Linux On the Desktop: 0.24 Percent?

Canyon Rat writes: "According to this story, less than a quarter of a percent of desktop users have adopted Linux. The survey was based on web surfers so it may be accurate." Anne Onymus adds a link to an interesting reaction over at lowendmac.com.

The problem is..

[Rosonowski]

The problem with a web survey is that websites are targeted, much like television, to a specific audeince. That audience is more or less likely to be a windows/linux user, and as such, the results are likely flawed. Kind of like if you tried to do an OS survey on slashdot. Linux would have a much higher rating, would it not?

Never Trust...

[Over_and_Done]

A survey that does not reveal its methodology. Until you know how they did it, how can you really trust the results? Does anyone how the survey was conducted?

Here we go...

[forgoil]

I bet that there will be at least 100 posts saying that you can't trust this kind of data, that it's complete bollocks and yada yada yada Linux is so good it will for Bill to eat Linus used shorts.

Please don't care about that article, it's not interesting really. It's not really news. We all know what we use ourselves (XP and linux in my case) and I suggest that our time should be spent on something better than surveys and such things.

Writing serious and useful documentation for linux for instance, and putting it into XML and making it readable and searchable in different applications (such as the exellent Konqi, the only other browser besides IE I would ever dream of using). Go do that instead of reading all the pointlessness that this news consists of.

Lynx will never show up on these stats

[andyr]

Since the stats are gathered in one place, a hitcounter, my lynx-browsing will never be tallied, as I do not download those little GIFs. Even under Galeon [sourceforge.net] I flag it to not download pictures from other sites - so I will not show up there either.

Cheers, Andy!

Will Get Faster then More Popular

[KarmaBlackballed]

I tried using Linux KDE as a desktop last year and was disappointed with the speed of the graphical interface. I could watch the dialogs painting and this was on a 900MHz machine.

This is not an issue with Servers.

I, like most users, expect performance to be at least as snappy as on other systems using comparable hardware.

As hardware gets faster, the GUI sluggishness will be less apparent. That along with the advent of more mainstream compatible apps will make it more prevalent as a desktop OS.

This seems high actually.

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that one in 400? Think about that. Of all the THOUSANDS of PCS that Dell, Gateway, and others sell each day, how many of these get Linux put on them? I am trying to comtemplate all the computers I have ever seen on my life on the desktop, myriads! And maybe 2 have had Linux running on it for the desktop. EVERYONE (speaking from mid america here) today has a computer, most families have two, think how many run Linux, none. Think how many have heard of Linux, practically none. This seems ridiculously high, its probably much less than .24 percent.

Windows is for surfing - Linux for serious stuff

[kill-hup]

While I doubt the numbers, I suppose it could be true. At my current company, they insist on supplying *everyone* with a windows box, regardless of need. As a sysadmin, all I use it for is surfing (google searches, sfocus, pstormm slashdot =), since my Linux desktop is where I get all my real work done ;)

Survey says...

[adubey]

I've had some training in statistics, and I see a number of problems. First, the slashdot editors are making the perennial journalists' mistake of misinterpretting statistics. Statmarket only claims to be measuring web client usage, and doesn't make any claims about the desktop market in general (at least from what I saw).

In terms of the study itself, statmarket admits that the sample is "self-selected" rather than randomly selected. This results in a biased sample. In particular, since they are offering a service to business users, the sample is likely biased in favour of business sites. The bias is then against more "arty" or technologically-oriented sites, resulting in lower-than-expected numbers from Macintosh and Linux users. It might also be biased against home users.

That said, while the survey may be off by an order of magnitude, I wouldn't expect it to be off by more than an order of magnitude. Most other surveys don't put Linux usage at more than 2 or 3%

Re:The problem is..

[ergo98]

But I think that's really their point: If only small engineering circles use Linux, then it's a fundamental fact that the deployed base is small. The dream of Linux, and all other alternative OS', is that the oft stated scenario of "grandma using SuSe" will come true, and naturally grandma isn't going to start her browsing at Slashdot just because she installed Linux: She'll have the same general browsing as most other grandams.

In other words, if you're saying that websites always cater to a certain crowd then I 100% agree (though note that that stat came from information gathered from some 125,000 sites so it'd be less biased than, say, howtouseacomputer.com), however you're conceding defeat if you say that those who use Linux are of a different breed.

