NetApplications’ hitslink.com just released their april market share stats and linux passed 1% for the first time ever.
Here is a plot of the linux market share for the past several years based on hitslinks’ stats:
1 in 100 desktops/laptops is now linux according to hitslink. Hurray. While this number may be a low estimate due to linux users visiting different sites or hiding their browser identity, the main thing to take away from this is the trend: up! Over 300% in just a few years.
Mac OS X FTW! At this rate, by the time Mac OS X hits 20, Linux will have hit 2. lol
lolno, seriously, lol. linux nerds are hilarious
I love Free Software and I love Linux.
But I have to say one thing:
OpenOffice SUCKS!
I mean, have you seen the latest Microsoft Office??? If we had something like that on Linux, we’d be set!
Microsoft Office on both Windows AND the Mac is simply marvelous. And trust me, it hurts me just to say that.
Unfortunately, Microsoft will never develope software for Linux, so it is up to us to develope a Free office suite that can compare to and compete with Microsoft Office. I know OpenOffice is trying, but Sun is useless and very closed-minded, so they didn’t do much to advance OpenOffice. Oracle now own OpenOffice, but it remains to be seen what their commitment to the advancement of the Free office suite is.
I really do hope that Open Office thrives, but I also hope others realize that the lack of a Free and advanced office suite that can compete with Microsoft Office is probably one of the greatest weaknesses of the Linux operating environment.
Have used linux on and off for over a decade. Used it in the mid-90’s (Slackware) to develope FORTRAN numerical codes in grad school as a poor man’s UNIX workstation. Back then it was not for the faint of heart, expect C-code tweaking, writing your own hack drivers, etc. to get it running. Felt like a weirdo for using it. Went into the work world as used 98 and XP for about 10 years till 2005. Around 2004 a coworker gave me a Warty Warthog CD which I threw in a desk drawer w/o much thought. About a year later, now married, with wife and kids was getting really fed up with the attempt to clean, fail, wipe, reinstall and mess that windows was. Wasn’t expecting much so tried that Ubuntu CD,….and was floored at how much GNU/Linux has advanced over a decade. No need to mess with CLI, no need to fetch a dozen driver CD’s to get functionality, no registry mess, and a TON of high quality apps, and package managers….seriously folks software CD’s and even downloaded indivdual apps are so 20th century. Went through about a year of dual booting and am now wholly on GNU/Linux, and I don’t feel like a freak using it now either, 2 immediate coworkers use it, the old lady next door who I gave gratis help for with computer problems took to it with aplomb (Will help folks for free, but I don’t want repeat “business”), I honestly think 1%, even in the US stronghold of MS is too low by a factor of 3-4X. If I was a wagering fellow my guess is GNU/Linux adoption is on a sigmoid curve (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmoid_function) and right now the user install base % is on the slow upslope, but that major uptick in adoption rate is somewhere coming soon, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, it coming. MS may dump XP copies on the market, redefine what a Netbook is, or hype Vista 7, all its going to do is shift that rapid uptick back a few months, buts it still coming. The switchover will be fairly rapid once its underway, another poster referred to a “positive feedback” and that’s a good analogy. The Mac and Windows aren’t going away but my guess is when the dust settles on the other slowdown leg of the sigmiod, Windows will have 15-20% of the install base (some corperate clients, Active X games, diehard MS fanbois), Macs may 10-15% (College students, diehard Mac fanboys), others collectively 10% or so (a big deal for these guys as eComStation, ReactoS, NetBSD, Darwin may each see a 2-3 fold jump in their desktop user base), GNU/Linux will have the rest 50-60%. I expect that innovation and excitement and great leaps forward like in the late 80’s early 90’s will return in the new dynamic market.
i’m a big fan of osx mainly because it has a *nix command line without alot of the *nix frustrations, however i recently ran into a huge problem with my gf’s macbook as the sims 3 first would not run (required leopard) then was way to slow. installed bootcamp and all was well. its dumb shit like this that i try to avoid with osx……. heh so yeah linux won’t really be ready till it has the games
This is exceedingly good news. I suspect that the G1 and now the myTouch3G have contributed somewhat to these numbers, as has Ubuntu (and, by proxy, various similarly accessible distros like Fedora and openSUSE).
With the coming of dozens of new Android devices in the next few years, I would not be surprised in the least if this trend turns out to be exponential.
(Sidebar: Because the number of devices connected to the Internet is presently increasing exponentially, it is not necessary for there to be a saturation asymptote, which would make the trend sigmoid.)
@self Aaand I’ve totally botched the stats there. I neglected to realize that since we’re talking about percentage, which has an implied and thoroughly obvious saturation bound (100%), it would indeed be a sigmoid curve on the percentage graph. Whoops! =)
@self
Correction the second: I see that this site graphs Android separately from “Linux,” which is confusing, since Android *is* a GNU/Linux distribution, but that’s neither here nor there. It carries only 0.02% of the share, which is not terribly surprising given the considerably lower likelihood of a mobile device being used to access pages which are overwhelmingly biased toward desktop environments.
They should probably relabel that “Linux” entry to “Desktop GNU/Linux Distributions” or some such to avoid confusion with Android and the like.
El Mono, which do DVB card do you have? Chances are it actually does work. The list of the supported cards by the Linux kernel can be found at http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/dvb/cards.txt and if you need any help getting it to work I will be happy to show you how to.
Cheers,
Steve Pardee
steve@stevenPardee.net
do you guys think they will upgrade this product to a better one ?
Since then Linux have been loosing its share though
No anti-linux news allowed here! Just kidding… But, actually, in this months stats, Linux is at 1.03% ( http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8 ) – So, it has pretty much held steady. This is not a bad thing when you consider that the total desktop OS usage share is dropping overall (due to Android, iPhone and Sympian use climbing). So, desktop-linux holding its market share probably means it’s desktop share is ever so slowly climbing. And if you count, Android and WebOS into the Linux market share, it has a really healthy growth going.
Of course, reading too much in to these stats is probably not that good an idea 😉
This really confirms that the trend towards Linux on the desktop is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. We’re seeing a steady growth that isn’t extremely fast. The trend is a very solid one that should keep up for many years to come. It seems to be growing 50% each year. We’ll have 2% in 2011, and 4% around 2013. It’s still a long way to go to achieve world domination, but it’s a fun challenge.
Linux is quite powerful OS… But it will never win…because of its complexity.
Linux still has a long long way to go…
that increase is likely due to netbooks, many of which run on linux
Got its 1% and stalled. I’d rather see one good DE than 10 questionnable ones, like it is now.
Now (Dec 2012), this rate is 1.25% on Net Application (without Android: +2.65%). We can see all impacted categories here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems#Summary.
Really impressive!
A link with the current desktop stats: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=9&qpcustom=Linux
Though I doubt this counts Android phones or tablets. I also don’t know if it counts Chromebooks.