21 Jun
2013
21 Jun
'13
7:21 a.m.
On Fri, 21 Jun 2013, Liam Proven wrote:
On 21 June 2013 12:37, Mouse <mouse at
rodents-montreal.org> wrote:
There are evidence-backed estimates.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/80379/how-many-ubuntu-users-are-there-worldw…
12-20 million.
Various other measures estimate around 0.8% to 1.25% of the market:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_uptake#Measuring_desktop_adoption
http://www.starryhope.com/ubuntu-most-popular-linux-distro/
>
Consider: the most popular desktop Unix by an order of magnitude (or
> 2) is Mac OS X. It's outsold all other commercial Unix variants put
> together.
Those two statements do not have as much to do with one another as you
seem to think; without installation statistics on noncommercial Unix
variants, such as Linux, we have no grounds for anything but wild
guesses as to whether OS X is "the most popular desktop Unix". At
least not for values of "Unix" relevant to this thread. Fedora claim way more - 20 to 50 million:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics
However it seems fewer copies are actually in use:
http://w3techs.com/technologies/comparison/os-fedora,os-ubuntu
Most servers do not show up in browser and http server estimates. Web
browser and server statistics can not and do not account for the majority
of the computers out there because huge numbers of them are not being used
for web browsing or as web servers. Even those that are used as web
servers cannot be accurately measured because of round robin DNS, reverse
proxies, caching proxies, http gateways, load balancing, etc.
Similar for web browsing, since many of the larger ISPs are using
transparent caching proxies of their own. That isn't even taking into
account that many Linux users end up configuring their browsers to report
false user agent strings in order to force the numerous broken websites out
there to still work with browsers other than Firefox and Internet Explorer
under MS Windows.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics...