure OCS qualifies as a PBX, though)? How many companies are virtualizing their data centers with VMWare ESX, Xen, or KVM, all running on Linux versus Microsoft HyperV?
How many consumer electronics devices have popped up with Linux on them, versus Windows? I can probably name 20 devices with an ARM processor, and some version of Linux running on it. Here is a short list: Linksys Wireless routers, webcams, Tivo, Roku, Netgear ReadyNas, Sony flatscreen televisions, POS terminals, etc. Windows mobile has notably made its way onto mobile phones and Wasp barcode scanners.
How about high-performance computing? How many Rocks clusters, and render farms are built on Linux versus Windows HPC servers?
Seriously who cares if Linux isn't prevalent on the desktop. Linux has filled every other niche, besides the desktop computer, six ways to Sunday. While Microsoft and Apple are laughing at a 1% desktop share, Linux is taking over every other niche which it is able to quickly evolve and adapt. World domination fast, indeed.
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
How many Macs do you see in public?
I have only seen about 5-10 Macs ever (two Apple IIs over 12 years ago, 2 Mac laptops, 3 IMacs, and a couple others)
how many Linux notebooks?
Notebooks? About 10, but PCs/Servers over 20.
I have 3 Linux PCs and 3 Linux Laptops.
I agree with you on almost everything here, except one: Linux is not a "niche" OS, any more than the model for its existence, Unix, is a "niche" OS. It was, from the very beginning, intended to be a general-purpose computing platform, capable of running just about any type of program. And it does.
It may be used mostly by a particular "niche" of the market right now, but that does not make it a niche OS. The two things are entirely different.
For example, some recent versions of Mac OS were developed on top of a variant of BSD, which for all practical purposes is itself a variant of Unix (even if the BSD people would disagree). Would you call the Mac OS a "niche" OS? Not at all. It is as general-purpose as Windows. But all it really is, is a layer on top of a POSIX-compliant OS, which makes it, at lower levels, virtually indistinguishable from all the POSIX-compliant flavors of Linux.
For example, I have had as many as 4 different OSes on my computer at a given time, each used for specific purposes (mainly because some programs were available for one OS but not another). They are installed in various combinations, sometimes in VMs, sometimes as multiple-boot, or a combination thereof.
When in school, my laptop was usually dual-boot, Windows and Linux, and on any given week it was a tossup which one I had set to auto-boot when I turned the machine on.
Whatever Linux's actual marketshare is, I think we can all agree that it is far lower than anyone expected 15 or 10 or even 5 years ago. By this point most people in the linux community expected a significant marketshare.
I confess to a bit of confusion as to why we're so wrapped up with getting linux on the desktop. We have a perfectly valid desktop operating system; Windows ( although I have yet to administrate 7 in a corporate environment, so take what I say with a grain of salt ).
Yes yes, it's evil and horrible and all the other things we like to harp on it about. It's also entirely manageable and entrenched. And while, yes, I would like many of the manageability functions linux provides, there are a lot of things that linux simply does not do as well as windows ( irregardless of the applications ).
Seems to me our efforts would be best served towards back end work; getting decent file systems ported to linux, providing samba with even more features that windows does not natively have, ect...
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Not that vague at all; pretty direct, in fact.
when I, on linux, make a saas/web application. Customers log on with IE or Firefox and do their thing.
They are using linux?
My idea of the future is: no more applications at the desktop (except for word,excel,browsers,...).
The desktop is irrelevant, it's the net.
nosig today
You really have to cross 1% before you can achieve better proportions like 100%.
Market share implies usefulness, or that people use, want to use, or are forced into using it.
For Linux to have 1% market usage would mean that there is also a decent sized pool for community.
A 98% market share for Linux would be great; it would mean a massive pool of users to form community, to find issues, test new versions, etc.
Resulting in an even better product that more people will find beneficial and easy to use in an advantageous way.
95% of all statistics are just made up.
"A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist" - Sir Humphrey Appleby
I hope you're right. I like being in the top 1%.
[How] Linux is used in various business settings answers an actual question -- and the answer can be used to ask further questions, form opinions -- and maybe one day even explain to some degree what 1% of the market share really means
Net Applications is all about the mass consumer market.
Users with unrestricted access to the web. Shopping at Amazon. Playing games. Watching the videos on YouTube. The news on CNN.
This is where the Net Applications client spends its money. This is where the Net Applications client makes its money.
There is no mystery in these stats - no surprises:
When people shop or a PC for personal use, they almost always chose the Windows system or the Mac.
