Gartner will officially announce figures that show Linux has shipped on 5% of all PCs worldwide in 2004. It expects that figure to grow to 7.5% by 2008, but is quick to point out that this is not necessarily a representative figure of the number of Linux PCs being used. The company estimates that perhaps 2% of all PCs shipped worldwide this year will actually be used with Linux, with that figure growing to 3.5% by 2008. Not every PC that ships with a version of Linux continues to run with that, noted Gartner.
5 Percent of all PCs in 2004 shipped with Linux
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And of course the vast majority of Linux PCs out there did NOT ship with Linux, it was installed by the owner, so the actual number of Linux PCs out there must be over 2%. I hope this puts an end to all those clueless people claiming that Linux is on less then 1% of PCs out there. Personally, Id guess at least 4%, probably more.
Brilliant MR wow, I am sure Gartner _must_ have overlooked that possibility. I am sure your personal guess of 4% is much closer a figure than their analysis of 2%.
Most of those 5% are just installing pirated copies of windows on them. Also, many of them are probably used as small servers, not desktops.
PC’s make for inexpensive servers.
Please learn the difference between PCs shipping and PCs in use.
Here’s a revelation that nobody has ever thought of. I bought my PC with Windows on it, and I installed Linux overtop of Windows!
for refusing to ship computers without an OS and causing skued results in the estimation of the popularity of Linux as a result.
— “Please learn the difference between PCs shipping and PCs in use.”
Okay… that was what I was pointing out in my comment…
What matters here is the year-over-year growth of Linux systems shipping. How many percent was that in 2000? 0.1%? So the growth is pretty significant. When Linux hits around 3% of the market for desktops, which numbers indicate it will soon enough, its not a market to ignore anymore by hardware developers, game developers or the ISVs. Which means that Linux will be an even more attractive platform for people to run, as they can expect to pull out the newest game DVD, pop it in their Linux computer and start playing. Currently, Blizzard supports MacOS X at aprox. 3% market share, ID software has since the dawn of time supported multiple platforms.
The interesting bit here, is that for game devs. to support these two platforms at a combined 5-6-7% marketshare, they will have to drop DirectX and XNA – in favor of more open technologies such as OpenGL, SDL, etc. This is an interesting development, if Xbox2 mainly supports XNA directly in the hardware as opposed to OpenGL+SDL or whatever gamedevs decide to use. This _could_ mean two large Microsoft gambles will be lost before they hit the market with full force. Good for divercity, bad for monoculture.
Currently Googles Zeitgeist suggest Windows has about 91% of the market share – 1% Linux, 3% Mac, 5% “Others”. Ofcourse what the “others” are, we dont know for sure, but my guess is its a handfull of BSD machines, and some of the lesser used OSes like RiscOS, QNX, Irix, Solaris, and browsers that choose not to include the OS header.
The growth factor, is whats important, not the still relatively small number of machines shipping.
Anonymous (IP: 217.61.223.—)
I’ve always thoguht that *BSD number should be included with Linux numbers because they are really part of the same thing. I have no attachment to Linux itself. Hell f live dies I’ll go over to one of the BSDs no problem. But since they are all part of the OSS movement I consider it stupid to discount them. After all, how many of us would be terribly disappointed if Linux never got truly accepted but 40% of all desktops had NetBSD on them? Really its the same thing and many people (especially on the desktop) will never dabble in the regions where OS becomes apparent.
Personally, I have a bigger attachment to KDE than to Linux.
I would like recall one quote: ,,Small step for a men…”. Sure, it’s still less than 10%, but when I think about how dose Linux desktop looks alike in 1999, about features of kernel 2.2.x. Now Im using Linux based desktop in work, at home place, on server, on SIMPad. Linux is not ready for everybody. But it’s for me, and Im happy with it. 🙂
Where did your statistic of 0.1% for 2000? 200 was said to be the year of the Linuxdesktop back in 99.
June of 2001 was as far back as I could find stats for in Zeitgeist, but it listed Linux as %1 back then as well.
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/zeitgeist-june.html
The way I see it is that Linux is generally used mostly by IT professionals, and that profession represents a small percentage of the population so growth is likely to remain slow untill Linux expands out of that “niche”.
What about to people who buy a G5 but replace it with Linux and those who buy preinstalled Windows hardware but replace it with Linux?
