“WebSideStory, Inc., the world’s leading provider of outsourced e-business intelligence services, today reported that despite much hype and expectation in recent years, Linux has failed to gain market share from Microsoft and Apple operating systems. As of December 17, 2001, Linux held a global usage share of only 0.24 percent, according to WebSideStory’s StatMarket. This compares with Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Macintosh operating systems, which hold a combined global usage share of more than 98 percent. For almost three years, Linux usage share has fluctuated between .2 and .3 percent, with no substantial growth. Usage share is the percentage of Internet surfers that are using a particular operating system.” Read the rest of the press release.For comparison’s sake, here are the OSNews OS statistics, for December 14th (which was a ‘normal’ day) and today’s stats (however do not forget that since December 17th we have been constintently linked by most MacOS-related sites because of Scot Hacker’s ‘Tales of a BeOS Refugee’ article we host – resulted in a 300,000+ page views in two days time!). Statistically, we have observed that while OSNews attracts ‘power users’ and people who are interested the alternative OS offerings, Windows-surfed OSNews readers do outnumber the rest of our readers, but not by the large margins StatMarket claims.
Linux More Bark Than Bite With Web Users
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Those few penguins out there (the 0.24%) sure do make a lot of noise, though.
Linux is too much of an untamed (and buggy because of the GUIs) beast for the desktop. Using Linux on the desktop is like trying to take your cat on a camping trip (we tried); you can’t make a cat be a dog.
However, I wouldn’t serve a web site on Windoze. Even the small companies I used to work for that used NT for LAN servers had lots of trouble (funny how our customers using NetWare almost never had problems). Use the right tool for the job.
According to the article this was measured by hitbox.
Linux browsers being more secure, and linux users wiser, I doubt many
accepts ALL incoming cookies. I for one find that hitbox is often the first to
the way to the automatic denial of cookie in konqueror. On top of that, you can’t
really be sure linux browser sends OS-details in their user-agent string. And BOTH
these requirements must be fullfilled to be succesfully counted..
So this measurement is inherintly misleading for linux numbers!!
Still I don’t suspect the real number is more than 2-3%
I am sure that most of the Linux browsers do fullfil the requirements, but I do know one browser that does not. In the version of BeOS Pe/PRO 5.0.0, NetPositive did not return the OS string. I had to literally shout to my husband to convience him to fix it (back then he thought it was not an important bug/overlook, and it was not his job to fix it either, but still… :o) So, unless you are running BeOS 5.0.0, the OS string shows as “Unknown” and from what I can see from the OSNews and BeNews stats, still a lot people have not upgraded to 5.01 or 5.03 of BeOS.
I thought all the hype surrounding Linux (or at least most of it) was in the serverspace. I personally am running a box with Windows 2K, a box with BeOS 5 Pro, and a box with Linux — but the Linux box is a server. It’s my most reliable box, and all of my network traffic goes through it, but I don’t use it for the Desktop.
What I’m saying is this: saying “despite much hype and expectation in recent years, Linux has failed to gain market share from Microsoft and Apple operating systems” implies that the type was centered around Linux being a killer desktop OS — something that very few Linux advocates believe the OS is good at.
So, what is a dildo compatible browser?
Latest findings indicate that it is MacOS 8.x with Netscape 2 and 3.
Yeah – – for all whining and moaning I here, one would think half the desktops in the world used linux.
My favourite sayings are like: “Linux is the BEST! I only use Windows to surf the net and play games.”
And you use Linux to do what pray tell?
I use Windows to do nothing (at home, can’t help work). I use Linux to tinker with, hoping that one day it’ll be worth a crap (before BeOS becomes unusable due to lack of support). Alas, distro after distro I’m quickly losing hope. It sucked when I first tried it in ’96 and it still sucks now. The stagnated desktop userbase is of little surprise to me.
Statistics shamistics. Linux isn’t going away and it’s my most efficient system to work in. Gnome and KDE continue on for the fun of it. Look to server statistics if you want to see growth, but yeah – desktop does kinda suck.
It took them ten years to get this far and the only thing I can say against Linux is that it moves slowly.
I’ll be moving my girlfriend’s mother from BeOS to Linux Mandrake sometime soon. Considering her needs are word processing, database, web and email – she’ll be happy enough (no flame please, but I’m moving because there’s no future in BeOS and there is one in Linux/BSD/MacOSX/Windows).
