21 Jun
2013
21 Jun
'13
6:44 a.m.
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/
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
Mac usage is /way/ higher.
http://www.numberof.net/number%C2%A0of%C2%A0mac%C2%A0users/
http://techcrunch.com/2012/06/11/apple-there-are-now-66-million-mac-users-4…
http://idaconcpts.com/2008/12/05/a-not-so-simple-question-how-many-mac-user…
http://osxdaily.com/2011/03/18/mac-market-share-around-the-world-usa-15-can…
Mac OS X has around 8%-10% of the computer market.
There are well over a billion PCs out there, nearly 2 billion:
http://www.worldometers.info/computers/
Let's say 1? billion PCs. 10% of that is 150 million; 8% of it is 120 million.
So, something over 100 million Mac users.
That means that, if there are really only 20 million or so users of
desktop Linux, there are about 5-6? more Mac OS X users than desktop
Linux users.
That's a pretty big margin, especially considering that Linux is free
and runs on cheap commodity hardware while OS X is commercial and runs
on expensive single-vendor hardware.
It's an optional extra. I do a fair bit of Mac support. In my
experience, it's very rarely installed or used. When it is, it's for
local Unix apps.
It's a good marker of how many people are using something.
> 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. > No X.11
and no networkable GUI.
That's odd. The OS X install I know best - on my ex's iMac - has X.
Two of the programs most often running there are games I wrote, which
definitely use X. Perhaps you're thinking of an outdated version? > Consider:
the most popular Linux by a similar proportion, with many
> hundreds of millions of users is Android.
> In fact it is fair to say that /only/
deskop/portable/handheld Unix
> variants that *don't* have X.11 have been commercial successes.
What does "commercial success" have to do with it? I, for example, am running X under a Unix variant on
at least a
half-dozen machines that show up in nobody's statistics because
everything on them is noncommercial open-source software, showing up in
no company's sales statistics and not reported to anyone. Nor am I
alone; at one of my workplaces there are more machines running such
systems than those running commercial OSes and at the other it's close
enough to half that I'm not sure which has the majority.
Do you update your OSes? If you do, your update downloads are counted.
Nobody knows how those stack up against commercial
variants, because
the nature of the open-source noncommercial world means the necessary
statistics do not exist. Not only is no-one keeping them, no-one is in
a position to keep them.
Sure, stats exist. Mac sales != Mac OS X users; some run Linux, some
run Windows.
Linux downloads != Linux users: lots of people just play and never
switch to it. OTOH, those who do use it, install multiple machines (or
VMs) from a single disk image.
--
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