And we seem to be forgetting dual-booters. Anyway, I hope hardware and software vendors are paying attention. In any case, I believe many of this estimates are deflated.
What do you do for a living Mystilleef?
That is my case, because my PC came with Windows 2000 and now is running Linux (Slackware 10.0), btw, it is running Linux since a long time. ..:-) My brother bought an old Compaq Presario to allow my little nephews to learn how to use computers and I switch the OS from Windows 95 to Slackware 9.1…:-)
>Not every PC that ships with a version of Linux continues to run with that
>noted Gartner
Not every PC/ laptop that ships with a version of Windows continues to run withthat noted Bas
If i buy a PC or laptop its 99% sure it already loaded with Windows.
If always have to wipe out the disks and throw the Win cds out of the window. Still if find 5% or 3.5 of the market a lot.
>Currently Googles Zeitgeist suggest Windows has about 91% of the
>market share – 1% Linux, 3% Mac, 5% “Others”. Ofcourse what the
A lot of Linux computers act a server so they will never be counted by google zeitgeist but do form a good selling market for businesses.
Besides that how good of a counter is Zeitgeist anyway?
I guess after a couple years of paying for Steve Jobs’ hardware tax some people will just dump Mac and move on to Linux. What’s the Mac marketshare at about now, 2%?
>Currently Googles Zeitgeist suggest Windows has about 91% of >the market share – 1% Linux, 3% Mac, 5% “Others”.
Google zeitgeist is by no means a measure of market share, it is simply a means of the number of Google queries one makes. It simply means that Windows users have to search google 2-3 times to find what they want while Linux users know where to find information without using Google.
How did they evaluate the fact that almost ALL PC’s MUST be shipped with Windoze on it (because MS bla bla bla) and that a lot more people than they think just re-format the disk to install Linux (or even install dual boot) without just screaming it lound ??? How do they count dual booting systems they don’t even know about.
“LINUX ??? WE JUST USE IT” (I am going to trademark this sentence
)))) … who amongst the users community really CARE about that kind of figures ???
Man, this Gartner “thing” is just plain NON RELEVANT to existing situation.
Their (and other alike compagnies) “studies” are just impossible to perform in fact due
1) The mandatory “tax” to MS with every sold PC (that tax is called Windows for those who were wondering)
2) AND to the possibility of the users to do whatever they want with their PC just after they left the shop.
Even in the coporate world thios is relevant to NOTHING because:
1) because previous points 1) and 2) are also valid.
2) there is no point 2)
Statistics and numbers will always say what you want them to say: your point of view of the situation.
Keep that in mind people.
That arguement is so flawed. How many Windows users use MSN, excite, yahoo, AOL keyword blah etc. compared to Linux users?
I am not saying the Zeitgeist numbers are spot on, but I would be reluctant to say Windows users use Google more often.
Even when sites have built in search engines I rarely use them preferring instead “site:domain.com search terms -crap” on Google’s engine.
Google hold about 70% of the total market share, and almost the entire other 30% is probably made up of Windows users.
i always laugh at the posters claiming that dual booters or hobby linux users are in such vast numbers to change the statistics of marketshare
hello, we are talking about MILLIONS of pcs shipped every year. the volume of desktops that dell and hp ship with XP for business dwarfs all those dual booters and vmware users out there.
Also, the comment about mac users dumping mac for linux? come one give me a break. the path of least resistance is Windows. Why migrate from mac, already a niche market to another niche os with flaky support. I am all for variety in computing, but let’s be real. linux is not a mainstream os for desktop use.
I guess after a couple years of paying for Steve Jobs’ hardware tax some people will just dump Mac and move on to Linux. What’s the Mac marketshare at about now, 2%?
I seriously doubt that a mac user would go with Linux.. Even if they would switch, they would switch to Windows XP. You can actually see the other migration of “linux user switching to mac” at a lot of open source conventions. Lot’s of powerbooks and ibooks, very often having OSX installed, not a PPC-linux distro.
I went from Linux to OSX. With X11 installed, I have Open Office and gimp et cetra. You can still play with open source software, but you don’t have to wrestle the system. Plug and play actually works!!!
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html
It’s true it’s still stuck at 1%. And look at the browser stats… I too would think there are many more Linux desktops around but I’m sure that’s clouded by the fact that I use it so much more now.
