Intel's Linux Driver Continues To Be Most Popular

Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver continues to be the most popular GPU driver on the Linux desktop.

As talked about earlier in the summer, Intel Winning Over NVIDIA For Linux Enthusiasts, comes from OpenBenchmarking.org statistics via the Phoronix Test Suite software. While this is just reflective of those who run the software and opt to let it collect hardware/software statistics, the numbers tend to be quite interesting and relevant to Linux enthusiasts.

For those that haven't seen yet, the September 2012 numbers for the different categories are now automatically updated on OpenBenchmarking.org. When it comes to the display drivers, Intel is the most popular now at a 41.8% "market share" among the popular drivers. Intel's usage rate continues to climb while the NVIDIA binary driver and others are falling.

This isn't incredibly surprising since Intel is well known for their extensive open-source driver support, they only support a single open-source Linux driver and no other option so there isn't any fragmentation, and with the Ivy Bridge launch earlier this year their graphics hardware is much better. I would suspect Intel's usage rate on the Linux desktop to continue to climb into next year, especially with the next-generation Haswell offering big performance improvements and with Valley View on the Atom side they're returning to in-house graphics rather than PowerVR and their crusty blob.

When it comes to their processor market-share, Intel continues to dominate at just under 80% per the CPU category.

Another interesting statistic is about disk drives on Linux with Western Digital and Seagate being in a dead heat for being the most popular disk vendor.

EXT4 is the most widely used file-system on these disk drives.

Other distributions are gaining ground on Ubuntu with the OpenBenchmarking.org usage.

A desktop look at GNOME vs. Unity adoption.

See more interesting statistics and benchmark results from the category listings.