Re:Our Stats ...

[JiveDonut]

Why is it scary that 45% run win98?

Windows 98 is a perfectly good OS for home users. I have two linux boxes in my house that I use for programming, file serving, wireless network, etc.

Guess what the third one runs? Win98.

Circular circle? :)

[ishark]

I like the answer on lowendmac. Not the article, but the statistics. Beside that, could it be that we're witnessing the same "netscape effect" of the web? The article says that lots of web developers use those statistics to build sites. Translation: they only target IE. I can believe this, since I use galeon and I often have quirks in commercial sites. Now, if your site works well only with IE I'm not surprised that 98% of the visitors use IE.... Just like netscape-enhanced sites used to justify their attitude by saying that "90%+ of the visitors use netscape"....

(Note: I use Windows == IE. I don't know the statistics of Ns/Mozilla/Opera vs IE on windows, am I guessing right that they are a tiny %?).

Rejection of Cookies

[guisar]

I will also bet that Linux users are MUCH more likely than other users to reject the cookies which these sort of tools rely on. As a result, we are probably left on the table.

Re:Where they get their stats.

[zmooc]

Still, that doesn't have to be a guarantee at all. It is very well possible that the sites that use hitbox are for some reason visited more by windows users (newbies?) than other sites. Sites with content that's more interesting to us geeks usually don't use hitbox (slashdot, google, blah). Porno sites for example work much better in windows (movies!). I'm not saying that Porno sites use HitBox more, but it's just one of the many examples. The only way to do such a survey right is by picking a few people randomly and then contact them by telephone. And then it's still possible that users of OS A are more willing to cooperate than users of OS B:)

Re:The problem is..

[ralmeida]

Actually, I kinda wonder about that. I *own* a Linux box, but I don't use it for surfing, I use it as a server (web/ftp/mail/etc).

That's why it's called Linux On The Desktop.

Re:Where they get their stats.

[Anonymous Coward]

Total shock! I use linux exclusivley and I would put the number at about 1 - 2%. But if you take an honest poll at colleges the results would be eye opening. The linux users group at our local university has grown by at least 600% in the last 2 years. Alot of technical graduates are spreading the word. Our classes in networking are all linux based and programs are submitted with make files and must run on gcc.

Re:The problem is..

[zmooc]

Proxy logs? That must be even more inaccurate than a webpoll:P Who use proxies? The users that have installed the software they got from their ISP. And what did it do? It set up the proxy-settings. Those that install another OS usually don't bother setting up proxy-settings. So proxies are probably mostly used by newbies. And they usually run Linux. So what the survey actually should say "Linux has 0.24% desktop coverage among users of ISPs that use HitBox". This survey is like saying "69% of my friends runs Linux so the world-wide Linux-on-the-desktop-coverage must be about 69%".

Re:I'm not registering any Linux User Agents

[Anonymous Coward]

The browser market is much more fragmented on Linux, and new versions of say, Mozilla, are released a LOT more frequently than IE. Try lumping together all those that say Win* ... and all those that say Linux... and see what you get. I'm not saying there'll be more Linux, but it'll be a much fairer test.

Re:This is the wrong statistc...

[Bryan Andersen]

I wonder how many "users" were worms like Nimda or CodeRed?

Re:Slow GUI Performance

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I did notice. And my 600MHz linux box at home is a lot faster / more responsive than my 850MHz windows box at work.

X-windows is the best Linux asset

[Petrus]

The biggest reason for which I use Linux as a desktop is X-windows. As a home user, MS-Windows is not powerful enough to me. I need network transparency, otherwise my kids coul dnot use the two old 486 computers fof anything useful.

The X-windows network transparency, multiple X-windows on single machine, multiple desktops is what puts Linux years ahead of Windows features.

If it needs something, its smooth installation of DRI and true type fonts.

Petrus.

B.F.D: There's still a monopoly out there fellas

[Locutus]

Come on now, how is anybody supposed to get Linux out on the desktop if nobody worth a hoot can pre-install it? Not even in a dual boot configuration. I've got two friends who went out and bought $1500 PC's to do email and web surfing. Only some of the fringe players like Ellisons company,etc. do Linux such that consumers could use and how do they compete in a Windows-only press world?