Mmm I belong to the “other” group with my BeOS
Always nice not to belong to nor Windows, nor Linux.
Mm, yes.. amazingly enough, with my Amiga I’d be counted as “other” too. Makes you kind of wonder what the ‘other’ consists of. Would be nice to see a breakdown of those 5% cause it’s millions of machines out there that doesn’t run to linux, mac or windows..
mindboggling..
Many systems, including my old Dell laptop, came with a version of Windows installed that was shoved aside for a Linux installation. It’s called the Microsoft tax, and we have only discussed it for years.
That knife cuts both ways.
tells me that if 5% is shipped with linux and no-one of my many friends who use linux even had that as a possibility when they bought their comp, the percentage of linux users out there is more likely to be far above these 5%.
Really, linux has been growing rapidly lately and in my near friendship (approx. 40ppl), over the last two years 12 of these have linux installed and use it for everyday stuff having windows only for games, and 4 of us have _only_ linux installed playing the games that’s available (ut2004, nwn and savage).
Last year I installed Lindows on every PC in my house. My mothers, my brothers, my roommates and also my girlfriends.
So far non of them have cried “Give me my Windows back” My mother for instance never had a PC before, Lindows sells what they call Webstations (Pretty nice low end PC’s with no hard drive that can run their bootable version of Lindows) So I bought one for her with a flat 15″ monitor for $250 USD, slapped a hard drive in it and installed Lindows. No problem. She loved it. She types her letters in Star office and surfs the web with Opera.
See versions of Linux like Lindows/Linspire can go over well with people who never had or don’t have a computer. For instance, my brother had a Windows 98 SE emachine. Kept crashing in 98, too slow to put on XP or 2000, perfect for Lindows. Installed Lindows last summer. He has not had a serious problem since. For a while he would laugh at the name Lindows etc. BUT a funny thing happened, I installed Crossover office and Wine X and he started playing games on it. Then his friends came over and wanted to know what he was using and why it looked neater then Windows. Next thing you know I was setting them up with Lindows. And just to keep everyone happy I got Win4lin and put on every machine in case there were somethings that they had to do in Windows (Like run Turbo Tax or something).
The point here is that you can get people to use Linux if you show it to them and show them it’s useable. Useable does not mean give lessons. I didn’t give lessons, I hooked everything up, showed that I could get on the web and left it at that.
The parents of the kids who I moved to Lindows (5 in all) still thank me for getting rid of the headache that came along with hearing about new Windows worms and viruses everyday. The cost of buying new computers to run Windows XP. And the stupid spyware that was killing their Windows 98 and ME installs.
With grass roots efforts like mine, Linux and Linux based OSes will continue their upward growth!
I’ll make one up… uh… 21.8532% of windows computers were formatted and Linux was installed!
I’m an expert! Honest!
What exactly constitutes a Linux or Windows or Mac user? A lot of people seem to think that people can only use one platform. I dual-boot Windows and Linux…have boxes running various flavors of BSD, have QNX installed on a machine, etc., etc. So where would I fit into these statistics. The fact is, I would say that at least 75% of Linux users also utilize another platform (mostly Windows, sometimes Mac, sometimes BSD, sometimes BeOS, whatever).
No marketshare/mindshare study I have seen takes dual- and triple- booters into account. The total percentages of Linux/Windows/Mac/Other users should exceed 100% in an accurate study. Of course since Linux is seldom purchased, traditional means of studying this will never apply.
the facts so far
5% of the PCs actually selling have Linux installed
1% of the Google hits due to Linux systems
could mean, that most Linux PCs are used in company intranets.
Carsten
Let’s buy a Linux x86 machine then after format your hard drive to put a pirated version on WinXP.
It can explain theses Gartner stats.
Since practically everyone that uses Linux uses the internet in some way, why can we not make an effort and set up a website where users can let themselves be counted and tell how many machines they have running… August 25 (when it is Open Source day or something) would be a perfect day to do this. The most difficult part would be in letting Linux’ers know about this action, which can be done by community forums, websites, newsgroups, chat&email to friends, …
make it so that a vote counts only one time. Even if there are a lot of people that do not respond, it will still give an indication of the ‘minimum’ number of PC’s running Linux. And allow the persons to stay anonymous in order to lower the barrier
i always laugh at the posters claiming that dual booters or hobby linux users are in such vast numbers to change the statistics of marketshare
I agree. I saw a comment over on Slashdot by some poster that said the 2% number had to be off, he currently has 10 computers running Linux. This guy doesn’t seem to realise his 10 computers account for 0.0000000001% of the computers in the world.