That said, there’s a market for a BSD/Mandrake distro.
yeah but still some of us actually fully use linux. like me. the only reason i actually go into my windows partition (which is probably once a month) is to play a game i couldn’t jimmy rig with wine. and when i’m at school (can’t help that)
i hear alot that people say that linux is only the “tinkering operating system” for people who live in their parents basement. but really i’ve found linux to be the most useful operating system i’ve ever used. i’ve gotten so many more projects done with linux than i ever had with windows. also it’s a realiable operating system, compared to windoze or mac classic.
So, what is a dildo compatible browser?
Like it or not, the only viable desktop OS for x86 computers are Windows and BeOS.
Near as I’ve ever been able to tell WebSiteBoring has a big problem selling the Statmarket data in bulk because it both dull and useless. While information about how users interact with YOUR site is important, and comparative data for your direct competition is at least interesting, data about how 40m Windows users interact with “Dave’s Cat Photo Site” is useless.
The basic things you can find out from their expensive reports are the same things those reports said when they were free, the web just doesn’t change that much now that the revolution is over. Average people run a 2 year old version of Windows and use Internet Explorer. Many people still don’t have 24 bit RGB graphics, and they really do try to surf @ 800×600 or less.
The big flaw in Statmarket is HitBox. None of the best quality information resources that I’m aware of use HitBox, and even if one out of the hundred or so sites I visit on a regular basis did use HitBox my browser (and millions like it) are configured to hand over the minimum possible to these ‘orrible privacy invading foreign icons. In fact for a while I ran Moz with such icons completely disabled, making me totally invisible to HitBox even if I happened to read a site which uses it.
So what is HitBox measuring on those 125 000 sites? People reading about their favourite unsigned band, pictures of pets, a hundred thousand 2nd rate or 3rd rate sites. I’ve no problem with them existing, but who cares who reads them? Only the owners. Everyone else should take Statmarket figures with a large quantity of salt, and instead get their own site logs to read.
Seeing as I’ve been using Linux (Mandrake) as my “desktop OS” for some time, I find these comments, well, dated. When I first tried Linux about 4 years ago, I never even got it installed. When I tried again with Mandrake 8.0, I found Linux to be, not only viable, but a competant “desktop OS.” I’ve found nothing that I do missing from Linux. Nor did I have and problems installing Linux. Everything works just fine, from installation on. Maybe mine is a special case, but I would not count myself anything but a Linux-newbie. I have not gone back to windows for anything.
Guru I am not, but neither am I “counted” by the likes of hitbox. Not in my windows days, nor in my Linux days. That is a preference of mine, but maybe I should let myself be counted. Nah.
Notice they didn’t qualify one time except for the quote at the bottom that this article is only discussing Linux desktops and more specifically browsers? Linux is winning more that people know against Microsoft but, it’s in the server space.
What’s so amusing is that the same architecture that Microsoft is haging their belt on is the one hamstringing them, Intel. If Intel had a hardware architecture that scaled like Sun or HP, then Microsoft would have more of a credible lead in the market.
Linux is doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to IBM and others, it’s grabbing the low hanging fruit and planting seeds. Remember when Microsoft was content with just the desktop? Now that they have to answer to Wallstreet, they are leaving behind the foundation they built their company on and in doing so, they take the same risks as all the other players, loosing market share in mainstream computing segments.
Microsoft’s licensing and pricing structures will be their undoing, not the technology.
Opera for BeOS is not even counted. I know I have visited the site at least once a day, and I see no Opera 3.62 anywhere! I’m sure that I am being counted as MSIE.
BBjimmy host of http://forums.delphiforums.com/T_P_T_B/start“
Opera for BeOS is not even counted. I know I have visited the site at least once a day, and I see no Opera 3.62 anywhere! I’m sure that I am being counted as MSIE.
