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Report: Linux desktop market is only around 0.24 percent

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CommonSense:
According to some organization called WebSideStory, Linux has only 0.24 percent (i.e., less than 1 percent) of the desktop market.

And in a related story, XMLdatabases.org suggests that Mac OS X is the death of Linux on the desktop.

Your thoughts?

voidmain:

quote:Originally posted by The Webmaster:
According to some organization called WebSideStory, Linux has only 0.24 percent (i.e., less than 1 percent) of the desktop market.

And in a related story, XMLdatabases.org suggests that Mac OS X is the death of Linux on the desktop.

Your thoughts?
--- End quote ---


Webmaster, are you trolling?          I suppose both things are possible but I doubt either article. I am curious where each article get's it's data.  When they say "Market Share" are they talking about product sold? Even though I would agree that the percentage of home systems is very low it's really hard to tell.

For instance, with Linux I download the install CDs one time, and I have 8 systems at home, and 40 at work loaded up with it (this is true) and I give copies of the CD to all my friends.  Are they counting how many times it was sold in a store, or downloaded? Neither is useful for stats. And if they are they have no way of knowing I burned a copy for all my friends to load from, and my 48 machines. With MS and MacOS you have a captive audience and they are required to purchase a license. And how many PCs preinstalled with Windows are walking out of Best Buy with WinXP and converted to Linux?  It's probably a low percentage but how would anyone know?

And as far as the websidestory.  I don't know how accurate this could be either.  They say they use "hitbox".  It's funny because Linux people are smart and know how to block these "hitbox" items. I block them in several ways.. I use squid proxy server with a filter both at home and at work. I block these sites at the firewall and create my own DNS zones for as many hitbox domains as I can, pointing to nowhere, so there's not much of a chance in being included in the marketing data. And if they were going to say they got their data from the Web Browser User Agent string, we all know how worthless that survey would have been.

Although I am interested in trying out and/or buying a Mac, I seriously doubt I will get rid of any of my Linux systems.  From what I've seen in the little bit I've used it, the *NIX side of the house is farther from the norm than I would like.  I hope the article is wrong and that it draws people mostly from Microsoft, those who were interested in trying UNIX but didn't want to take the Linux leap of faith, then once there they combine forces with all the existing *NIX people to help get some desktop competition out there for MS.

Of course, it is possible that I am an extreme example. There might also be more extreme examples than I, how is one to know?  It's hard to buy a machine without XP on it, I don't believe you can buy a Mac without an OS on it.  Pretty easy to count those as part of the market share but I wonder if they are taking them off the list whem people reformat and change OS?

[ December 19, 2001: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

runkpock:
Only the few get to use the best. But really now,
does that mean I have to stop using linux for my
desktops? dammit. I'll tell my friends too, I think
they are using that OS too. I thought that linux
was just starting to make its way onto the desktop?
Give it time man. Now I wonder what the percentage
is for OpenBSD desktops? Now thats got to be worse,
no?

gump420:
If anything, I would imagine that eventually Mac OS X will help to . . . wait for it . . . increase the number of desktop machines running Linux.

My reasoning is thus: unless Apple makes OS X cross-platform (something they used to hint at doing and have since been curiously silent about) their market is limited to people with Apple hardware. So, if you assume they're strategy doesn't radically change in the near future they will continue to bump along with a very small market share as the vast majority of computer users go for cheaper Intel-based systems.

Now, how this will help Linux is showing the UNIX world that it is possible to make a commercially viable UNIX-based operating system that can be administrated by a complete idiot. So, sooner or later, one of the Linux-based companies out there is going to catch on and create a viable competitor to Windows that is based on Linux.

With that goal in mind, it's also important to realize the other ways that Apple is showing the way, so to speak. Aqua (their GUI) has no basis whatsoever on XFree86, but there is an X-Windows server that runs on Aqua seamlessly, allowing the user to run Mac OS X and X-Windows apps side by side. The lesson here is that X-Windows is horribly complicated for the average idiot, so why not make that part transparent. It's important to keep it there for compatibility, but there's no reason to let it dominate the GUI experience and make it impossible for an idiot to use the OS. Now, combine this with Wine or WineX for Winblows compatibility . . . well, let's just wait and see how long it takes somebody to pull their head out of their ass and stop making overly-complicated Linux distros that aren't user-friendly in any sense whatsoever.

voidmain:

quote:Originally posted by gump420:
well, let's just wait and see how long it takes somebody to pull their head out of their ass and stop making overly-complicated Linux distros that aren't user-friendly in any sense whatsoever.
--- End quote ---


Gump, I'm convinced it's coming soon. I have seen exponential advances in recent times. I don't know if KDE or Gnome or something else is going to be the item that becomes the user friendly part of it but I just upgraded some of my machines to RedHat 7.2 and just last night I downloaded and upgraded KDE to v2.2.2 and it has come a long way in a short time. I'll admit there is a long way to go.  

KDE 3.0 is out in beta I believe and there are some nice screen shots of it on KDEs web site.  Doesn't look a lot different but I see some additional features that weren't there before. Maybe Apple should open up their source and let the Open Source guys make a killer Linux system, Apple might consider that too threatening...  Of course they used to like to use semi-oddball languages and constraints to write the OS and apps, I think now with the *NIX underbelly they've started down a better path..

[ December 19, 2001: Message edited by: VoidMain ]

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