 
 
 
 
 
Linux Community Forums Software Desktop Linux Market Share Passes 1%!!
02 May 09
Hitslink.com just releasted their april market share stats and linux passed 1% for the first time ever.
See historical plot at my article here: http://www.berkeleylug.com/?p=43
Digg the article here: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Linux_Market_Share_Passes_1
04 May 09
Well, that depends on how you measure it - The following Article said in 2006 that Linux on the Desktop would have a market share of 5% (it's in german, unfortunately).
Don't trust any statistics, that you haven't faked yourself!
04 May 09
As many have stated before it is quite hard to calculate the actual Linux market share.
We remain hidden from the traditional statistics grabbing mechanisms thanks to the following:
[ul]
[li]The lack of forced registration for Operating Systems installations[/li]
[li]The ability to mask our OS and Browser on web servers, typically done to allow us to access windows centered websites.[/li]
[li]The effectiveness of our firewalls, blocking OS discovery scans[/li]
[li]The clean network traffic, without the plethora of announcement packets that other OSs send you cannot just sniff to find the Linux boxes.[/li]
[/ul]
I believe that if you count the server and desktop installations that Linux has far more than a 5% market share, however the freedoms we enjoy as Free Software users and highly customizable applications we use are the reasons that we cannot confirm any numbers as accurate.
In particular the OS masking through browsers is what makes the report your are citing inaccurate.
06 May 09
One percent of the Desktops on the internet is not a shabby number at all. I think its higher but lets say its 1%. Even Microsofts own figures are much higher and i suspect they have a very high interest in getting the right figures.
How many computers are there really out there? There are about 200,000,000 Linux webservers out there, how many desktops can there be?
The real numbers are very hard to get if not entierly impossible. Still one percent is no doubt a very high figure if you count it as potential customers/users. The step over the threshold for the snowball effect that usually kicks in is not that far away.
14 May 09
I think the members of this website will give a pretty good idea of how many of us are out there.
14 May 09
In all honesty there's little reason at all to care about market share. There are only 2:
1) You're a tech writer and need something to fill column inches about
2) Higher market share *might*, emphasis might, lead to better 3rd party device driver support.
The Linux Foundation is a non-profit consortium dedicated to the growth of Linux.
Join / Linux Training / Board