It's useful to remember that the MSDOS and Windows PC began as the outsider. It clawed it's way onto the office desktop because users wanted it there.
I agree completely that you cannot place much trust in the percentage, for all of the reasons that get mentioned whenever we talk about OS or browser market share.
The trend, however, is much more interesting because it cancels out much of the systematic bias that will be present in any given series of results.
In this particular case Linux shows a fairly steady increase from 0.43% to 1.02% over the last two years, a compound annual growth rate of about 50% (albeit from a low starting point). I think that's good news.
(In fact the actual figure may be even better than that, because there was a suspicious 25% decline in October 2008. It could be that they changed methodology in some way, perhaps by reclassifying one of the embedded Linux-based platforms, because that month's change stands out as being very unusual.)
It means "the overall share of the market". If you're using it to measure quality or reliability or developer's dick size then you're doing it wrong, and that's not the statistic's fault...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
It would be interesting to come up with a metric that evaluated "real" work done under each platform. The numbers might be surprising.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
It's pretty unbelievable because it's not true. Linux went past 1% at least 5 years ago. The only way it's believable is if you're completely unaware of what goes on in the real world.
Look into the logs on our computing cluster on any given work day ad you'll find between 1,000 and 2,000 users using our hosted software. 9 GNU/Linux systems, lightly loaded. But that's thousands of Windows terminals, and a hundred or two Macs.
But the work is being done on NINE midrange servers!
A funny scenario - one of our clients had their own database system running on a dozen Windows servers. Performance was at a crawl, and I can't tell you how many times I had to reassure them that performance wouldn't be a issue. Well, the cutover happened, and the increase on our systems was so severe that we didn't even notice!
VIVE Linux and Postgre!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Actually in this context neither "operating system" nor "applications" is correct. We are really talking about different computer ecosystems or cultures and simply using the generic name of the OS as a convenient shorthand. Which is really quite appropriate, since it is generally recognized that geeks don't have culture (cue the toe fungus jokes), which would mean we'd have to talk about silicon ecosystems which, aside from being just silly, would also inevitably lead to conversing about habitats (cue Mom's basement jokes).
So there really isn't any other good choice if we want to have a serious conversation about the differences between the Zen of WinXYZ and the Tao of Linux distros. Remember that when comparing these kinds of religious differences: that was zen; this is tao.
Will
:) )
Compare this (this article is based on this data):
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9
which doesn't give any hint how the data has been obtained with this:
http://www.heise.de/open/Linux-knackt-auf-dem-Desktop-die-1-Prozent-Marke--/news/meldung/137137
(Win XP: 55.5%, Linux: 14.8%, Vista: 14,4%, Apple: 7,7%)
with this:
http://www.handy-mc.de/handy-bestenliste/toplist-bewertung.html
Toshiba Portege G910 (#1), a handy which doesn't exist yet, is much more popular than the iPhone (#200).
There is a lot of nonsense floating around. Do not trust this data.
It is meaningful if you want to draw the attention of hardware manufacturers and have them develop drivers.
Just my thoughts as Linux user and advocate:
1) 1% is much more than 50% in the begining of the nineties. So Windows and OS X is still more - so what? If 1% constitutes about ~ 50 milion users, That's a heck of the user base on which to grow on;
2) More or less market share statistics started to become less meaningful (but not meaningless) after globalisation - these numbers fits more for Western sphere, but Linux based OSes have good adaptation rate in Asia and Northen/Eastern Europe;
3) I think it is meaningless to count on such stats as indicator is Linux ready for desktop - it is empty concept, because mine desktop differs heavily from yours. Mostly Linux is ready for desktop, there is just not enough apps to satisfy different needs for users. It is ready for webmaster desktop for sure, it is ready for musician's desktop (those who are not afraid take a risk and dive in Linux world), it is ready for grandma's and my girlfriends desktop.
And, please remember - most of us use Linux because we really like it. When we do advancements, when we improve code, we do it firstly for ourselves. It's fun to create better and better software. There are lot of things to improve, yes, and that is why we should keep crunching.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
I switched to OS X 13 months ago, and I honestly don't see a point in switching to Linux as my primary system (I'm a software developer, mostly working in Java).
The only reason one would do that would be philosophical, rather than practical. I use Linux of course, but I don't miss anything available on Linux using OS X. But if I were to switch to Linux I would miss quite a few things (mostly having to do with images and video and Nikon and Canon software support for Linux in particular. Of course there is the issue of Photoshop and Adobe video suite).
