Internet News writes about a major mark for Fedora 10 release. Fedora remains the only distribution to publish it's statistics and gathering methods openly and transparently. In any case, they reached 1 million active installations of Fedora Linux 10.
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Member since:2009-02-26
If we could get hard numbers from Xandros/Asus and Linpus/Acer concerning the number of pre-installed linux netbooks that would go a long way to addressing traditional "marketshare" in the sold in a box sense.
Those vendors account for something like 70% percent of all the netbooks sold last year, but we don't know what the split is between linux and XP models.
The userbase estimates for self-installed linux instances are indeed harder. And Fedora is trying very hard to carve out a methodology for other linux distribution to re-use so we can work together to get a global picture across all distributions of what our userbase looks like. There's no secret sauce in how Fedora count users.
-jef
Member since:2006-11-24
"What are you looking at if you think Linux market penetration is insignificant?"
Sure. I was really only commenting on the comment, well, I commented on, which in turn seemed to find 1 million impressive. However, I am not sure whether that was meant to be ironic or not.
OK, I don't know about 12M Linux installs, but I'll go with that.
So then: if you search for PC sales world-wide numbers, I found 75M for Q4 of 2007, I believe (rounded of for convenience here). Also for convenience, lets assume that is kinda representative and I'll generously round this of by a quarter billion in your favour to make it 1 billion PC sales in the past 4 years (past 16 quarters). Of course, there are vastly more than a billion PCs around.
Now, don't blame me for the maths if I tell you that 12 million out of a billion (which isn't really a billion in the first place) is 1%. But since it is more likely that there are +2 billion PCs actively used out there, that puts your 12 million linux installs at 0.5%. Can you confirm that you agree with that?
Also, who cares about 500 Linux distris out there? Half of them only show up on distrowatch because I made the single download that caused it to be listed there in the first place = forget about most of the ditros, they carry no weight.
0.5-1% is irrelevant, can we agree on that? I have Suse, Ubuntu, PCBSD and Opensolaris here -- that doesn't mean everybody else has, too.
Member since:2006-08-09
Member since:2009-02-25
An AT Internet Institute (formerly Xitimonitor) survey gives Linux a 1.2 % share of web users.
http://www.atinternet-institute.com/en-us/internet-users-equipment/...
I don't know who owns AT Internet Institute or whether they have a marketing agenda of their own. The numbers are based on a very large sample of web traffic, but I don't know if they disclose the sites that are monitored. I think it would be easy to get a bias even in a very large sample by selecting certain types of sites.
Anyway, 1.2 % of web users is tens of millions of users, and it is clearly the most common OS after Windows and Mac OS X. It's not irrelevant by any means, it serves as a demonstration to hardware manufacturers that Linux is a viable and low cost OS. The manufacturers are finally taking notice and starting to offer pre-installed Linux systems.
Critics have said that Linux is a toy, irrelevant, about to be overrun by the next version of Windows etc. etc. for as long as Linux has existed. The installed base of Linux has grown steadily all the while, albeit slowly on the desktop. This is how free software on the desktop tends to work: there is no great redesign followed by a marketing push. Instead, different parts of the technology get better all the time and while it may not look like much at any time, it adds up. The parts are now falling into place at an accelerating speed.
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Member since:
2009-02-26
Fedora, one of the ~500 Linux distributions reports 12M users. Ubuntu has similar numbers. Netbook sales indicate 30% Linux. Some estimates now put Linux installed base at double the OS X installed base. Microsoft has declared their number one competitor to be Linux, not Mac.
What are you looking at if you think Linux market penetration is insignificant? Market share? That's the number of copies of the OS sold. Since Linux is free, it doesn't apply. The numbers you want to look at are the installed base - the number actually in use. Unfortunately, just as with Windows, this can only be estimated. For example, I have a dozen Windows licenses and a couple of OS X licenses, but all machines are really running Linux exclusively (the installed base).