5% “Others”
Of course, all BeOS machines. That’s clear.
And the Linuxes that are shipped with PCs are crap. You cannot motivate anyone to switch with this shit. I went into a store recently (in Austria), there was this el cheapo Athlon XP with “Suse Linux 9.0 eval”. At that time, Suse 10 was already out. I asked the salesdroid what the specs of the machine were. He answered “Athlon 2200, 30 GB Hard disk, 128 MB, Sound, USB, network”. I Answered that those were no specs and that i wanted to know the brands and chipsets of the components. He was irritated and couldn’t help me. So i asked what the “eval” meant and why they were shipping an outdated version of the operating system. He said that all this stuff would be very complicated and that it would be insecure to use a system that everyone has access to, he recommended to get Windows XP Home extra crippled OEM Edition for a special price of just another 100 Euros. To my dismay he escaped when i felt compelled to start a discussion about the security of FOSS in comparison to certain other operating systems.
So the Salesdroid was gone and I used the opportunity to have a look at the system. As i expected, hardware was all quite legacy (x86! no, i mean even in comparison): USB 1.1, SDRAM… But the operaqting system was worse: When Suse 9.0 was released, YaST was still proprietary, so of course it was missing, and they apparently didn’t bother much to configure something by hand. X server was running at 800×600 in thousands of colours, seemingly they were to stupid to change the amount of RAM reserved for the onboard video (Not mentioning that ZAxisMapping was of yourse disabled). Ethernet was a Realtek 8139, not configured at all, the had tried to configure the onboard sound with OSS, but apparently didn’t succeed because there was just static coming out. And the best thing was that there was already a 20 GB FAT partition to install your pirated copy of Windows on.
The next day i fired off an email to the company, saying that if they claim to ship an OS with the computer, i would like to see it in a usable state, and some real specs wouldn’t be bad too. After one week i got a reply saying that they were sorry that i wasn’t happy with their offerings, but those were the specs they’d got (meaning they don’t even know what they#re selling) from their suppliers, and that (of course explained in much more polite phrases) i should fuck off and stop trying to convince the stupid masses of blokes not to buy their stuff.
What a different experience at the local Apple retailer: You walk in, get offered a cup of coffee, and the dealer asks you what you’re interested in. At the time they were throwing away the last G3 iBooks for half of the list price, i say “I know about computers, just tell me about this particular one”, and he doesn’t start to burble at me for half an hour, he just says “It’s a G3, so no altivec, 128 RAM, CD-ROM.”. And they gave those things away with Mac OS X 10.3.4 (properly configured), even though tha machines had been delivered with 10.2.8.
So are the Linux pre-installed options meant to be taken seriously? I know there are sites where you can order nearly any PC with nearly any Linu distro or BSD flavor pre-installed, but these cost more than a normal one with Windows tax.
i am one atm, currently using XP Pro and Suse 9.1.
i would use linux all the time if the games were available.
i will install UT2k4 and NWN on SUSE, but what about Rome: Total War, or Halflife 2, or the Operation Flashpoint series?
the other annoying thing is that i would consider myself a competant XP user (don’t laugh), whereas with linux i am very much a n00b, but i guess that will change with practice.
The question of what about people that bought a pc shipped with windows but put linux on it. Think about it, where do you think the 2% in use comes from…. in the past almost 100% of PCs shipped with windows. So one would assume they have some statistical basis for that figure. When you think of how many PCs have been sold over the years all with windows of some form or another, 2% is actually pretty good.
The problem, I have learned, is that commercial software on Linux completely bombs, maybe because of zealots, or the fact that of the 3% of PC users on Linux, maybe only 20% of that 3% actually plays a game on Linux vs using it for a server or someone who has no interest in games.
Mac users, are used to paying for software as well
It would be nice to see more cross platform stuff, it would mean more Mac games too!, but I don’t see it happening to soon.