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
I don't feel good about sending my bank account, passport, or insurance numbers to the office of the company I'm working for by e-mail because they run their office on Microsoft software.
You want to tell me again that MSWindows is manageable?
You really want to tell me again that MSWindows is manageable?
By a couple of women who can't afford to bring in an MSCEE or whatever every other week to update things and tweak all the settings? By the half-trained MSCEE they do bring in once or twice a year to help them clean up the mess Microsoft's junk leaves behind?
Salesmen like you should be locked up for a couple of months in a padded cell with nothing but a MSWindows box hanging naked on the net to play with, just to see how "manageable" it is.
Linux went past 1% at least 5 years ago. The only way it's believable is if you're completely unaware of what goes on in the real world.
I believe in God. I can't prove that my God exists, but he does exist!
I see Macs on the train every now and then. About four in twenty at the office are Mac users when they get the chance.
I'm a full-time Mac user, myself. Almost. Every now and then, I boot my Mac under Redhat or openbsd to do something. I use that Mac on the train, and sometimes it's running Redhat when I'm on the train.
I'd use Redhat it on the train more, but I need to figure out the trackpad settings. At the office and at home, I can just hang a USB mouse on it.
There's the problem with the statistics -- how do you tell a "Linux user"? Not by the box he's using, by any means, as you say.
(And I'm not sure most people could tell from the screen side, either.)
You can pretty much do anything you can think of with it, in IT terms.
Windows... Mac... Not so much. Sure you can beat them into shape after buying a bunch of addons of varying expense... They're designed for specific markets, they're great in their niche, but outside they are a pain.
You want a 100,000 machine cluster? With linux you can. You want a pocket pda/phone. With Linux you can. Not only you can, but YOU can.
Imagine some benefactor had given you a garage with all the tools and materials you could ever need. For free. Wouldn't that be cool? Think of the things you could do with it. That's Linux. Windows in comparison is a Ford sedan. You use it for travel.
Deleted
It's >10% and ~96% on servers. So you're wrong, the person who started this 1% was either in 1993 or just lying through their teeth.
Imagine some benefactor had given you a garage with all the tools and materials you could ever need. For free. Wouldn't that be cool? Think of the things you could do with it. That's Linux. Windows in comparison is a Ford sedan. You use it for travel.
-- And like any other car, it is occasionally susceptible to crashes, accidents and break-ins.
Economists have a graph called an economic S curve for technologies that catch on. when it reaches 2% market share or 2% of the market share it will have substansial growth begins. over a few years it groth increases substanially and then levels off. when it reaches 98% market share the growth slows down substanially. This curve has been acuarte for every single technology. Linux might be at or past 2% of the market share it is going to have and therefore may be getting ready for substancial growth. These is a book called the ROARING 2000's that explains economic S curves. This actually may be a story that is more important than most of you think.
I see macs in public (laptops) all the time, it all depends wether you frequent places where people are sat down for extended periods of time, like trains, planes and stations/airports etc. I see lots of other laptops too, but unless you get a look at the screen it's hard to tell what's running on them... I have seen laptops running linux tho, mostly eee netbooks.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
I would say the embedded market trounces the desktop market in terms of size... The average family may have 1 or 2 desktops, and possibly use one at work... But they will have several TVs, phones, cable/satelite receivers/recorders, routers, games consoles and various other computer controlled appliances.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
(Gratis, or free as in beer. Contrasted to libré, free as in speech.)
How is this market share measured? Number of sales? That won't do for something which you can obtain for free, without being counted anywhere.
Number of installations? Better, but how do you calculate that, and what is the definition of an installation?
Looking at the browser user-agent strings? Maybe, maybe not. A lot of people fake the strings, or turn them off completely, or do not display their OS.
And some food for thought: why is it that something with supposedly 1% of market share drives 85% of the innovation? Snazzier UI of Apple is not innovation - it's an exercise in packaging. Virtualization of Windows7 is not an innovation, it's been fielded many, many years before in various systems, including Linux.
Everyone knows Linux has 10% market share worldwide.
Those 1% are from broken statistics. Even for just the US they're wrong.
You don't have to go through that tortured argument. OSX is SUS03 and Posix 1003.1 certified.
Exactly right. What you describe is a mellowing of the hardcore Unix sentiment that is never reflected in things like "market share" studies, about *nix in general or a specific "desktop" distribution. Years ago carrying bootstrap tapes or that popular 50-pack of floppy disks to install a new machine with your favorite flavor of *nix was a real badge of honor. Sure, you might have to recompile the boot blocks and stay in the office until 4am cursing at your phosphorous green terminal.. but you know what, it was all worth it because it separated the men from the boys.
