Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Fri 15th Aug 2008 04:15 UTC, submitted by computerishcat
The traditional market share numbers would say that Linux is currently at less than 1%, but some more recent numbers suggest that it might, in fact, be almost even with the Mac. This all brings the question of how many Linux users are there really? Unfortunately, we may never know. Certainly, there is no way of knowing currently, but it should be possible to at least get a rough estimate.
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Member since:
2007-09-06
I believe they tried an Opt In to track kernel updates from unique installs. Basically, if a distro is updating the kernel package; it's not a random software install and it's probably in active use.
Few wanted to volunteer for having there updates lowjacked. This was about the time MS was back in the news over updates policy. I believe it was the validation ball-gag they required before you could get XP sp2 updates.
The problem of accurate market statistics will remain and in it's probably better that it does.
- MS sales statistics will always be the licenses they sold to stockpiles not the number fo activated and regularily updated Windows machines; they keep that stat to themselves, guess it's not good.
- Only Linux based OS purchased through distribution channels like retails outlets can be tracked as difinitively as the MS/Apple units shipped per year. The very nature of the platform means there will always be untrackable distribution methods including roll your own from tar.gz directly for all the various programs you want.
- It's probably better that the various random ways to get your prefered nonMS/Apple OS regardless of branding or collection of commodity parts it's build with. It is a culture and platform meant to impower the end user not the vendor's shareholders.