OSNews

Dude that site is in some funky weird language. They could be comparing percentage of virus-infected boxes for all I know.

Of course ;-) but names of the OSes and percentage of usage is quite easy to understand.

That country is Poland, central Europe, member of European Union since 2004.

As you can see there are still almost four times more Win2000 desktops connected to the Internet, than Linux machines.

I think you might be overstating what this means. They are counting page views by OS. It looks like this just represents a breakdown of their own viewers rather than the whole country of Poland, much less the entire continent of Europe.

To quote them: "The basis of the knowledge is data coming from gemiusTraffic - a research study designed to analyze Internet traffic on websites."

I do not know if I understand your suggestion right - but those result are NOT just for their (ranking.pl) own website. "Gemius" is a online research agency http://www.gemius.pl/pl/about_company (in english!)

So - since results are more or less similar in all other countries - Mr. Torvalds do not have - in my opinion - many reasons to cherish. Linux is great thing in general view, but Windows still ruling the desktop and home PC world.

Since release of Vista I wonder how Vista's bad design and some of its "features" will influence into Linux desktop and home adoption and after almost a year it seems that people just stick to XP and are very reluctant to move from XP to Vista, nothing more, nothing less.

Statistics are useful for many things, but they don't support that sort of sweeping, absolute conclusion.

You might as well argue that Earth has no landmasses (since the majority of its surface is water), or that there are no spoken languages other than Chinese (since it's spoken by the majority of human beings).

Statistics are useful for many things, but they don't support that sort of sweeping, absolute conclusion. You might as well argue that ... there are no spoken languages other than Chinese

But such conclusions are the ones that drive the market. If you were an entrepreneur, at this moment you would probably be investing tons of money in China. For the same reason, if you have an IT shop, you'll probably want to have some windows expertise since the vast majority of customers will request that.

Obviously all this reasoning relies on the statistics being correct and relevant to the considerations you're extrapolating from them. Everybody knows that there are market sectors where linux is dominant (so the stats are not relevant for that markets) and everybody knows how it's difficult to get unbiased stats in operating system utilization by a large population.

dzien dobry autumnlover, I too love autumn in the planty in Krakov, or having a beer in the rynek in Tarnov, but, having spent a lot of time in Poland, but, most people I know there use Linux, and having a look around the magazine booths, there is more Linux magazines than Windows ones.
There is more internet cafes using Windows though, and when I asked the guys who run them, they said that tourists know Windows....
I have a picture of vandalism on the main bridge over the Vistula with Tux and Linux spray painted onto the pavement.

The Linux movement in Poland is massive, you cannot deny that, I have seen with my own eyes.

Oh, and Pierogi z miencem is amazing

I like them too, especially with barszcz (see Wikipedia). Also, there is special variation of pierogi called uszka ("little ears") also served with barszcz, and somehow smaller. Uszka stuffed with mushrooms instead of meat and served with barszcz are traditional Christmas Eve dinner course, and even being ateist and rationalist myself, I cannot imagine end of December without them ;-)

How did they manage to get those figures? I suspect browser user agent, which has been debunked time and time over here.

In other words, I'm very doubtful about the validity of these statistics. Unless you can provide proof that their method doesn't involve looking at browser User Agents, then these numbers are worthless. Sorry.

In the meantime, you should stop basing your arguments on intrinsically inaccurate figures. For all we know, Linux (and/or OS X) usage could be up to 10x higher in Poland than these numbers suggest.

I maintain several web sites - on all these sites the Windows rates are now below 95% for all versions of Windows combined. (unique visitors per month) Two years ago the rate was around 98% so there has been a small drop. In Windows use over all. In fact Mac OS will usually out number Linux.

One factor that we do not know about these site statics is weather or not they are from Windows only country. (Sites using active x or offering games using direct x or will only render correctly in IE). Beleive me if I go to a site and find in unfrendily I do not go back. This means that sites that are not friendly to Non-Windows viewers will skew their results to favor Windows.

Also note my trafic is nearly 100% US I suspect that if I were getting non-us trafic the Windows numbers would be slightly lower.

Who cares? It has NOTHING to do with this. There are many interesting questions you could ask Linus, the questions about Windows asked in this interview isn't among them.