- Site menu:
- Latest Discussions
- Latest Newswire
- Archives
- Submit Story
- Story HOWTO
- Syndicate
- E-mail Alerts
A Challenge To Canonical, Red Hat, Novell, Linspire, and All Linux Distributors: Put Up or Shut Up
Linux isn't going anywhere as long as hardware and multimedia remain out of reach. It's an interesting paradox- Linux supports more hardware platforms than any other operating system, except perhaps NetBSD, yet its hardware support sucks rocks. This is not a slam on Linux- we all know that the influence of the Evil Empire is powerful, in addition to plain old vendor shortsightedness and laziness. Wireless network gear, modems, graphics cards, and sound cards are all notorious trouble spots. Printers and scanners are royal pains if you don't shop carefully. Sound and video codecs, and streaming media formats are very Windows-centric. What are the big Linux distributors like Canonical, Linspire, and Novell doing about this? Packaging closed binary code, and passively waiting for that magical day when hardware vendors bound out of bed with happy cries of "Today is the day we support Linux and open our drivers and codecs! Hurrah!" Oh, they might occasionally dispense helpful advice like "Shop carefully! Only buy supported hardware!" Thanks, that helps ever so much. Normal people like you and me know this is completely loony. We know that hardware vendors are well aware that Linux, Unix, *BSD, and Macintosh users account for sizable chunks of their customer bases. Sure, they publicly say lame things like "We can't be bothered with supporting 1% of the market." If they really believe that non-Windows computer users constitute that small a market share, they're too stupid to be in business. But they're not- they know we're buying their products, and while we complain a lot, they still have our money, so they don't care. While individual efforts add up, it's far more effective for the big kids to band together and start applying pressure. Just imagine if *buntu, Red Hat, Mandriva, Debian, Novell, Xandros, Linspire, Slackware, GNewSense, Gentoo, Knoppix, SimplyMEPIS, CentOS, and so forth formed an industry consortium for the sole purpose of pressuring hardware vendors to support Linux. As a bonus, the same codebase will support Mac OSX and all those nice Unix boxes, both commercial and free. A carrot-and-stick approach ought to do the job. The carrot is developer support, community goodwill, and increased sales. The stick is all those nice Linux customers spend their money elsewhere, plus the usual public carping on mail lists, forums, and blogs. So what do you say, Linux distributors? Does this sound unreasonable? Can you please take a time out from endlessly forking and doing your own things, and finding more excuses to bundle binary proprietary code, and instead work together to resolve this problem?
ReferencesIt is difficult to come up with an accurate estimate of true Linux market share for two reasons: the majority of Linux installations are free downloads installed onto re-purposed or dual-booted Windows machines, and there is considerable pressure to squelch any truthful Linux information from ever seeing the light of day. As far as I can tell, no one is even trying to count these. They do track sales figures, and these are quite interesting:Linux server revenue exceeded $1.4 billion in quarterly factory revenue in 2Q05 as Linux server revenues showed 45.1% growth, the fastest rate of growth since 2Q04. Linux servers represented 11.5% of overall quarterly server revenue - reaching an all-time high.I tip my hat to any hardware vendor who can kiss off $1.4 billion of quarterly revenues as too trivial to bother with. But, you say, those are servers. Everyone knows that Windows servers are teh suck, and Real Admins run Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, Unix, or Solaris. Real Admins don't need sissy stuff like fancy video or multimedia. That's for dumb ole end lusers. OK, never mind that multimedia and gaming devs and marketing folks need all the fancy multimedia bells and whistles. I can't cite any fancy studies, but I'll bet a case of your favorite beverage that Linux at least equals Apple on the desktop. I think it exceeds it, and it is indisputably growing.
Apple's Macintosh market share soars 16 percent. "Like IDC, Gartner has the top four players in the U.S. PC market as Dell (32 percent), HP (18.9 percent), Gateway (6.2 percent) and Apple (4.6 percent). |
|
|
Comments (34)
Nice, but it needs more numbers
5 earlier comments in the full thread.
http://counter.li.org/estimates.php
My guess was 29 million users worldwide, probably even more by now.