“there was this el cheapo Athlon XP with “Suse Linux 9.0 eval”. At that time, Suse 10 was already out.”
Last time I looked Suse 9.1 had just come out a couple of months ago. You must be living in a time warp. There is no Suse 10 and won’t be for quite some time.
The reason why you get linux on el cheapo is because MS has a strangle hold on the big vendors. They sell Linux and MS ups the price of XP on them. Simple. No one wants to lose their core business which is Windows right now.
As far as gaming goes it’s just a matter of time. People act like things are going to happen over night. Wine X works very well with Windows games for now so it’s easy to enjoy games on Linux. I do it all the time. Once more regular users get on Linux (Which will happen) then more companies will make apps for Linux. Right now most of the people using Linux are not the kind of people who HAVE to use MS office cause they know nothing else or HAVE to use photoshop etc.
Also if you REALLY must use Windows you can run Win4lin on Linux, install Windows 98 SE or ME and play tons of games, use almost all windows apps etc. No problem.
People should just say “Hey I am a Windows dude and I don’t like Linux” instead of giving old arguments and lame excuses.
Not to call names. But between DOS and Windows XP people seem to have gotten real dumb and real lazy. I mean if a user has to open the console, type SU and enter then dot forward slash the file name dot sh to install a program they act like the world has come to an end. “Oh my god I actually have to think and type! Wooo too much for me.”
For example I worked with Novell for quite some time. All command line. My boss to make things easier desided to go to NT cause it was sooooo simple, could pay us techs almost nothing and a 6th grader could make NT domains. Later Windows 2000 came out with Active Directory, similar to Novell NDS. And guess what? A lot of IMPORTANT commands like the command to update GPO’s from the domain etc have to be typed! OH HORROR. Now you have to think again. A few of the techs I know fell out of the business cause they couldn’t get it. What a shame.
because it would be interesting to see those numbers. I am willing to bet that the US installed base for Linux and OS X is each closer to 15% combined or higher.
“because it would be interesting to see those numbers. I am willing to bet that the US installed base for Linux and OS X is each closer to 15% combined or higher.”
I doubt it, for OS X it’s higher but for Linux I’d imagine it’s lower.
I’m gonna say half that “other” category is probably linux. Besides, you all are forgetting opera users. Doesn’t opera allow you to tell it you are using IE on Windows? I think you can actually change it in mozilla too, but no one does.
>Also if you REALLY must use Windows you can run Win4lin on Linux, install Windows 98 SE or ME and play tons of games, use almost all windows apps etc. No problem.
How good is Win4Lin’s DirectX support? Last I heard it was only “basic” support and didn’t provide any 3D hardware acceleration.
I actually know people that did that “because they had to buy an OS”. There are people that completely switch from Windows to Linux but I don’t think there are millions of people doing that (yet).
Linux is getting popular but I think some people are overhyping its popularity. Then again, I guess it depend on where you live. For example, I only have two friend that are running Linux… and they’re running it in a dual-boot setup where MS Windows runs most of the time. Okay, I have another friend that runs Linux on its server but it was mostly setted up by me… I also have a friend that runs OS/2.
However, I suppose Linux is more popular in Europe.
Linux is getting a higher use. I wonder if Microsoft will ever make Office for linux.
You don’t need to wait for Gartner or anybody else to tell you that Linux is growing. It is. By they must have the necessary caveats, must they not? Because if it turns out that we are already shipping on 5% of the PCs and that tons of installations are being done on old PCs, my, my, what must be our “marketshare”? Fuck, marketshare, what’s our mindshare? Who’s moving and shaking the technology world? Who’s created the best computing community in history?
Think about the nonsense that they are spreading. That someone would go through the trouble of ordering Linux on a PC to end up using something else. I don’t think so!
People who order Linux know what they want: Freedom. They want community and the ability to learn and share. Will you join the revolution? Or better yet, start own of your own. Blast that Windows PC to pieces and put a nice Linux box in you life.
Recently I took a trip to Micro Center and I noticed they had 1 Lindows box. I think it was a 2.6 GHz P4 made by a low end generic company. The system was running Linspire and cost more than the Windows system sitting next to it. I quickly looked over the system and it does look like a very low end OEM put it together with the cheapest parts available. Hopefully a company will start making high quality preinstalled Linux computers sometime in the near future.
