While searching web, i came across a site, where i saw some interesting charts, showing current share of OS in the market. Linux has just .83%, was a big surprise for me.As expected M$ will lead, but Linux just .83%.
There also IE is ahead of FF, but FF is still showing some resistance.
What you think guys about this.
ANL
Hi there,
Honestly I have a hard time buying this. The stats are given for “total market share” but the market is not defined. What I mean is that are we looking at servers and data centers, home, enterprise, etc. Or are we to believe that of the totality of installed OSes in the world, these figures are accurate?
I also think that if Linux was <1% then I would be suprised to see Asus, Acer, Dell, Lenova, etc. making UMPCs with Linux versions. A 1% market share should not be worth it - yet they do market to this group.
Working in a data center I can say that easily 90% of all our customers are using Linux servers. It’s not even close.
That is not to say the the Linux community and vendors don’t need to get their act together and get some actual marketing going. Linux really lost out on taking advantage of the bad experience so many had with Vista, but now the prime time to act on that is past.
Perhaps initiatives such as that by Mark Shuttleworth and his intention to make Linux look beautiful will help Linux.
But unless truly marketed, it is going to take a long time to get there. In the end however, the slow but sure progression of Linux, open source OSes and their communities will case a pretty big shift away from the current “one big commercial company so you don’t have a choice” - again, were I work we see hundreds of Debian, CentOS, Suse, Ubutu and FreeBSD servers.
I just sometimes I would see a Linux commercial instead of an iPhone TV ad, or Macbook print ad, or Windows promo. Just one good commercial that made people go “Wow!? That’s Linux? I had no idea.”
To hell with Project Mojave - show them something really impressive!
Cheers,
Pete
I am agree here.
We in our office using two servers with Linux, my PC with Linux, two other guys using Linux, i mean here about 70% in our office we are using Linux. But the questions arise here are “Are these market share charts are real”. Is it count on real data, is it analyzed properly, On what basis they analyze it. Some questions with some tough answers?
And about marketing, yeah Linux has no marking plan. None of them i saw some where, Just M$, “depends”.
Hi. Scroll down to “About Our Market Share Statistics” on this site: Market share for browsers, operating systems and search engines
Maybe you wan’t to pay to make use of the geographic filter and tell us where the differences between the continents / countries are ;-). I’d be really interested, because I can’t imagine that Mac has a market share around 8% in germany and linux has 0.8% only. I think these statistics are strongly biased towards the US- corporate or commercial user.
Market share of what? Servers, digital televisions, mobile phones, supercomputers, desktop computers, netbooks?
Well it’s 75% in supercomputers and Asus say 30% of the netbooks they have sold were Linux. I don’t know what Acer’s percentage is.
So because you don’t like the figures, it has to be a huge conspiracy to put forward figures that no one really takes any note of for what?
And as with anything like this, figures differ between companies, for example, the figures for w3counter for November have linux at 2.11% globally
Linux is young in it’s general usability for non technical people. The reason companies are offering prebuilt linux machines is because Microsoft created in two ways a market for it. One unintentionally by releasing Vista, which left people, companies, government departments, etc, etc looking for an alternative. And the second way, through their deal with Novell, companies realised that if Microsoft was getting behind linux with Novell, then it was worth looking at. So a market has been created for computers to be sold with linux already on them. Will that market take off, only time will tell, some chains report that in computers returned the largest portion are linux.
Linux needs to move away from the geek zone to the general user zone, and it is, greatly. But I personally think that a couple of areas need work. E-mail. Many microsft users enjoy rich email clients, and email and chat are a major part of their computer usage. Kmail has come a long way, but it is still very dated in a number of features it lacks, compared to windows live mail and apple’s mail. The other area is games.
But i tend to think this relationship with microsoft and novell will see microsoft porting software and games to linux.
Well, I think that GNU/Linux, at least in the server & consumer arena, is a quite competent OS, technologically speaking. Technologically speaking, there may be OSes that can compete with it. No doubt about that.
