Linux in the USA is probably above 1% for the desktop. It surely is above that for the server or cell phone markets.

In the rest of the world, Linux is above the highest percentage you blogged about.

Is MS the rule that only their product is the one to be used? Not that kind of thinking in the rest of the world.

I have used Linux since the summer of 2004. From the increase of people I know who use it, the increase comments on computer hardware from Linux user on mail order part companies and the increase packaging that announces that their product is supported by Linux it is easy to see Linux is a rising star.

I really don't see how the market share can only be 1%. Ubuntu has over 10 million users, Fedora has over 12 million users. I've never seen hard numbers on SuSE, Slackware, or any of the other myriad numbers of distros out there.

Our marketshare has to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 or 30 million users. Thats gotta put us closer to 10%.

Well the 1% is coming from a company that puts tracking cookies all over the web using Javascript. Your average Linux user's a bit more security conscious than your average Mac or Windows user, NoScript is a normal thing for us, right? NoScript makes it so they can't count us.

Dooont wooryyy...beee happyy ;)
one day .. or another ..
its coming soon .. the end of an
world is 2012 :D

Microsoft themselves stated Linux's market share is bigger than Apple's. http://www.osnews.com/story/21035/Ballmer_Linux_Bigger_Competitor_than_Apple

The data says Linux is only at 1%. But ZDNet reported years ago on IDC "predictions" that are much higher. They can't be wrong. Predictions are NEVER wrong. How do we save our pride? Oh, Blame Microsoft!

Before anyone gets upset - I use Ubuntu. I think its a great operating system. I have never met anyone in real life that uses Linux, and can count on one hand the amount of people that know what it is. I work for a very very large online company, doing technical support. In the five years that I have worked there, we have received 3 e-mails or phone calls about the compatibility of our site and linux. Linux is an awesome OS (in all its flavors) but I think its safe to say that the rest of the world has not caught on.

In a competitive market, based on product differentiation, how can there be harmony? When every manufacturer insists on prominently displaying their logo and using a different form factor for their products, how can one help but to have a home full of mismatched furniture?

You really need to go to a Microsoft specific site to see more posters defending their beloved Microsoft than champions of Linux. Of the sites I frequent, many (ZDnet) are bastions of Microsoft greatness. Yet the Linux supporters always outnumber the Microsoft supporters. Although their disrespect and lies regarding Linux haven't changed (I guess Microsoft hasn't updated their script yet) there is a quality of desperation in their voice. It's almost as if they are trying to will Linux into oblivion.

I refuse to get religious about operating systems. An awful lot of the rhetoric used by Microsoft users, Linux users and (especially) OSX users is eerily reminiscent of that of a tv preacher.

Overall, I think Linux is the better tool. But there are good and valid reasons to use other operating systems, continued employment being a very common and good reason.

However, I don't think it's any coincidence that Microsoft achieved dominance in the American market during the same period that bottled water became omnipresent. In both instances, clever marketing convinced the general public that something that was clean, safe and free was inferior to a product encased in plastic.

Only Microsoft has an idea about the real use of FOSS on the desktop, but still only an idea.
As has been pointed out, they know how many licenses have not been activated, how many have stopped phoning home etc.

I'd say the numbers are probably way beyond 1% to make them bring out the astroturfers and shills in such force. But they also forget to make the gang drop the old lies and invent new ones!

With 6 billion people on Earth there should be about 2 billion PC users. Thus, 25-30 million, as Arthur estimated, Linux users are close to 1%.

There is data on Open Office downloads. Linux is 4% there. I guess this is the upper limit of the number of Linux users.

So, my estimate is 2%.

I doubt there is info on OO downloads for Linux, unless of course they get information from the various Linux distributions. Every time ubuntu is downloaded, OO is ALSO downloaded, as it is included by default, and I'm sure they don't count that. The 4% is probably only enthusiasts who want the latest version of OO before their distro adopts it - which is an astonishing number. I use linux for pretty much everything at home but I stopped downloading OO from OO.org a very long time ago... it's just not worth the hassle for the upgrade.

Andrey, Stever Ballmer himself said that the PC market is about 300 million machines (http://www.osnews.com/story/21035/Ballmer_Linux_Bigger_Competitor_than_Apple), which puts known Linux PC deployments at around 10% (3% Ubuntu, 4% Fedora, and Suse is likely around 3-4% as well). I'd call 10% the lower limit, as Linux (according to Ballmer) has greater desktop market share than Apple, and Apple has 8-9% market share.

Mathew
I don't think it's any coincidence that Microsoft achieved dominance in the American market during the same period that bottled water became omnipresent. In both instances, clever marketing convinced the general public that something that was clean, safe and free was inferior to a product encased in plastic.

Man u r so right!! Gonna keep ur sentence as a quotation in my profile.

I am a Fedora user. Switched from Windows to Fedora/RedHat several times since 2002, and made a permanent shift around 2004, I think.
I have met people who use Linux in my classes. Few people know what it is, but of those who do, I'd guess around half of them use it.
Now, the sample of people I am talking about is about five people, out of about one hundred, in a high school, two years ago. Most kids do not have their own computers, and their parents are too lazy, tech-wise, to install an OS different from the one the computer came with- Windows.
Things have probably changed somewhat. I for one have added four or five users to the population, mostly through example. They see my computer and want some of the power I exert over it for their own computers. Also, local stores and online retailers are adding more and more computers with Linux as a default OS to their product lines, so in the next few years the number of tech-lazy people with Linux should increase slightly.
Essentially I'm trying to say, 5-10% sounds reasonable. Anything under 4% or over 20% sounds like a lie.