Hell, OS/2 had/has a much higher usability rating, IMHO, yet only in one country in the world could IBM get pre-installs, Germany. I'd heard that OS/2 had 25% of the desktops in one year. BeOS was available for free to anybody who wanted to pre-install. They couldn't. Can you say monopoly?
BAD Monopoly?

Linux will remain out of the desktop space as long as Microsoft can hang anybody who lets Linux get close to a pre-installed Windows box. PERIOD. No operating system in existance today or tomorrow will break this strangle hold cause users take what is pre-installed.

IMHO

Re:The problem is..

[MSG]

The problem is that users don't really know what they want, they only know what they're told they should want. The parent post may be a troll, and it may not, but it's full of frequently posted bullshit that people need to stop believing.

don't try and convince me that an almost 20 year-old architecture is going to bode well these days

OK, why are you even considering Linux then? It's a 10 year old OS replicating a 30 year old architecture. It can't *possibly* be any good, right?

Modular, extensible software isn't new. X11 was designed that way years ago. The only problem has been the proliferation of slow, monolithic implimentations. XFree86's implimentation is much much better than many in the past. X11 itself is a fine drawing layer, even if libx11 is a bitch to interface with.

There is no compelling reason for people to use Linux on the desktop

Maybe not. I don't know. My mom's been using it for 3 or 4 years, since before Windows had ICS. That was the killer feature. Even after that, Windows didn't have a good personal firewall. Even still, it's vulnerable to about a million virii that will never affect her computer. Everyone has something that they desire from their computer...

Xfree86 my ass, move off that clunker and have a nice thin layer at the bottom

There's that frequently quoth bullshit. X11 IS THIN. Thin == little memory: X11 works on Compaq iPAQ's in something like 2MB of RAM, and provides better services than the Linux frame buffer. Thin == low level, which is what most *real* X11 programmers bitch about. X11 is so thin that it provides a mechanism without any policy! That's its design goal. It's just the mechanism, so policy can be decided by anyone who needs a graphical environment without rewriting their drawing layer from scratch. As GUI's evolve, and their internal designs change, X11 will always be there for them to be built upon, without rewriting the low level hardware interface bits.

Why does everyone bitch about X11, but no one ever thinks that Linux should be replaced with something that isn't 100MB of source, and 20 MB of binary? What? No one thinks that an OS would be much faster if it were "thin"?

Remember, THIN == few features. X11 provides all of the features that you need to draw in an extensible architecture, without anything that belongs somewhere else.

Linux needs a completely IE compatible browser.

Compatible in what way? If browsers on Linux aren't compatible with IE, then the fault lies not in the Linux browser developers; it's with MS. There *IS* a standard for this crap, you know? It's all written out, and anyone should be able to understand it. Mozilla and Opera are far better at being standards compliant than IE, so why don't you bitch at MS. Why should we have to degrade from written standards to implimentation standards that are likely to change as IE does?

Fonts suck

*GOOD* fonts are really hard to create, and therefore very expensive. Perhaps you would like to develop some? Or maybe fund their development? Not that you're wrong here... The fonts we've got would be a lot better if they were scalable and hinted, but that's where we loose out.

50,000,000 "unique" users is nothing

[Erris]

When you consider that 125,000,000 people in the US alone have internet access, 50,000,000 so called unique users is not so big. I have to wonder if the tool they used to determine uniqueness is a MSIE only thing.

Web surveys are not a good measure anyway. Linux users may have something better to do than surf comercial websites all day. Consider the number of Sun users reported. Linux is used by the physics community for workstations. I doubt any of those "desktops" got counted. They might not even have a browser (gasp!), or a GUI for that matter.

Re:The problem is..

[Cheetahfeathers]

The people who are capable of coding the stuff that would make Linux be a desktop for the non-geek are the same people who have no interest in making such an enviornment, since it doesn't suit them personally. They have no motivation, such as a big corporation giving them tons of money to make something they consider useless or worse than what they have already.

Re:The problem is..

[jackbox]

Does anyone recall how NT 3.1 was supposed to be the desktop follow-up to Windows 3.x back in... like, 1994? When did NT finally achieve notable penetration on the desktop? Maybe around 1998? Maybe only last year with Windows 2000?