However, it is VERY difficult to specify who's a user and who not: If you use Windows, but your internet goes through a Linux gateway, does that count? Do PDA's count? What about mobile phones? What about routers? When is somebody a Linux user by the way? If I have a dual boot, then what? If I use a LiveCD or RescueCD sometimes, then what? If I try Linux three months, but switch back to Windows, then what? If I build a small home network with a gateway (so all have the same IP), and run Linux on all my PC's, then what? Do 'servers' count? If I run Cedega or Linux in VMware, does that count? If I run Win4Lin in Linux all day, how would that count?
Indeed, we should estimate the "number of zero's" in the values. 29 million is a bit low probably, but not unreasonable.
Then, don't forget two important projects: -The OLPC project (Fedora) -The Intel / Linux / China project, "Leaked memo from Intel shows Major Linux Effort" http://lxer.com/module/newswire/view/46808/index.html (Don't know what distro)
Also, a lot of Asian people don't visit our 'western' sites probably, so they are not being counted in most statistics we use. For example, looking at some Alexa (or whatever) statistics, the percentage of Asianux will probably not be representative.
In comparison, Apple claims approx. 15 million...it's somewhere on their website.
There may be a matter of perception, or Mac users may buy more stuff. Apple may provide a certain degree of support. Mac OS's are certainly fewer in number than Linux variants. Etc.
The real issue may not be the code base so much as quality assurance. You need to test what you support. That's a much smaller universe in Apple land than Linux.
Afterall, the goals is to show some numbers to the run-off-the-mill hardware manucaturer that now only gives out Windows drivers. Most of what we are clamoring for is stuff make for plane-jane desktops (video cards, NICs, sound, usb devices, music players, camera's), not stuff for high end servers or appliances :-)
Quoting:I'm just trying to count plain-jane desktop linux machines
Ah, so was I when I said 29 million. Nonetheless, more people use Linux than that 29 million, which was the point I tried to make. If there are 15 million Mac users (didn't know that), then it's indeed strange and not justified 'they' have more drivers. Moreover, the number of Linux users is growing faster than the number of Mac users, as far as I can tell. Probably, those Mac-people (and Apple) have more money or what?
That number seems too low, but maybe...
I've seen things indicating that the 16% of computer users use Macs -- ie, installed base instead of market share.
If there are only 100 million computer users, that would be about 15 million, but I suspect 100 million is a tad low.
@hkwint: yeah, your 29M sounds very conservative. Looking at your current stats it looks like the number of Linux users actually decreased (141K noew as opposed to 180K in 2005 registered users) but your page doesn't say how many accounts were deleted since your 2005 estimates.
Are we measuring computers or computer users? They won't be the same.
There are two computer users at our house, but we have 3 active computers in use, another one that gets intermittent use, and probably a dozen in total, most of which have been retired but not thrown out. Those include things like a Commodore 128, a Tandy Model 4, several Tandy Color Computers, a PDP-11, and an Aquarius. It doesn't include the VMPlayer based copy of Ubuntu on my wife's Windows 2000 machine or her Nokia 770.
I think (from memory of quoted figures) that computer usage in the US has topped 50%, by most reliable measurements. With a population of ~300 million, an average of approximately 4 persons per family, and guessing about 1.5 computers per computer using family, that gives ~112.5 million computers in the US alone, and probably 150+ million computer users. Europe would probably be similar percentage wise.
Firefox and OpenOffice.org also use their download stats, with the acknowledgement that it is not entirely accurate. Still, one gets a rough idea of the number of users.
I would expect Apple to have more users because they have been selling viable desktop machines for longer than there have been viable Linux desktops.
Quoting:they have been selling viable desktop machines for longer than there have been viable Linux desktops.
Dino: Do you really believe that?
Apple have been selling better desktops a lot longer than MS, how come they are not exceeding MS?
Come on now, Abe. To not believe that, I'd have to be an imbecile.
The first MacIntosh came out in 1984. Linux 0.01 was released in 1991. KDE 1.0 came out in 1998. GNOME 1.0 -- after that, I don't remember when.