Guess what else happened over the years? Many of us chose to focus our attentions on other things like real life. We still love to tinker, but on our own time without our arcane systems forcing us to when it's not convenient. Modern inventions like "desktop *nix" are a work of genius whether you are a greybeard or a greenhorn.
Give all the naysayers who are crying "newbie!" a few more years of smashing their forehead into a keyboard because their elite operating systems outsmart them on a daily basis to come around...
is dis da article where all i have to say is linus is da bestest to get modded up?
i thinnk da marketshare is 4653% but i don't have any kind of report to back it up!!!
micor$ofy is teh suck!!!444!!!
As a faithful Mac user since 1986, let me tell you something about woeful market share--it matters not. I don't measure my friends as a percentage of all people in the world so why should I measure my OS of choice the same way? The way I see it, the more Linux boxes out there, the more chance somebody who has never seen or used Linux will be exposed to it, and might start using it themselves. This phenomena is completely independent of market share. If Linux grows from (make up numbers time) 5 million to 10 million, I have twice as much of a chance as encountering it, even if PCs went from 500 million to 1 billion in the same time period.
All a high market-share tells me is what platform is the most mediocre.
Linux has enough market share that there are 10s of thousands of people supporting it. Linux has enough market share that I get an outstanding Desktop OS. An OS that I gladly pay for through donations and purchasing vendor products. Linux has enough market share to provide me with the most stable, safe and feature rich platform available. It has enough market share that Linksys, nVidia and other high-end hardware manufactures support it.
1%, 10% or 90%... Linux has enough market share for me.
-[d]-
I believe the subject answers the question but I couldn't post just a subject.
Sorry, but your 1% doesn't matter, its a toy.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Budwiser used to be a micro-brewery ... then it got good. Market share will tell you if people enjoy drinking your beer.
Linux used to be a micro-OS ... then ... oh wait. Market share sez Linux is sucky and people hate to use it.
Its not suspicious.
It means they are including web servers from large hosting companies and some large hosting company switched off Linux. You see jumps like this all the time when watching trends for Linux and Apache versus Windows and IIS.
You can almost certainly find a matching netcraft report showing the same change.
Probably by October this year, they'll be enough switching to Linux that the 25% lost disappears or gains more back.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
They're measuring the number of client machines running Linux, not the number of servers.
You might get some effect as they change which sites they harvest statistics from, but for a step that large my money is on a change to their definition of what counts as 'Linux'.
BTW, when I said 'suspicious' I did not mean 'malicious' - only that there was more going on than met the eye.
The 25% has already been made up, and then some.
Linux is a far advanced OS compaired to all other, it's like saying "Is the most advanced piece of technology important", So in short Yes Linux is the best OS to ever be developed and in use today period!
You just have to love these Windows Trolls trying to downplay the exponential growth of linux' market share...
2010 they'll laugh about 2% market share
2011 they'll laugh about 4% market share
2012 they'll laugh about 8% market share
2013 they'll laugh about 16% market share
2014 they'll laugh about 32% market share
2015 they'll finally shut the hell up...
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
Just as "one and one only" voting has been shown to be inferior to "instant runoff"
Instant Runoff Voting isn't monotone. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system#Criteria_in_evaluating_single_winner_voting_systems
The Schulze method has a strictly better set of desirable criteria (if IRV has desirable property p from a particular set of properties P, so does Schulze).
"Linux recently achieved 1% market share of the overall operating system market."
IMO: the article is grossly misleading, at best. Clearly the 1% statistic is meant to measure desktop use, but the article harps on "overall" market share.
Personally, I do get a little tired of the rather pointless prattle. Let me do the obligatory auto analogy.
I have driven Peterbilts, Kenworths, Freightliners, GMC trucks, Whites, - you name it, if it was built in the United States, I probably drove it. Off road equipment, I've driven Case, Caterpillar, Kubota, - I could go on.
Never did I wish that more commuters were driving a Peterbilt like me. Good GOD, commuters are dangerous enough with their little 4 wheelers!! Imagine Soccer Mom careening down the highway in an 80,000 pound rig!!
Operating systems? Average Joe is incapable of keeping an operating system going when the OS does everything for him. Why do we wish that he would adopt a system that doesn't do ANYTHING until he explicitly TELLS IT TO DO SOMETHING?!?! Do we need 500 million bumbling idiots all asking us for help and guidance because they can't play a movie?
