While I was trawling through Net Applications' operating system share trend data for the past 24 months, something struck me. June 08 marked a big month for Linux. The OS saw the largest increase in market share for the whole 2 year period - a growth of 0.12%.
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Member since:2005-07-06
remember, that % means nothing without some kind of added info like the total size of the group referred to, and how the data was collected.
distro forums will naturally show a high concentration of users for that distro. but if one collect browser data for all the major search engine sites and use that as a single large data set, what then?
think of it this way. you have 100 linux users in a room, then you march in 100 windows users. now you have a total of 200 people in that room, but the percentage of linux users dropped from 100% to 50%.
with larger groups, like what one get from looking at website logs, there may be 100000 linux users, but 1000000 windows users. this will send the linux % into a nosedive.
Member since:2007-12-13
Why? If you use Linux at the desktop, chances are you've already changed your browser's UserAgent string to some version of IE or FireFox for Windows so you don't get tons of useless warnings from sites refusing to show you a page because you're using an "unsupported browser" to view it. Those people will show up as Windows users in the survey.
That and you get a certain amount of skew based on the demographics of the sites.
Anyway, Linux "market-share" is mostly concentrated in other "markets", such as servers, embedded devices, media distribution, etc.
Member since:2006-03-23
Member since:2006-02-05
Member since:
2008-07-07
I'm so surprise, whenever I read some statistics like this, to see the low percentage of linux users. I mean, when I look around in ubuntu forum, gentoo, fedora, archlinux, <your distro I forgot sorry> forums ther's plenty of people using linux. I also cannot believe companies to do anything for an OS used by less than 1% of computer users (or they are beting on a growth?).