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Linux Foundation's Desktop Linux Survey Results
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Nov 22, 2007 03:37 PM
from the this-one-goes-out-to-all-the-penguins-out-there dept.
from the this-one-goes-out-to-all-the-penguins-out-there dept.
DeviceGuru writes "While the Linux Foundation's third annual desktop Linux survey doesn't officially end until November 30th, the number of daily respondents have shrunk to a trickle and the Foundation is working on analyzing the results. They now have up an early look at the raw data. For starters, almost 20,000 self-selected users filled out this year's survey compared to fewer than 10,000 in 2006's survey. Not surprisingly, the Ubuntu family of Linuxes is the most popular among organizations, at 54.1 percent. This was followed by the Red Hat family — RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux/Fedora/CentOS) — with 50.2 percent. The Novell SUSE group — SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) and openSUSE — came in third, with 35.2 percent."
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No Debian? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:No Debian? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:No Debian? (Score:5, Funny)
[sarcasm]It's okay, Debian's in the Ubuntu family of Linuxes [/sarcasm]
Parent
Re:No Debian? (Score:4, Informative)
"Debian (22.2 percent)"
So looking good...
Parent
Proof enough (Score:3)
Oh well, guess its best to be among the few, than among the many.
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An institutional Gentoo installation would probably have one or two compile/test machines to produce packages, then just install the binary packages on all the production machines. At least that's how Purdue's CS department seems to do it.
Parent is Flaimbait (Score:3)
What are you talking about? It's not like compiling from source is some black art only known to gurus and initiates.
Using an ebuild that's been marked stable in portage is no more risky or unreliable than using an
Re:Proof enough (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you've got the infection backwards. If you're ever having a problem on Linux, 99.999% of the time your best bet is to ask a Gentoo or Slackware user.
Snicker at their elitism, but fact of the matter is your average Gentoo user probably knows 100x more about Linux than your average Ubuntu user.
Parent
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To each it's own. The ones who _know_ Linux are a minority, that's why Ubuntu and the like are on 95% of the corporate machines: because 95% of the "professionals" have no clue.
One's dream is the other's nightmare: If you know it better, you will _prefer_ to have control of everything; if not, you don't want control, you want it to work as it is.
I used to run Slackware at home, but now I lack the time to fiddle with the machine, so Ubuntu or Fedora are more attractive to me now. But it is still
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I love ubuntu. It has everything I need built right in: my hardware is detected right away, it comes with open office, the gimp (which doesn't suck anymore!) a decent mp3 and movie player (why isn't VLC the default?) and loads of games to choose from, and instalation is so easy. it has everything i need right at my fingertips, and its all free.
I've tinkered with other releases in the past
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After all, there's nothing like a distribution which occasionally breaks itself to teach you all about troubleshooting Linux.
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The only thing it measures is hype, and the most interesting fact you can get from the data is that debian users got better things to do than fill out online-surveys. =)
Of course this doesn't mean that the data doesn't correlate with reality, i
URL should be www.linux-foundation.org (Score:5, Informative)
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Bad Link in Orignal Post. (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/ [linuxfoundation.org] is NOT http://www.linux-foundation.org/ [linux-foundation.org]
The first is just a traffic collector page.
The Linux Foundation mentioned in the story is at
http://www.linux-foundation.org/ [linux-foundation.org]
Thats where you will find the article/survey.
"Family"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Von Neumann architectures?
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Server vs. Desktop (Score:5, Interesting)
Is it just me, or is this possibly a misleading statement? Does "more commonly used" just mean more numbers? Or does it mean that organizations with Linux desktops aren't running Linux servers? Or just that they have more desktops than servers? Even if it is the first, I still don't think it means too much, because one organization running a gigantic Oracle database on big iron and Linux is going to probably be using Linux more than another organization running Linux and OpenOffice for word processing on 10 or even 50 desktops.
Year of the Linux desktop (Score:5, Funny)
Links and respondents (Score:5, Informative)
Current results [linux-foundation.org]
The results say the current number of respondents is 10941 (and counting). Where did the figure of 20,000 come from?
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Rounding Error?
Probably related to the logic that has 139.5% of the users reporting in already.
In any case, we certainly are not going to blame these little arithmetical peculiarities on Linux. How about we blame Vista, Internet Explorer, the RIAA, George W Bush, and Intel? Don't worry. Ron Paul, Ubuntu, the second amendment and the free market will pull us all through this li
Not just that.. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Novell downturn? (Score:5, Insightful)
in 2005 Novell/SUSE got 28%
in 2006 Novell/SUSE got 16%
in 2007 Novell/SUSE got 11.7%
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Well, that just means Linux is growing so fast that although Novell keeps gaining new customers, several other distros are growing even faster than that.
