Linux Market Share Passes 1%!!

As many have stated before it is quite hard to calculate the actual Linux market share.

We remain hidden from the traditional statistics grabbing mechanisms thanks to the following:
[ul]
[li]The lack of forced registration for Operating Systems installations[/li]
[li]The ability to mask our OS and Browser on web servers, typically done to allow us to access windows centered websites.[/li]
[li]The effectiveness of our firewalls, blocking OS discovery scans[/li]
[li]The clean network traffic, without the plethora of announcement packets that other OSs send you cannot just sniff to find the Linux boxes.[/li]
[/ul]

I believe that if you count the server and desktop installations that Linux has far more than a 5% market share, however the freedoms we enjoy as Free Software users and highly customizable applications we use are the reasons that we cannot confirm any numbers as accurate.

In particular the OS masking through browsers is what makes the report your are citing inaccurate.

I think the members of this website will give a pretty good idea of how many of us are out there.

Well said.

Not 1%! just 2%!

i agree daniel, even some of our public schools here in Philippines are converting their systems to Ubuntu, save money, no viruses is the reasons.

practically genius people choose linux ^__^

think much bigger eric. like this.

I wish the whole windows users wasn't so damned locked into MS Windows.

much better.

:laugh:

Another thing that makes it so hard to pin down is that many people purchase PC's licensed for, and pre-installed with some flavor of Windows, then just blow it away and throw Linux on it. It inflates the numbers in favour of M$.

On a happy note, I'm beginning to get requests for Linux based workstations from several of my employer's clients. Some were prompted by Vista, most were because their on-site tech people are fed up with constantly fighting a losing battle with malware. As evil as it is, by exposing how horribly insecure windows is, malware helps Linux adoption. I'm more than happy to oblige, both from a Linux advocacy standpoint, and because it is so much easier to remotely troubleshoot problems if I can just ssh into the box.

One of the big barriers of adoption in the business arena is coming down now that various Linux mail clients are gaining true MAPI (Exchange) support. As much as I hate it, Exchange is pretty firmly entrenched in a lot of corporate networks.

Skripka wrote:

2) Higher market share *might*, emphasis might, lead to better 3rd party device driver support.

AND more third party applications. Sometimes commercial applications are what is best, and we are never going to get them until vendors ignore Linux.