Hmm... Linux has 21% of Google results...

[Kopachris]

I don't think this really means anything, but out of Google searches for "linux", "windows", and "mac", Linux has 21% of the results. Linux had 446M results, Windows had 1.16B results, and Mac had 429M results. Again, I don't think that really means anything. Just thought it was kind of interesting.

[Tom--d]

Interesting...

Even tho nothing can give a figure on the percentage of Linux being used. There is no database.
People say its like 1%. It's a lot more. I cannot give a figure (I would love to tho).

[Kopachris]

Interesting...

Even tho nothing can give a figure on the percentage of Linux being used. There is no database.
People say its like 1%. It's a lot more. I cannot give a figure (I would love to tho).
Linux has like 1% of the market share for Desktops. For servers, I'd *estimate* more like 70%. I'm probably way off.

[Tom--d]

Linux has like 1% of the market share for Desktops. For servers, I'd *estimate* more like 70%. I'm probably way off.

How do you know its 1% in the Desktop market? ;)

[-grubby]

How do you know its 1% in the Desktop market? ;)

It's less than 1%


Linux has like 1% of the market share for Desktops. For servers, I'd *estimate* more like 70%. I'm probably way off.


Probably more around <=50%

[klange]

It's less than 1%

Probably more around <=50%
I do hope you're joking. First off, the 1% desktop figure is only true if you're just considering newly purchased hardware with Linux on it. And even then, I'm pretty sure it's a bit off. The actual Linux desktop usage is much higher (Dare I say, 3%?) but we'll never be able to reliably calculate it.

Also, we're still pulling barely > 50% on servers.

[Twitch6000]

It's less than 1%




Probably more around <=50%

Again though how would you or anyone else know?

[tjwoosta]

i can see how it could maybe be 1% for linux that is purchased

but really though most people get there linux for free by downloading it and burning .iso's

i dont think anyone keeps track of that

[jpmelos]

And yet, answer Twitch 6000, how would you guys know it?

There's no really reliable research on it and you still claim to be right? It's like you guys are making numbers up! One guy comes and says "It's 1%." then comes the next guy and says "No. It's much higher, like 3%."

There's no way anyway could ever know. That's pure speculation. It's like "How many people are using blue 100% cotton T-shits right now?" I'd say 3% of the world, you could claim to be 5%. That's just stupid speculation. There's no way you could know.

[Bölvaður]

There's no really reliable research on it and you still claim to be right? It's like you guys are making numbers up! One guy comes and says "It's 1%." then comes the next guy and says "No. It's much higher, like 3%."

actually, statistically if you ask over 1000 people from all around the globe the % linux is used on the desktop, then the average of those answers are probably not too far off.

[-grubby]

It was a rough estimate. I wouldn't quote me as a source, those just seem to be (at least I think) generally accepted figures for that

[Ozor Mox]

Probably the closest we can get to a reliable source is when a well-known, technology neutral and high traffic website publish their web server statistics. One such website did this not long ago and I wish I could remember who it was or find the thread on it.

[Bloch]

I don't know why people keep saying it's very difficult to estimate linux usage.

All that has to be done is for a major website / web service to check the logs and report the percentage of hits from linux computers.

Will this yield the percentage of desktop linux systems?
No.
But it gives a statistic that is actually a lot more concrete and relevant, and avoids endless argument as to what constitutes a desktop computer, dual booting etc etc.

Does anyone have such a statistic from a major website?

[init1]

It's less than 1%




Probably more around <=50%
BSD is also very common on servers.

[MikeTheC]

@ Linux has 21% of Google results...

Yes, but the question is, will Linux give them back?

[yipperzz]

so many people google linux because they are trying to search for fixes to their issues :D

[oldsoundguy]

this is going to change those linux figures a LOT:

http://www.eeextra.com/news/netbook-sales-figures-for-q3-2008.html

note that the figures were PRE Christmas sales. (and that the majority of those sold are running Ubuntu!

Windows is trying to get into the market with a stripped down XP that is REALLY POOR. I tried out an Acer in Costco just yesterday with the Windows system. I could get on line, (they have free Wi-Fi) but the browser kept shutting off and I had to re-boot. Sales clerk said it is a common issue. (most likely getting in and removing Windows Zero Configuration and installing a 3rd part Wi-Fi program would solve that, but I was gonna be damned if I would suggest that!! LOL)

couple that with this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7806683.stm
and once again MS shoots itself in the foot!

[Kopachris]

Like I said, the 21% of results means pretty much nothing. Also, the 1% desktop market share and 70% server market share were estimates. I was right about being way off on the server market share.

BTW, the 21% of results was how many results Google returned for each of those searches, not how many people search for those terms.

As for a common, technology-neutral website, we could pester Wikipedia and Google to publish their hit statistics. :)

[oldsoundguy]

quit guessing!!

http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

These guys are a bit skewed towards the techno side of the house ... but they are in the ballpark.

[tjwoosta]

nice find!

seeing it all laid out like that makes it seem about right

thats alot less then i would have guessed though

[oldsoundguy]

that was NOVEMBER stats .. things will change with the December and January stats with all of those little NetBooks that wound up under the Christmas Tree!!

[Sealbhach]

I thought Macs were around 8 to 10% ?


