OSNews

Marketshare based on website vists is flawed.

I won't point out the obvious problem with this. Although the fact that the figures fluctuate in the Millions should give you some indication of the problem. Is it 7Million or 70Million

Whats interesting about Ubuntu is *not* its Marketshare but more about its target Market. Ubuntu has *more* than perhaps any other company before, focused on the Desktop, and is being successful at it. In particularly Microsoft Users wanting a more satisfying computer experience. You can see Red Hat is trying to get back in the game.

The thing is GNU is not all that different between Distributions so what its made up by is almost irrelevant...now if you were talking KDE vs Gnome Marketshare or even Grub vs Lilo you would have a point. I'm interested but still not overwhelmed.

The only thing that *you* can draw from the demographic that visit *those* sites is that 100% more of users use Linux each year. Although thats not particularly helpful.

The bottom line is Ubuntu is finding itself as the Market leader in Windows *Desktop* refugees not the Computer Literate, and they are liking what they find because GNU is pretty good, and this can be attributed to the Mozilla foundation and Sun for Firefox and OpenOffice as much as anything (and the thousands of other smaller companies / individuals), good for them, and like the rest of GNU will continue to evolve every 6 months while Vista 2006 looks the tired legacy OS it is. Its good that Ubuntu broke the mold.

What I would like to see *next* is Ubuntu turning *users* into *Money*. The kernel is already heavily funded through overwhelming success in both the server and embedded Market, and *many* traditional GNU companies have turned there back on the desktop(look at Red Hats turnaround). It would be nice to see the same kind of Cashflow and Company interest for the Desktop.

Edited 2007-08-05 00:54

It's a very good thing that Ubuntu made GNU/Linux accessible and a real possibility when Red Hat had given up on the desktop, OpenSUSE had installation and performance problems and Mandrake had suffered from a decrease in popularity and use even after the merger with Conectiva.

Regarding Red Hat wanting to get back into the desktop game in my opinion they failed and it will take considerable time to catch up to the current competition.

I'd take Slackware, Solaris or BSD over it any day of the week. Sun has more focus on the desktop than Red Hat and hopefully with Nexenta and project Indiana Solaris can attract more users in the future.

Fedora is not and will never be a contender for a stable, fast and functional 'just works' desktop. But I have to say that it doesn't aim to be that. It's just a snapshot of the cutting edge of GNU/Linux, nothing more and nothing less.

The reasonably stable Red Hat desktop died when RH9 was end-of-lifed. Everything after that has been too embarrassing to put to words, nice for play and bad for work unless you're only using only one or a few applications and then you could call it an appliance.

All in all I am more confident that Canonical can pull this thing off building from a reasonably stable Debian base than any of the major enterprise Linux vendors that show a lack of passion and direction on the desktop at a time when the outcry for alternatives could be heard resonating everywhere.

And windows is a quantum leap behind OSX. So...



if the metric is friendlyness and ease of configuration, I would put it at 80% to OSX and windows and iinux would account for the other 20%

but this whole thing is an incredably rhetorical discussion, because neither quality seems to effect marketshare very much.

You can't derive accurate market share numbers from web stats. This is especially true for small percentages.