Slashdot Mirror
2-Year Study Shows Mac Users Downloading More Open Source Software
AmyVernon writes "We combed through about two years' worth of data on SourceForge, looking at the platforms of the users who downloaded projects, and millions more Mac users are downloading open source projects now than were in February 2010. In the same time, Windows downloads have increased by a much smaller percentage and Linux downloads have actually declined." I wonder how much of this last part can be chalked up to the ever-better download infrastructure that the various Linux distros have. (Note: SourceForge and Slashdot are both part of Geeknet.)
After buying our Macs we don't have any money left to buy software.
I'll tell you why downloads for Linux have declined - better and more complete package manager systems give users less incentive to go to places like SourceForge for programs, because they can use built-in tools like Ubuntu's Software Center.
If it's because more *iux developers have moved to Mac, especially on laptops. 10 years ago I knew more "switchers" who switched from Linux to MacOSX for development including myself. Mainly because all the hardware worked and I had the same software stack for the projects I was working on even if the final deployment would be to linux servers.
Every year since I've watched the number of developers using macs increase at conferences so much so that in the past couple years non-mac laptop users really stood out at the three conferences I attend every year.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Macs (or Windows, for that matter) don't have any sort of repository, do they?
Also a long time Linux user, I jumped onto the Mac bandwagon as my full time platform in 2005. Best personal computing decision I ever made. On the one hand, Apples default applications are remarkable (Garageband\iMovie anybody?) I also use textedit like crazy. For me the single most important piece of default software has been X windows. If you are running it on Linux I can almost certainly run it on my Mac. I use GIMP frequently. OS X comes with GCC, apache, etc... I also like that I don't really ever have to minimize anything since tiling a bazzion windows on a Mac really is very effective. Then there is built in system wide spell check. Did I mention spotlight? I could go on and on.
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While Linux offers a lot more [out of the box], the average Apple user doesn't need a repository. They can however easily add one! The App Store helped a lot in my opinion. Using Fink and Macports is not mainstream, but it sure works me!
Not that, but maybe some mac users (I'm one of them) used to use linux but decided to get a mac simply because it doesn't require you to read 3 manuals just to change some configuration while still allowing you to have a really powerful console.
Because of my Linux past, I tend to use macports or homebrew to get almost anything, so I suppose I don't count to the sourceforge statistics
There is another explanation that is being ignored. Linux developers are more prone to having migrated to github. Added to that the much larger repositories of debian, and ubuntu which reduce the downloads from the original source. An example of this is that when MySQL stopped offering official downloads for debian, I doubt more than a handful of people noticed, as it was a lot easier to get mysql from debian.org.
Work bio at MMWD
I find many of these posts very interesting... especially the number of developers getting Macs. I was one of them myself at one point. But I find what intrigues me most is wondering about their histories and past experiences with the os's.
:) ), while I contemplated my situation. Replace the $300 screen on this 'aging' laptop (wow technology moves fast), replace it with a new one (I find just about every laptop I
I am currently 99.999% linux, only using Windows or Mac when testing sites or software. But that's not how things began...
I am currently 32. I like many my age, but not all, had grown up with the Apple II's in my elementary school. My earliest memory of such events was being the 'printer expert' in 2nd grade. When anything went wrong with it, I was asked to fix it. I was an Apple fan, amazed at what I could do with this yellowing grey box on the desk. At one point my father came home with an Apple IIgs which just expanded on my experiences, buying my first modem and connecting to the world via the BBS's around at the time. My first email address was through one of these boards. We later got a Macintosh, I forget the model, but it had all sorts of multimedia capabilities. In high school, I bought my first PC from a friend. He gave me MS DOS 6.22 to use, and later Windows 3.11. I found it all very interesting, and learned quite a bit about the OS after formatting and reinstalling it so many times. Maybe a year later, I found out about Linux from another friend at school. He was very passionate about it which made me so curious about this relatively unknown OS. My first time installing Linux was very painful, but I was determined. Through Windows, downloading a handful of disk images, and then rebooting and loading what I downloaded onto a second partition. After a few times going back and forth, I had enough of the system installed, that I could get myself online through Linux and continue installing the packages there. Compiling the kernel I don't know how many times to get this or that working. Finally the full installation setup with X a week after I had began. From that point on, I had strived to use Linux as my main system. Only problem was I liked using laptops. It took a very long time for Linux to become viable in this arena. I switched from various versions of windows to linux and back again for many, many years. I could never switch fully over for one reason or another. Quite often it was due to lack of software for some task. I keep trying, though I often had a second system setup as a Linux server for various network related tasks. Fast forward to about 4 years ago, I got my first Macintosh since way back. A Macbook Pro with the intel processor. I got Parallels and was able to still do my Windows stuff and play with Linux when I wanted to. 2 years later, I had my motherboard replaced because of the NVIDIA issue. It was at that point that I felt incredibly vulnerable if my system had actually gone down. Was I going to drop another $2,000 on a new Mac replacement if something went wrong? All my software was Mac-only! I had backed myself up against a wall. I began looking for multi-platform open-source free software to replace all of the OSX-only programs I was using. 6 months later I did a full backup of my system in-case anything went wrong during the transition, and leapt back into the Linux community wiping my Mac and installing a recent edition of a Linux distribution. Only a few stumbling blocks since the Macs were just starting to get support, but I had made the switch. One year later, the screen on my MacBook went bad, an internal crack that would cost about $300 for me to replace it myself, more if I had someone else do it. Typing blind, since the screen was completely unreadable, I got myself to another tty console and installed ssh using apt-get. I can't believe it wasn't on there, but now it's one of the first things I do. I was able to access everything on my computer now from my fiancée's laptop, which I had recently switched to Linux (she loves it!