L I find it humorous, when today people quote there parents as being tech inferior.

The Home PC revolution started in the 80;s and really hit strides in the 90's.

Linux has been talking about being king since the mid 90's and really had not moved to much further.

And your parents possibly I can't say maybe they are tech newbies, but they most likely grew up in the Unix, Xenix world. My first OS on my first serious computer was SCO Xenix.

Many people stick with MS OS's since it actually does *work*, over time as we age, we enjoy doing other things. We like boating fishing camping, we have lost the pale look of someone sitting in front of there computer tweaking it 24/7 to get that last bit out of it. So we looked for something that just works keeps working and is not a pain. We leave the serious computer work, if we are in that field for work. So in these cases we install MS products, since despite the bad press... they do work.

Sure my OpenSuse, and Ubuntu installs work good, but I often spend a lot of time tweaking this or that. And my time is work more to do other things.

TO me the idea that Linux would dethrone MS died long ago, I know there is a new group trying to move it up. But, then again the programmers at MS despite what people try to say, are good.

I still have one XP box running, and in the past 5 years it has never blue screened crashed or caused any other unwanted issues. It has just worked. It only gets rebooted for patchs. I can say the same for Vista, and my only beef with Vista had nothing to do with Vista. It was with third party hardware manufactures *HP* who realized all those old scanners and printers just keep working. So the only way to get new business was to take advantage of the release of Vista and say sorry no support please buy a new product.

"Linux has been talking about being king since the mid 90's and really had not moved to much further."

The Linux kernel was introduced in 1991, in a market where there was already a monopoly (lasting to these days). And not any monopoly: one with brutal vendor lock-ins in all their products. Tell me how it would "be king" in mid-90s. Besides, in hasn't moved much? You utterly lost your touch with reality there, sir.

"Many people stick with MS OS's since it actually does *work*"

No, it doesn't. Windows requires third-party drivers to interact with most any piece of hardware. It also requires third-party antivirus technology lest using it becomes prohibitively dangerous. Most software (games, Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc.) that people quote as being reasons for staying with Windows is produced by third parties. It does not "just work". The environment has been bent to adapt to it, making it work much like a drunkard can be thought of walking correctly along a street bent to follow his erratic path.

You, like untold millions, have been conditioned to believe that all that Windows does is all that can be done. So, yes, Windows can do everything. You have been conditioned to believe that device drivers (software) should be done by device (hardware) makers, not OS (software) makers. To believe that requiring more CPU, more RAM and more HD is the hallmark of any new OS version. To believe that devoting a fair amount of CPU cycles to running antiviruses is so natural you don't even complain. That whatever outrageous clause in an EULA should be clicked-through without second thought. That searching the web for workarounds to elude artificial limitations that your OS wants to impose on you is natural. That defragmenting hard disks is unavoidable. That reformatting the HD and reinstalling the OS is a regular maintenance issue, because any computer (people even equate Windows = computer) gets slower, more bug-ridden and cruft-flooded with time. That's just how things are!

No, it's not. There is a whole free world out there, and everyone is welcome!

I have been using Ubuntu at work and at home now for two years. I have become very comfortable with it, and cannot imagine going back to Windows. However during that period of time, I have stopped at one or another coffee house almost every morning and I have never seen anyone running anything but MS or Apple systems. In fact, I don't think I have ever even seen anybody running Firefox either! It has always been IE on MS machines, and Safari on Apple machines. Firefox is popular at my place of work however.

I have a friend at work who says he runs Ubuntu at home - out of 55 employees - that makes just under 2%!

My own take on all this is that Linux desktop adoption in the U.S. is not greater than 1%, and is probably around 2% world-wide.

I think that the average U.S. citizen, regardless of education level, does not know what a browser is, does not know how it differs from the installed OS, or even how the OS differentiates from the hardware it is running on. I further think that as time goes on, the average user's understanding of these things will actually decrease.

Great review !

For long, I also suspect that the constant repetition of the phrase that Linux has no more than 1% share on the desktop market hides a not-so-obscure marketing interest. ;-)

Regards

I'd have to agree that outside of the US appears to have much higher adoption rates.

I'm based in Australia, I regularly encounter others running various versions of linux and BSD.

I work for a company mostly in the online space, to give you a quick breakdown for my work experiences

We have 4 staff who work basically full time in various iterations of linux, BSD and openSolaris

We have 2 more who work back and forth between linux and windows.

This is in a company with a total of 18 staff, bringing it in at just under 25%

among my family and general acquaintances, the linux useage would sit at around 10%

When Adobe came out with Flash Player 10, a number of web sites switched to the newest version. Flash Player 10 was important because of some very serious security holes in the earlier version.


It seems to me that an application that would be downloaded for all platforms, would give you a pretty good measurement. This particular application is usually added after the fact because it is not included with the OS distribution. (I know the latest Ubuntu has an open source flash player, but not all web sites acknowledge it).


I have always wondered what the percentages were of the various downloads. You have the Windows .exe, the OSX .dmg, and YUM, .tar.gz, .rpm and .deb, for the different distributions of Linux. I'm sure Adobe has the numbers. You don't put the resources into developing an application for a platform if no one is using it. Don't forget, Adobe's paying market consists of those who provide content. Their product is most valuable if the content providers know they will have the largest possible audience. Even Microsoft recognizes this truth, which is why Silverlight is being developed for Moblin. Silverlight can't compete with Adobe for content providers if they ignore the Linux audience.