Thanks for your good work. I and others appreciate it. You may want to turn your friends to your loal Linux user group and if there isn’t one around, start one of your own.
If I found a company with a preinstall of one of the above, I would very much consider purchasing a linux/bsd installed system.
Other than that, I don’t find a preinstall of fruity looking, one-off pseudo linux very attractive.
You have to be realistic. There are tons of business PCs that are running Windows and always will because of proprietary sotware programs they rely upon. My company has thousands of PCs that were just upgraded from Win98 because that was what our database would run on. We just recently went to Win2K. Then there are a large number of PCs out there belonging to the grandmas and grandpas or other non tech savvy people. They are going to run the Windows that came on their computer. My inlaws have 98 still on theirs. All it is used for is to play Hoyle card games. So you start out with the majority of the current installed base will not change ever. All linux can do is try to keep eating away at the edges. This isn’t a short term thing. We have to be looking at the long run. But here MS is becoming more active in getting into the schools to win the hearts and minds of the youngsters. So since linux is based upon volunteers all of the current linux base needs to try to get involved in helping at schools or libraries. It will take a great deal of evangelism to ever get above 5% in the installed base.
They just want a software package for business and surfing the net.
Think people.
Apple people don’t need microsoft. They are doing fine
Linux needs OEMS to install their os so the masses can get used to linux.
Hoping BillionaireBill’sOS will have security problems and crashes to move people to linux is not reality.
This is the problem with linux. First it’s just a kernel and there is no real business pushing it(oems).
Linux distros need to organize so software is easily installed and have deals with computer makers to have it installed.
Last time I looked Suse 9.1 had just come out a couple of months ago. You must be living in a time warp. There is no Suse 10 and won’t be for quite some time.
I just checked, you are right. I guess i swapped the version numbers with Mandrake (Mandrake 9.1 is from winter 2002/2003, right?). But it was Suse. Most likely it was 8.1 eval, because it was outdated.
How good is Win4Lin’s DirectX support? Last I heard it was only “basic” support and didn’t provide any 3D hardware acceleration.
Why don’t you use Cedega?
But here MS is becoming more active in getting into the schools to win the hearts and minds of the youngsters.
“More active” is very nicely said, actually MS acts very aggressively. Real example from my little country (sorry about my english, btw):
Two months ago MS offered to schools (and they agreed) of our second biggest town (about 100,000 citizens) leasing of 500 XP+MSO2003 for about $1500 per year, this means three dollars per user per year. What do you think, will these schools install/use linuxes after that? I don’t believe.
Numbers can always be changed/modified. The 2% though is pretty accurate. I say that as a currently running poll on what operating systems people are using at home has that percentage as well. Forget what the machines sell with, what people are using is the true judge. For the curious, the numbers are as follows:
7190 People Polled:
95% Windows
2% Apple
2% Linux
1% Other
This means that out of 7190 people:
6830.5 people use Windows
143.8 people use Mac OS
143.8 people use Linux
71.9 people use Other OS
It appears that Apple and Linux operating systems are currently holding the same market share as far as users go tied at 2%.
— subjective opinion —
where I live, we have started getting linux classes available for those who want (and out of 200 people my class of 30 did), 2 more high schools I know are planning and implementing dual-boot with debian/XP, I myself have held speaches at a few occasion and so far those who have chosen to try out a pre-installed gentoo system have been satisfied.
among my friends I know of at least 25 who run linux today compared to zero who ran it half a year ago.
I am occasionally asked to help people make the switch, and I’ve had lots of work due to this.
So I’m saying that they can try to tell me that we hold 2% of the marketshare even though 5% of newly sold computers have linux pre-installed, but that’s not what I see.
in real life when I ask my classmates (going a electicity/it education) it’s undoubtly more than 10-15% linux users.
for you who wanted to make them count themselfs, have you looked at counter.li ?
and for you who said we need companies behind to grow, know that IBM plans next-gen bios to release as open-source and they have marketed, sold and got profit out from linux for about a year now (perhaps more, don’t know of earlier).
and IBM isn’t alone, there are more big companies, and many, many governments are taking a stand and is either shifting all their computers to linux or recommends their people to.
