Linux now has 'double' the market share of Windows
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 22nd Jan 2013 21:28 UTC, submitted by lemur2
Linux "If you consider NetApplications' data set, then Linux owns only about 1 percent of the desktop OS market and Windows has almost 92 percent. But if you consider all computing platforms, including mobile, than Windows has only 20 percent and Linux has 42 percent - and that would be in the form of Google's Android alone." No more or less legitimate than claiming Windows owns 92% of the market. It's all a matter of perspective.
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RE[5]: Marketshare
by abraxas on Thu 24th Jan 2013 00:15 UTC in reply to "RE[4]: Marketshare"
abraxas
Member since:
2005-07-07

The fact that Android Apps run (mainly) in a VM and that VM has been ported to countless other OS (Other LINUX distros, QNX, Mac OS X, Windows, etc) and those Apps run happily, with or without the underlying Kernel and OS services - what does that tell us? I know what you think as you've made that fairly obvious, but I'd say - LINUX was just a convenient platform to build Android upon. But really, it might have equally have been BSD or another OS, had one existed in a form that was useful and fitted the profile.


You're right that the kernel could have been anything else. I think that's the point. It could have been anything but they chose linux.

Or can we start pointing at the Dreamcast, XBOX, XBOX 360 and all of the Windows CE based devices (including Windows Phone 7 and 8) and say "Windows"? Can we look at all of the iOS devices and say "Mac OS X"? After all, it's a very similar situation. Cherry picking your definition is just a convenient way to cheat the figures, in my opinion (obviously.)


It's not exactly the same. The windows CE kernel and the Windows NT kernel are not even close to being the same thing. Despite drastically different userlands, linux system share the same kernel.

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