BBjimmy host of http://forums.delphiforums.com/T_P_T_B/start“>
“E-business intelligence”, I think that says worlds about the validity of the statements based on web browser hits data. Linux and BSD being used as servers wouldn’t show up in the statistics for the simple reason that you wouldn’t be web browsing from a server. Yet they are still OSes the last time I looked. Also not counted would be all those NetWare 2.x, 3.x 4.x, Sun, IBM mainframes/OS400, Vaxes, HP-UX/IX, etc. servers which I’m sure are OSes or NOSes and are most likely NOT connected to the Internet. Ooops, I almost forgot about PDAs, cell phones, PS2s and PLCs (Programable Logic Controllers) and lots and lots of printers and other embeded OSes.
I’m using SuSE Linux at the moment and the Konqueror web browser. I usually use BeOS 5.03 and Netpositive but the lack of “javascript” support forces me to use Linux because I have made my home Microsoft free. I made the decision two weeks ago to remove Microsoft products from my home because I really don’t want to use convict ware products. As far as Apple goes, I don’t want to use a system made by one company with total control over both the hardware and software at twice the price. OS X while pretty, isn’t worth the cost. So I guess I’ve just reduced MS’s OS share by another 0.000000001%
J.P.
End users don’t have to learn Linux to use it for the desktop. I’ve been studying how to use StarOffice for Linux and it’s just amazing. It’s like a gui version of emacs (i.e., it can do everything). You could easily set up a Linux box with StarOffice (or OpenOffice if you prefer) and your end users would never have to touch Linux per se. They could do all of their web-surfing, word-processing, database stuff, etc. in StarOffice. My only complaint with it right now is that the Javascript in it sucks. Other than that it’s pretty good.
I also switched 2 weeks ago from windows to linux (kde). And i can do anything i want, using WineX to run my windows game, using startOfficxe ifor wordprocessing & X-chat for my irc chats. I”m very happy
And people who say desktop sux, don’t know shit about it. Multiple desktops rock 
But it’s true compiling / installing can be a hell sometimes, but that will become better, i’m sure
the forum users on this site seem to have a very pro-BeOS slant; dispropotionate to the general computer-user-population, I’d guess.
Anyhow, I am generally a linux fan, for personal general stuff like jabber. For me, the strength of Windows is not the OS but MS Office. The apps that find their fans in the other desktop OSes (linux, BeOS, Macs etc) are generally niche apps, not mainstream office automation stuff. The biggest problem for the maturity of the Linux desktop, IMO, is the fragmentation and duplication between Gnome and KDE. That is one of the reasons that Linux moves so slowly, and that is a shame.
Some results from the research done by the city of Turku:
short term recommendation: switch to OpenOffice before the end of year 2003
long term recommendation: switch to Linux
Researchers predict other European cities to follow.
Read more here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/23470.html
So, I quess Linux is not that far from the desktop.
The full report is nice to read… if you know finnish.
-aboxb
Yeah, imagine that. A “geek” news site that posts significant information about OS’s other than Linux (contrast with slashdot) attracting BeOS users? I find that hard to believe!
If you want to read posts “dispropotionate” towards Linux try slashdot, linux.org etc. Where worthy BeOS, OS/2, Amiga etc. news is brushed under the carpet, in fear that Linux may not be the 1st/best/fastest at something. If Linux users weren’t so pig-forward, and “geek” sites weren’t over-ran with obnoxious pro-linux posters you would find more diversity promenent on all web boards. If I have an opinion that pro-anything-but-linux and post it on Linux.org or slashdot.org its ripped to death, no matter how polite the post was or how true it may be. I find most the posters on this site “dispropotionate” towards nothing, save the occasional lost slashdot-drone.
Slashdot linked to an http://lowendmac.com/musings/01/1219.html“>interesting on Low End Mac.
theran
You can have multiple desktops on windows to. Theres a program that does it. I forget the name of it and i’m currently 150 miles from my computer. But if you look it is out there. Yes Multi desktops is nice. Though in XP i find my self not using it as much since MS got the desktop working nice with the being able to see all the windows for a program in one tab type thing (much like you could do from the deskbar in beos).
I find it sad that BeOS was so low on this sight. Though i to formated it out recently along with Linux and QNX, BeOS will go back on sometime. Linux will not. This servey may be off but i don’t think its very much off. I would find anything over 1 percent for it to be way to high. Those who say for a small group they make alot of noise i think are looking in the right direction. If you didn’t read slashdot you would barely know about linux. They really should just rename them selve Slashlinux*$$^&*($dot.org