Ubuntu's Commanding Marketshare

[chessnerd]

According to StatOwl (http://statowl.com/operating_system_market_share_by_os_version_trend. php?1=1&timeframe=last_6&interval=month&chart_id=13&fltr_br=&fltr_os=&fltr_se=&fltr_cn=&limit%5B%5D=linux&timeframe=last_12), in the last 12 months Ubuntu's desktop marketshare has been hovering around 50%, usually above it. The next highest is Fedora, with somewhere between 4.7% and 6.7% over the last year. The outlook for other distros is very mixed. Debian and SuSE are hurting, both having almost 4% in December of 2009 to now 1.8% for Debian and 2.6% for SuSE in October. CentOS has risen from 1.6% to 3.1% and Red Hat has hovered slightly above 1% the whole time. The rest of the market accounts for the remaining 30-35%, however, since StatOwl can only measure these stats on packaged browsers, some of that remaining marketshare belongs to users of other major distros who switch to a browser that is not included.

Even so, Ubuntu's marketshare is still above 50%, and could be as high as 60-70% assuming that a fair number of users install and use other browsers such as Chrome or Opera.

How does this amazing marketshare effect the voice and validity of other distros? In other words, since Ubuntu is used on almost every Linux desktop, does this mean that what Red Hat or SuSE does is less significant than what Canonical does?

[arvevans]

It would seem that the market penetration of any individual distro may not indicate problems for any other one. Since there is a large amount of code that is shared between all the distributions, the differences may be more in marketing and in customer perception, than any real differences in the OS itself. Each distro tries to differentiate itself by it's window manager customization, but under the covers, most are pretty much the same. This applies to desktops, but for servers there is much less differentiation between distros because the server users don't get to see anything that is distro-specific. Since some of the named distros do have server specific releases, while others do not, it may be that this is skewing some of the results data.

[beew]

According to StatOwl (http://statowl.com/operating_system_market_share_by_os_version_trend. php?1=1&timeframe=last_6&interval=month&chart_id=13&fltr_br=&fltr_os=&fltr_se=&fltr_cn=&limit%5B%5D=linux&timeframe=last_12), in the last 12 months Ubuntu's desktop marketshare has been hovering around 50%, usually above it. The next highest is Fedora, with somewhere between 4.7% and 6.7% over the last year. The outlook for other distros is very mixed. Debian and SuSE are hurting, both having almost 4% in December of 2009 to now 1.8% for Debian and 2.6% for SuSE in October. CentOS has risen from 1.6% to 3.1% and Red Hat has hovered slightly above 1% the whole time. The rest of the market accounts for the remaining 30-35%, however, since StatOwl can only measure these stats on packaged browsers, some of that remaining marketshare belongs to users of other major distros who switch to a browser that is not included.

Even so, Ubuntu's marketshare is still above 50%, and could be as high as 60-70% assuming that a fair number of users install and use other browsers such as Chrome or Opera.

How does this amazing marketshare effect the voice and validity of other distros? In other words, since Ubuntu is used on almost every Linux desktop, does this mean that what Red Hat or SuSE does is less significant than what Canonical does?

I don't see how with figures like that for other distros the total would add up to 100%:P(If even Fedora and Debian are hovering around 3-4% that means lesser known ones would be way below 1%) The math doesn't look right. :)

[KiwiNZ]

I don't see how with figures like that for other distros the total would add up to 100%:P(If even Fedora and Debian are hovering around 3-4% that means lesser known ones would be way below 1%) The math doesn't look right. :)

It is quite likely to be indicative, most of the 100's of lesser Distro's have customer bases that barely register on the figures. They don't even make it onto the Distrowatch lists. The bottom half of Distrowatch's list would have a very small customer base.

So +/- a few percentage points it is probably a good indicator.

[simpleblue]

Regardless of what they say about the desktop, I think 'Linux' has a future in servers at the very least. Infact, it is a trend that continues to rise each year by a couple of percent. Linux now runs on 81% of the top 500 servers. I think that this will eventually spread to the smaller servers as well.

Perhaps this is why CentOS has become more popular? And keep in mind that distros like CentOS, Redhat, SUSE, may not be popular, but they are used to run the most badass servers around! Compare this to Microsoft, who only claim 5 out of the 500 supercomputer servers.

I'm happy with Redhats progress. Have you seen RHT's stock? Its higher then MSFT's and continues to on a show upward trend.

[stmiller]

Yeah it's somewhat odd to lump CentOS and Redhat into a 'desktop distro' comparison.

This company has some stats based on web servers:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all

Pretty much Cent dominates everything. But again- this is in the server world, and not desktop.

[chessnerd]

Yeah it's somewhat odd to lump CentOS and Redhat into a 'desktop distro' comparison.

This company has some stats based on web servers:

http://w3techs.com/technologies/details/os-linux/all/all

Pretty much Cent dominates everything. But again- this is in the server world, and not desktop.

Interesting. It is nice to see that Linux has such a commanding server share.

I wouldn't really call CentOS's 32.3% market-share with a 5.5% lead over their next highest competitor "dominating everything" when you compare to that the fact that Ubuntu has over 50% of the Linux desktop and especially compared to Windows with 80-90% of the total desktop market. Those are dominant market-shares.