I don't have exact stats. My point is: it's taken at least 4-5 years for Microsoft to push their own "industrial strength" OS onto the desktop. (Win 9x was a stopgap measure because people were sticking with Win 3.x and not moving to NT.)

Whoever is doing doomsaying on Linux by claiming "it's been years and it's not on the desktop yet - therefore it's a loser" has been brainwashed by the MS PR spinners.

These changes take time. And Linux has made incredible progress considering the many hurdles it has to overcome in the marketplace. Now is no time to stop.

Re:How to craft a response.

[spauldo]

Installed everything you ever needed and never bought software again?

Great News!

[nathanh]

A number of posters seem to be moaning because the figures range from 0.25% (HitBox) to 1% (Google). I see wild theories attempting to discredit the figures and additional arguments trying to justify why the figures should be higher.

Wake up to yourselves. Almost 1% is great! The current estimate for the number of Internet users is 513 million people (according to NUA http://www.nua.ie/surveys/how_many_online/). So even taking the lowest figure from HitBox that's 1.3 million people using Linux as a desktop. It could be as high as 5.2 million people if Google provides a better sample.

But that's only desktop users! I will claim (and I think many people would agree) that the percentage of Linux *servers* is much higher than the percentage of Linux desktops. I can't guess how many machines this equates to (I don't know the relative number of desktops to servers, or the percentage of servers that are Linux) but it's going to be more than zero.

It's brilliant news that Linux usage is this high. Every single person that uses Linux is a success story for Linux. There's no need to have huge marketshare, or be the dominant player. You just need a critical mass of users and several million users is definitely a critical mass. The early years of Linux had just a few 100 users and it was enough to propel the snowball forward. Millions of users equates to an avalanche!

Keep reminding yourself, just by using Linux you are helping to make Linux better. You are another person who can help a newbie. You are another person who might buy a book or CD and thus indirectly fund a developer. You are another person who might find a bug, suggest a feature, write some documentation, or perhaps even write some code.

You are part of the Linux community, and even the most pessimistic figures suggest that this is a community with MILLIONS of members.

Not conspiricy theories

[einhverfr]

HA, and the conspiracy threories come out already! I really don't think any one has motive to pretend that Linux has a lower end-user figure than it has, when it is such a minuscule figure - or are you suggesting that the figure is out by 20-50%???

The IDC states that 2% of corporate desktop users are using Linux. This is rouchly 8 times what this survey reported and I would think that there would be slightly more home users using it now than corporate users.

My estimate is 2-5% of users are using Linux. Still small but not as small as 0.24%...

NVidia dosn't get Linux

[Royster]

All in all, just the hassle involved in loading an accelerated graphics card made by the most pro-linux graphics card manufacturer in the world (MHO) is enough to keep anyone who is not a hard core geek from even considering using Linux.

If they were really so pro-Linux, they would have Open Source drivers so that you wouldn't have to jump through the hoops that you did. Place the blame where it belongs -- with NVidia.

Ways the measure is inaccurate:

[DunbarTheInept]

1. It only measures sites with their tool being used.
2. Users can lie with their user-agent strings and sometimes *have* to to get into a site at all.
3. Even when the user-agent string is honest, the user might have javascript disabled by default. Those who don't use Javascript don't get counted into this counter. Now, who is more likely to have JS turned off - a Windows user or a Linux user?
4. Web hits per day cannot measure computer *ownership* percentages, only user *traffic* percentages. Users with innefficient web browsing habits will tend to score much higher in the measure than those with sensible web browsing habits. The next time you see some guy clicking back and forth between pages instead of opening two browser windows, think "HitBox thinks there's 10 times as many of him as there are of me".

What hitbox does isn't necessarily wrong. It is a useful thing to know how much of the web traffic is coming from what users. It's just when this data gets misinterpeted by hack reporters that there's a problem.

Why I can't use Linux on my desktop

[mizukami]

Fervent Linux fan that I am, I've given up on being able to use it on my desktop for the time being. The main reason is lack of Japanese language capability.

Linux has come far enough to where Japanese can be viewed on the screen, and with some programs input, but it's currently at about the state that MacOS/Windows was about 10+ years ago.

My home server runs Redhat, but I've ended up even doing web development on it though a Win box, just because the internationalization (fonts, input method, speed of display, etc) is sooo much better. :-(