Maybe Linux is doing better than we think?

[BuffaloX]

I just read this "Gnome 3.0 General Sociological Research"
Which was done as a part of "Gnome 3.0 Usability Project"

http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProje...eneralResearch

Looking at the numbers, I noticed something peculiar.
When looking at language/country I first thought German was the big orange slice, which would make sense, since Linux is supposedly reasonably popular in Germany.
But something is slightly wrong with the colors.
And it turns out Germany is very small even compared to UK?
That can't be right, unless Germans are heavily into KDE or something?

The big orange slice is China.
This is the first time ever, I've seen an Asian country turn up in a Linux survey with any kind of significant percentage. But in this one it is HUGE.

The other day, my wife read an article postulating Linux had about 10% market share in China. Could it be true?

[wojox]

I don't think Linux will see a whole lot of market share until they get a firmer grasp on gaming. That seems to be the rage these days.

[humphreybc]

Uh to be honest, I am not sure.

But I do know that #ubuntu-cn in IRC often has a tonne of people in it. More than most channels

[Mornedhel]

Looking at the numbers, I noticed something peculiar.
When looking at language/country I first thought German was the big orange slice, which would make sense, since Linux is supposedly reasonably popular in Germany.
But something is slightly wrong with the colors.
And it turns out Germany is very small even compared to UK?
That can't be right, unless Germans are heavily into KDE or something?

Eh. I though France would be right after China, the US, and Brazil. We do have very active FOSS communities, after all. Turns out, either I was wrong, or no one was notified about this survey.

Japan also has a completely distinct hacker culture. A good chunk of Emacs stuff is Japanese (it gets ugly when they don't bother translating their documentation), and you can just feel that they don't approach it exactly the same way. They're quite active in FOSS, but it doesn't show at all in the survey, most likely because both communities don't talk a lot.

Regarding Germany and KDE, it's just possible that they indeed like KDE better than Gnome. If I remember correctly, at the beginnings of Knoppix, the default language was German and the desktop environment was KDE, so the first thing you'd do would be change the language to English and the keyboard to your own layout (and then you'd change from the annoying KDE default of single-click to double-click). Nowadays they have two editions, a German one and an English one.

[lev-unr]

I disagree about gaming. I think that there is a small market for gaming in Liunux - and even in windows for that matter. I have always been a firm believer in console gaming vs PC gaming. I think the experience is just better on consoles hands down.

I think Linux needs to concentrate more on hardware compatability - and making more native software that is competitive with mainstream - vs emulating on wine.

[thatguruguy]

I don't think Linux will see a whole lot of market share until they get a firmer grasp on gaming. That seems to be the rage these days.

A quick look at the listing of the top-selling software at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/software) casts doubt upon this position.

[Telecaster72]

Of course it is gaming that keeps Linux back, i friend _finally_ asked me to help him install Linux after a very malicious virus incident on XP, he wanted to dual boot to just run games on XP and everything else in Linux (we'll see how often he will boot into Crunchbang after he is done gaming to go online, i suspect his XP will get attacked again soon ). Despite the high sales in gaming consoles, a lot of people play games on their computers (infact all of my friends except me) and they exclusively use Microsoft even though the like the "idea" of open source and Linux, the dealbreaker is gaming.

A quick look at the listing of the top-selling software at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/software) casts doubt upon this position.

Looking at those prices for stuff you get for free or dont need in Linux makes my head spin...why???? Norton???? Most of the people buying MS Office and Virus Protections software and such i would think are older, scared of viruses and those "hackers", scared of anything different from the Microsoft OS they have learnt to deal with through the years and many of them dont even know other alternatives exist. But where it's happening is in the younger crowd that is not so stuck in their habits, if games worked as well in Linux as in Windows they would not have a problem with switching. -Hey look it's for free and i can play my online games on it, lets try it! The problem is though, how to get game companies to start porting their games to Linux? And ofcourse all the different standards such as .deb .rpm .pkg and so on is a problem....

[thatguruguy]

Believe it or not, kids are not the exclusive market for computers.

EDIT: I linked to some pretty objective data. I.e., a listing of top-selling applications on a general-purpose commercial site. If you want to prove me wrong, do it with some hard data. I don't care about the computer preferences of your uncle's girlfriend's next-door neighbor.

[Telecaster72]

Believe it or not, kids are not the exclusive market for computers.

EDIT: I linked to some pretty objective data. I.e., a listing of top-selling applications on a general-purpose commercial site. If you want to prove me wrong, do it with some hard data. I don't care about the computer preferences of your uncle's girlfriend's next-door neighbor.

I have no interest in proving you wrong, i dont waste my time on pettiness, just stating an opinion and if you dont care of my uncle's girlfriend's next-door neighbors computer that is fine, nobody forces you to.

Peace

[3rdalbum]

A quick look at the listing of the top-selling software at Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/software) casts doubt upon this position.

So all we need is tax software, MS Office and some resource-eating "Internet Security" programs and we'll be at 70% marketshare?

The results from Amazon are slightly skewed because the people who buy from Amazon are the ones who haven't shopped around and found that Amazon is massively overpriced. And people who buy from Amazon obviously don't mind waiting three months to get their product shipped to them.