.

[jrusso2]

that was NOVEMBER stats .. things will change with the December and January stats with all of those little NetBooks that wound up under the Christmas Tree!!

Three of those will have Windows XP and only one will have Linux since XP has been given away so cheap to the netbooks mfgs Linux has not been selling well.

[Sealbhach]

that was NOVEMBER stats .. things will change with the December and January stats with all of those little NetBooks that wound up under the Christmas Tree!!

These are supposedly December figures, I find it hard to believe they're accurate:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9


.

[doorknob60]

These are supposedly December figures, I find it hard to believe they're accurate:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9


.
What's that based on, msn.com?

[Frak]

Probably more around <=50%

I'd estimate around 40-60. It's a large gap because Linux is not always the front end to the user ;)

I see Linux used more for background work than for Tier 1 work (webservers). Ironically, I see more Windows servers with Apache than anything else.

[bryonak]

While the web statistics of high traffic sites are the closest we get to a useful indicator of usage distribution, we have to keep in mind that those sites are still targeting only a subset of the demographic. For example w3schools (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp) gets visited mainly by webmasters who care about standards, which leads to a overrated value for Firefox (40+ instead of around 20).
Equally msn.com will have an overabundance of Internet Explorer users...

These are the main references I use for web browser and desktop operation system distribution statistics:

w3counter (http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php)
TheCounter (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/)
OneStat (http://www.onestat.com/html/aboutus_pressbox.html) (a bunch of press releases, nice analyses of the current readouts)
w3schools (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp)



So much for desktops... the problem with server systems is that they're not easily trackable. The figures range from 20% to 80% for Linux...

One informative site is Netcraft (http://news.netcraft.com/), which shows Apache as 50%+ and rising while IIS (Microsoft's web server) has 34% and a falling trend. But a lot of Windows Servers run Apache instead of IIS.
To skew it to Linux again: gws (Google) runs on Linux, lighthttpd is mostly Linux but I've seen it under CygWin.

Then again, this only encompasses web servers. The background enterpise database and crunch servers have a much smaller Windows share, which only partially gets replaced by Linux, but rather by AIX, HPUX, Solaris, Irix, etc.



Another field where Linux is traditionally going very strong is supercomputers: more than 80% according to top500.org (http://www.top500.org)
I think this is a representative figure for universities (the servers, not terminals) and research facilities. For example, CERN runs almost everything on Linux.

[bufsabre666]

These are supposedly December figures, I find it hard to believe they're accurate:

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/os-market-share.aspx?qprid=9


.

no way theyre accurate, i dont care how good your advertisement is, jumping .8% in one month? please....

[bryonak]

Hitslink is as skewed as all the other stats sites...
Macs are selling exceptionally well only in the USA and Canada, to a lesser degree in Europe.
I've read that for 2008, every third laptop sold in the US was a Mac. So it's not surprising that the OSX share jumps quite a bit up.

I find the Mac share way too big for a representative statistic, but again, we're talking about subsets of users here.
There are too many computers with internet access in the world for the OSX share to be that high just because of last years sales.
Still they have perfectly valid data, it just seems like lots of Mac users visit the sites tracked by Hitslink.

[masque7]

Don't know if anyone else has noticed this, but... whenever I'm at school, home, or whatever... If I'm actually googling for computer-related stuff, or pretty much anything to do with computers, in the first page I'll always see an Ubuntu forums thread.

This either says:


The community is so helpful
The distro is full of errors so many people make threads about it
So much traffic on the forums/so many people use it


:/

[halovivek]

Really happy to hear that. soon it will become more this year. i am expecting.

[forrestcupp]

I don't think this really means anything, but out of Google searches for "linux", "windows", and "mac", Linux has 21% of the results. Linux had 446M results, Windows had 1.16B results, and Mac had 429M results. Again, I don't think that really means anything. Just thought it was kind of interesting.

It's because the small number of people who use Linux need so much more help to get it working.

[ajcham]

quit guessing!!
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php

Straying OT slightly, but that page also revealed something else which surprised me. I already knew that, as a Linux user, I was amongst a minority of computer users. But, according to that report, I am in an even smaller minority on account of my 1280x960 display resolution. Not sure why I found that interesting…

[wersdaluv]

Linux people post a lot because more than Windows and OS X users, talking about their OS is mostly just online.

[masque7]

that was NOVEMBER stats .. things will change with the December and January stats with all of those little NetBooks that wound up under the Christmas Tree!!
That most people seem to want XP installed on them :/

[Maheriano]

If you run a webserver (I do) then you can log in and see the statistics for each month, more specifically which operating system is used by each person whom visits your site. I usually get single digit percentages for Linux, barely double digits for Macintosh and almost 90% Microsoft.

[albinootje]

There's no way you could know.

It is *very* difficult to know indeed.

A few months ago it was said that Ubuntu has an estimated amount of 8 million people using it.

For me that's much more interesting to hear, then what the mass media is writing "Microsoft Windows has more than 95 % market share on computers", which is simply incorrect right away, because the press talks about desktop machines, not servers or embedded systems, and those numbers are surely based on the sales information from Microsoft.

This week I read that Firefox is going towards a 28 % "market share", I'm delighted about that.