I believe you who said they sold out-dated misconfigured linux comps, most likely to be marketing from MS side:
give the people linux, but make them dislike it. (since the staff knew nothing about it they are very unlikely to have taken the decision themself).
finally, mac and linux/bsd will keep growing at the expense of windows until longhorn arrives, and if longhorn stops their vendor-lockins thus letting people free they will see that things work better than ever and will stay, if not I anticipate the end of the MS monopoly.
“Linux is getting popular but I think some people are overhyping its popularity. Then again, I guess it depend on where you live. For example, I only have two friend that are running Linux… and they’re running it in a dual-boot setup where MS Windows runs most of the time.”
This is also the case for me and most of my buddies as well. We know how to keep our computers secure and virus free, so why switch? Windows is just as stable and we dont have to deal with emulators and such to use our Windows programs. I have Fedora 2 dual booting on the laptop, so I do boot into that every once in a while. Mostly just to dink around and learn Linux since might be worthwile to know. Otherwise I spend 95 to 99 percent of my time in Windows. I have other friends who have tried dual booting Linux, only to be single booting Windows a few days later.
We have ditched windows for good at work all out 300 pcs are running linux only and all servers run Linux or UNIX . Java apps saved our life its portability is 100% .
I am not sure who is counting that.
That’s good news but I hope you don’t think your company is representative of the market. In fact, 300 PCs is antshit in the total number of computers worldwide. There are probably some places where they are running 1000 Macs or others where the OS of choice is something like IRIX, QNX…
For something that many GNU/Linux users claim to be on par with Windows XP, in performance, and even a few are as far to go as to suggest as stability; this is not good enough, especially sense the product is largely availible to download for free.
*userbility not stability
I’d take these figures with a grain of salt. This is the same Gartner which claimed to have seen the SCO evidence and it was solid and Linux now belonged to SCO. The same Gartner who has been FUDing for Microsoft every chance they get for the last few years. This is just more FUD masquerading as a “study”.
the problem is that those who move to Linux tend to move back in a year or so because of the frustration level of having to tinker with the system.
true, my first attempt back in 98 I did move back to windows, however it’s a matter of choosing a system designed to be tinkered with or having to tinker something not meant to be tinkered with.
I tried red hat back then, and have a few more times since, everytime I’ve given up because I didn’t learn and I didn’t get the point of it more than that it was cool and everyone else said it’d be so much “better”.
then last year a new classmate suggested I’d try gentoo when I mentioned it’s too troublesome to learn.
Gentoo is a distribution designed for _super-users_, but I trusted him and gave it a try. two miserable attempts and one successful 3 day installation later I had come to understand how to solve my own problems finally realizing that linux is a os which gives you lots of rope to hang yourself with.
now, more than a year later me and my friend whom I’ve given a gentoo-linux installation are still happy with it and use their windowses only for games or don’t have windowses.
worth pointing out though is that all these people come regulary to me asking how to do things since they didn’t learn what I did during the installation, but it’s just a matter of time before they re-install themself and gets the hang of it.
Also not included is all of us that build our pc’s and install linux of choice
now throw that into the equation and see how much difference that makes. Schools are basically teaching A+ now so who can say that kids arent building and installing linux 
I was don’t mean the gartner stats… I am talking about the Google stats.
They have to be completely wrong or totally made up. I am not here to defend the market share of Linux, but how can Google say that 51% of its users are using XP ?
The majority of PCs that have ever been sold is still running Windows 98. I think the last census showed 57% running win98 and only 28% running XP
Can someone please explain to me how all these millions of corporate users running legacy hardware all managed to suddenly install XP on their machines ?
OR
Is it simply that people who have been using their PCs for a while know a better search engine… like dogpile.com for example ???
“I guess after a couple years of paying for Steve Jobs’ hardware tax some people will just dump Mac and move on to Linux.”
Possible.
“What’s the Mac marketshare at about now, 2%?”
Hoho, that doesn’t say everything. If a 10 million new computers are there [and i’ll evade the dual-boot and multiple-PC and all other arguments which make me believe Zeitgeist is far from an accurater statistic] then say 0,5% of those people buy a Mac with OSX. The marketshare lowers because of that, but does that mean Apple is doing bad business? Fact [if we believe ZG]: they sold 5.000 new computers. Bad or good business, i do not know, but the marketshare itself [again evading the ZG unaccaracy] says little if not nothing about it Apple is doing well or not.