As to Microsoft v. Mac, it's pretty easy to figure out: The first IBM PC came out in 1980, 4 years before the first Mac. By the time the Mac came out, millions of machines were in use running DOS and Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, etc.
The very first Macs languished on shelves, unwanted and unloved, probably because they weren't cheap and couldn't do much of anything that a PC couldn't do as well or better. Or, at least, that was true until small laser printers, Postscript, and desktop publishing.
Windows had a leg up in corporate environments, Intel PCs were cheaper than Macs, and, as its market share grew into a monopoly, Microsoft became increasingly ruthless. No mystery there.
Quoting:but your page doesn't say how many accounts were deleted since your 2005 estimates.Well, it's not my page, but anyway. The decreasing numbers is because their system changed from 'valid infinitely' to 'must login every year'.
Quoting:I've seen things indicating that the 16% of computer users use MacsThat must be European or American things. Western centric stats, and Apple propaganda which is not representative for the whole world. Do you really believe 16% of the Chinese farmers, or poor people in Brazil or Africa (and other poor people not living in the west) - if they have a PC at all - have money to buy a Mac? Some will own one anyway, but 16% is not realistic at all.
A while ago I read the billionth PC was sold. If half of them are broken, there are still 500 million of them, though I have no idea how many of the sold ones still remain. A lot of them are probably not able to run Windows XP.
I think that would be the numbers of macs sold per year. The number of users would be greater, sinc most macs(except the Performa) are used for more than a year.
:)
Those servers only do about 33% of the updates (140 external public mirrors do the rest).
That means about 3 million unique IPs for CentOS.
Now this number is high because many people have dynamic IPs, but it is also low because many companies and ISPs run their own update servers and never hit any CentOS servers ... so I would call those factors a washout.
We do not ship proprietary drivers or patent encumbered software.
> Are we measuring computers or computer users? They won't be the same.
I'd say computers, not users. Machines are probably easier to count. Plus, these stats are mostly interesting to smack hardware vendors with so it's the hardware (sales) that matter.
That is fantastic. I would think that would be a very accurate way of measuring active users.
Of course that could still be an undercount. Some installations 'may' mirror your updates internally, or do a standard build and then deploy that build on many machines internally.
It would be good to see similar stats from Red Hat, Novell, the major Debian Mirrors and others.
Thanks.
If we would be able to gather data like this off the top 10 Linux Desktop distro's then we could make a far more accurate guess.
gNewSense
By its very nature gNewSense doesn't bundle or ship proprietary software. Should you find some, please report a bug.
I believe that the point of gNewSense is that proprietary software is not included at all, whereas Debian has repositories for nonfree items. gNewSense will never contain the option to tempt users. I personally don't see anything silly about it.
where "you" could refer to the list of distributors that included gNewSense.
But if nobody, including the author, looked at it that way, there's no problem at all. I'm just writing this to show what inspired my OP.
Post a comment
A free account is needed to post. Write your comment here first: your text is kept in this browser while you sign up or log in, and is waiting for you when you come back.
Your message:Sign up and post (it is free) or Log in and post
For example: say that there are 1 billion desktop PC's running world-wide. We're only interested in giving a percetage figure (e.g. Linux desktop marketshare is 12% as opposed to 12.345%) so we need to calculate total Linux desktop usage in steps of 10 million.
Let's apply the 90-10 rule. 10 percent of the distro's make up 90 percent of the installed base. This matches up pretty well with the distrowatch stats (10% distro's create about 90% of the hits). Distrowatch counts about 500 distro's at the moment so our calculations could include up to 50 distro's or thereabout. We're already guessing that the end result will be around 5% (50 million desktops). 50 distro's spread over 50 million pc's. I think that counting in steps of 500.000 will do fine.
So, what we want then is a per-distro average installed base rounded to the nearest half-a-million for the top 10% distro's. Anything more detailed is just fiddling in the percentage-points and not interesting for our tally. It sounds doable to me. Add it all up, add 11% (90-10 rule reversed) and we got a ballpark figure for the total ammount of Linux desktops out there.
So, anyone know how much desktop PC's were running in 2006 worldwide?