Don't get me wrong, I'm willing to tutor a couple people, now, and a couple more in a few months. But, if Windows were to die overnight, tomorrow I would be literally SWAMPED with requests from people wanting to install Ubuntu, BSD, Suse - you name it. And, I would be totally LOST, trying to help dozens of people track down the obscure driver, or decide if a hardware change would be better, which media player better suits their needs - and the idiots would never just finally figure it out, and go their way. I mean, they STILL haven't figured out WINDOWS!!
When I look at my computers, I see specialized machines, designed and built for MY purposes, and customized to perform the tasks that I choose to perform. These same machines are probably unsuitable for more than 75% of other *nix users, let alone that vast uncaring audience of Windows users.
I dunno about all of you, but I CERTAINLY DO NOT want to see the masses given keys to shiny new Caterpillar D9's. Why are we so fired up about giving them the keys to powerful computer systems that they don't understand any better than they understand a bulldozer?
I say, piss on the masses. Let them eat MS crap.
All that said - I'll never really understand why businesses and corporations are still sucking up to the monopolistic Microsoft teat. You would think that the accountants would figure out that upgrading to *nix might be short term expensive, but long term priceless. I guess a lot of idiots manage to become accountants, just like any other profession.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Wouldn't this be a good description for an operating system which has, say, a mere 1% market share?
And if I were Ballmer, I'd be able to remember how many legs and wheels a certain flying chair had, what was its colour and cover, texture, weight and exact throwing pitch and the precise flying trajectory from the moment of grasping the seat till it fell down and even the force of throw and fall. And numerous other minutiae.
I can't recall when was the last time I threw a chair myself (snicker). Well, it must have been many cycles ago anyway. Maybe more than ten.
I'd sign in but I forgot my password somewhere in gmail...
anyway.
Linux is growing up, get over it!
When Linux his 10% market share, it will be meaningful. 10% of anything as a whole makes it important. Rarely less than 10% is truly meaningful. This applies to almost everything.
Congrats to you! 5% is indeed probably about right. Possibly a bit more, but that's a reasonable estimate, unlike these nonsense figures bandied around by people paid to produce nonsense graphs and sound bites.
Troll? The only troll here is the meta-moderator who marked the parent as a troll.
Why classify desktop and server linux?
Just count them all.
Then whats the percentage?
I have totally the opposite experience. In the last few years, in my primary coffee spot Linux laptops have damn near reached parity with Macs. If I had to pull numbers out of my ass, I'd call it Linux 10%, Mac 15%, Windows 75%.
FTR, I do not hang out at a techie coffee shop. I do hang out at a fairly socially radical coffee shop, which I think has a lot to do with it. Linux and free software are taking root among young, tech-savvy social progressives in a way that I don't think analysts are seeing yet. Wait til they have kids.
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!
I did not claim that it was necessarily the best, only that it was better than what we have.
But that wasn't my point. My point is that essentially it is a Linux variant, which it does not necessarily have to be to meet either of those criteria. Just ask IBM.
I wouldn't call OSX a variant of Linux. The kernel architecture is different, the initializations are completely different, Linux has a bunch of Unixy features that OSX lacks.
Macports has a huge range of the Linux software market but the Linux stuff tends to be more integrated. OSX's XWindows is very different than the X.org distribution.
They are both "Unixes" (Linux not officially but in practice) but they don't have the same parents so they are cousins. That's how I would describe it.
Everyone responding to this thread that I have read thus far has stated that market share is 1%. If we did a little digging, we might find that in March we (linux users) actually reached 2%: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Linux_Cracks_2_of_the_market_according_to_W3Counter
"Market share" doesn't matter, but not for the reasons listed.
1) It doesn't matter TOO much, open source software in general is portable; even BeOS and OS/2 are getting ports of firefox and the like since they are portable. But, still, you get companies that will not release specifications for hardware because "noone" uses anything but Windows.
2) The REAL reason is because the stats are bogus. They tend to measure sales not usage -- since so many computers have "Microsoft tax", Windows shows a very falsely high market share when it's measured by sales. In this vein, before the more recent 1% market share figure, which it turns out was ONLY from brick-and-mortar chain stores (where I have never seen a single Linux desktop), there was a slightly earlier figure indicating *10%* Linux market share, primarily due to strong Linux netbook sales.. difference being this includes mail order. If Linux fans can spin Linux market share to 10%, and Microsoft can spin it as 1% for the same time period, clearly these figures are not terribly useful to figure out what's REALLY being used. Similarly for web sites, the browser breakdown varies a lot.