Problem (Score:5, Insightful)
A few questions I pose:
1) Why do we want the bloaty, slow, pieces of crap that are windows AVs ported to linux?
2) Why do we want to port these, encouraging turning a blind eye to security and letting the AV do the work(such as it is on windows)?
3) Why not just improve support on say, ClamAV?
What's with linuxfoundation.org? (Score:3, Informative)
Whois shows:
Last Updated On:26-Oct-2007 19:57:38 UTC
Which is not the same day and month as the creation date, so I'm suspecting either someone has taken this domain over or it wasn't legit in the first place (I don't know as I don't think I've ever been there). Maybe check our links before we post them to the front page on
This survey is biased... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm writing from my phone so I won't go in-depth, but two things that bug me the most:
1: It looks like many home users took the survey, but are being categorized as SOHO's
2: At first it looks like the survey adress both desktop and server usage, but then the questions begin assuming repondent are using Linux on the desktop workstations. This isn't the case in my company, but he results to these questions are being used to show Linux desktop penetration.
I also responded to some questions thinking "servers only" but it end up being both servers and workstation. In an organisation with more employees than servers, all running Windows, this obviously change the result!
I'm not a Linux detractor, quite the opposite, but I'm being honest here. When you do surveys, please ask the right questions and make sure anyone responding to the survey won't bias it if the're not the targetted audience. To me this survey says almost nothing...
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There was an original announcement of the survey in the Linux-covering media, and I looked at it but didn't take the survey then, as it seemed only interested in business use. Later, there was additional coverage, asking where all the North American users were, as there had been relatively few such responses to the survey at that point. Most were and still are European, altho the North American response percentage increased from about 10% to
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can't do without apt-get but Ubuntu is going the wrong way (for me)
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Re:%139.5 (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
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Well, I could have believed %100 Since this survey was filled out by linux users, but %139.5 ?!!!
Am I the only one who sees a problem with the math here?
Yes. If you bothered to RTFA:
Linux users are - amazingly - capable of using more than one OS at once. I know this is anathema to those who believe that the only alternative to white is black, and for whom anything less than perfect logical symmetry causes cranial asplosion. But hey, we got into weird territory right fro
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Ubuntu = 2/4 = 50%
Red Hat = 2/4 = 50%
No, it should be just as it was written. It's the percentage of *users* who answered the survey, not the percentage of all answers that were a particular answer.
Given your sample data, ~67% of *users* use each of the operating systems.
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You maybe have three Linux boxen but by the very use of the word "boxen" you already showed you own no common sense so your opinion is moot and ignored.
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Re:It's still not catching on (Score:5, Interesting)
My experiences have been exactly the opposite of yours. I considered 2007 the year of Linux when my wife was hosting a play date for stay at home Moms and their children, I came out of my office for some coffee, and there are 4 stay at home housewives discussing who is running Linux, who is running Windows, and if it was a good idea for the ones running Windows to switch to Linux. That was the defining moment for me to say that Linux is officially mainstream.
As for headaches trying to get simple hardware working, I can only relate the story that I have told many times before... My son did his first, unassisted install of Ubuntu just prior to his second birthday. The only thing I gave him was the CD, a computer, and made sure the hard drive was formatted before he started. As, always, I will accept that he is a genetic mutant that makes his intellect vastly superior to normal humans, if you insist on it, but even if he was as smart as a 6 year old when he was only 1, that still means that Linux is extremely easy to install and use. Of course if it turns out that I am an overly optimistic dad with a child that is only average, then we need to consider whether we can safely have those that are unable to install Ubuntu, out in public without a handler.
Parent
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Seriously, it sounds like you may have a broadcom wireless card - that's a problem that really needs to be fixed somehow. Hopefully you give it (Linux) another chance some time when you have more time. Many of the "command line fixes" are actually easier than tracking down drivers and installing them in XP - once you're familiar with the platform.
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You're right. (Score:4, Insightful)
Is Linux ready as a desktop? Hell yes.
Are all the 3rd party apps necessary for every customer available on Linux? Hell no!
Is that changing day by day, app by app? Yes.
It's only a matter of time. Standard consumer needs are already being met by desktop distrobutions. Before long the application base will increase and fringe cases will be covered. At that point, an OS will actually have to give you a reason (not "all the apps you want only run on our OS!") to spend money on it. Wouldn't that be nice - them having to earn their money.
Parent
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I guess I'll get modded down, but in my last job we were forced to program for Windows because that's what everyone uses.
But we move from C++ to C# and suddenly 95% of our code was cross platform. I think you'll find that the more companies that shift to C#, the more software will start appearing on Linux.
Mono is a good thing. OK you may hate if from a 'freedom' point of view, but it sure enabled my program with freedom to move to Linux...