But. But, GNU/Linux is backed up by the most incredible “raison d’etre” in the computer world: the idea – nay, the philosophy – of free software. Now, the very moment you take that into account, no other OS can compete. It’s precisely because of this incredibly exciting, compelling idea of “freedom in computing” that GNU/Linux, taken as a whole, far surpasses anything that we’ve seen in the last 30 years of the computer era, and anything we’re likely to see in the next 30 years. Taken, again, as a whole, GNU/Linux is simply the best OS on Earth. By far. Because – unlike any other software – GNU/Linux is not “just” software; it’s also this inspiring, overwhelming, powerful, bright ideal that’s spreading all over the globe, shaping an immense community of positively thinking people. Of people with a vision, although many may not be aware they have one, yet. You see, with the adoption of GNU/Linux, we finally cease to be just “consumers” and become individuals, human beings once again.
And, just as anything that’s this good, it must necessarily take time to catch on. In the end, though, it will just as necessarily prevail. Nothing that’s this good can be kept down for a long time. Just wait and see. When you know you’re the best, there’s no hurry.
I live in a town of 20,000 people. How many own a PC or Mac? I have no idea, but I know a few that have Macs. I am the only person I know that runs Linux. <1% seems about right.
> ‘Link to site’ (http://tinyurl.com/6pwccg)
They are obviously checking browsers hitting one or more certain sites. As long as they don’t check Google, the stats are totally useless, IMHO. Even if it was Google, the results would be questionable.
Fact is, you’ll never know how many people run a certain OS.
Uwe
Actually people purchase Windows licences but not for linux distributions, Just downloading from net and distributing as well. So how one can get the correct numbers for Linux?
You can’t, unless each single distro in existence agreed to include a program (which also can’t be disabled) to report to a central place that this person is using Linux and then gather the statistics and compare them to other OSes. Even with this, it won’t be 100% accurate because there are many PCs or servers which aren’t hooked to the Internet and also maybe someone will find a way to disable this reporting program, post the solution on the Net and lots others will disable it too as it can be considered a form of privacy violation
Agree with you microchip.
This is a good idea to implement such system, as it will be not that accurate, but can give some figures, which will show the numbers.
Fedora has some pretty solid (yum data) stats on it’s usage-there’s a small note explaining the accuracy of the statistics; probably a valid way to count (or at least approximate) the number of users for a given Linux distribution:
Well, if their figure of 15,553,979 unique IPs is correct, and the assumption that this is an underestimate by an unknown, but probably not too huge amount (under-count than over-count), and if World Internet Usage Statistics News and World Population Stats have an accurate estimate for number of people using the internet as of June 2009 (1,668,870,408)- assuming both of the above, the percentage of internet users running Fedora Linux would be around 0.93%. Question would be then, how much do other distros contribute to the overall “linux” market share? (And oh god yes, I’m aware this is a potentially wildly inaccurate figure one way or the other, depending on how many more internet users have appeared since June; and I am very, very sorry for it :()
It’s pretty hard to get anything much more out of the page though, because it makes no qualification about where this data comes from- even if you view the stats for OS by “version”, linux is still presented as a single option, so there’s not much further to go down that road- unless there’s some sort of FAQ that I’m missing?
I’m not sure if this could be done but here’s part of my User agent string:
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090909 SUSE/3.5.3-1.2 Firefox/3.5.3
Note that it has Linux listed there. Is it possible to base a market share count from user agent strings?
Forums have a user count right? What if the Linux community tracked the number of unique users signed up and recorded stats worldwide by distribrution to user groups.
LUGs must also keep track of users signed up, what if they also reported their user counts.
Stores and Custom shops should be reporting both # of systems sold
as well as # of systems with and without an operating system. They could also be providing #'s by op system.
While this would result in duplications unless there was other measures then MAC, Windows, Unix, and Linux’s would be more accurately represented.
As it stands now,
Some people buy a machine with Windows and use it as a Windows machine,
Some buy with Windows and add an additional OS which isn’t counted,
Some replace Windows with Linux but because it came with Windows they get the credit,
Some buy without an OS so nothing is counted, and
Some buy with Linux but the Supplier records it as a Windows sale so as not to disrupt their agreement with M$
Those who do the survey polls, include and exclude stats to favor their unique point of view.
Futureshop for example counts all sales of PC’s as Windows sales even when no OS is installed. They record all MAC sales as Windows PC sales too!
Best Buy (the non-commission Futreshop) does the same thing and that just hurts Linux, and MacIntosh stats.