Xfce, LXDE, & GNOME Are Running On Ubuntu XMir

[GreatEmerald]

I suspect the accuracy falls quite a bit when western companies are trying to estimate market share in, say, China (particularly given that a lot of the large sites where data is taken from - like Google, BBC, Wikipedia etc. are blocked in China). I would also suspect that in developing nations Linux would be a bit more popular than in the West, due to the price being a more important factor, and due to concerns over security and reliance on a western company, countries like China would be more keen to switch from Windows than the U.S. is.

That's not really the case. In China, Windows XP is still dominant. After that is Windows 7, Windows 8 and Mac OS X. In India,Windows 7 is dominant, Linux is at 1.6% (which is above the global average of 1.35%). In Japan, it's Windows 7, with an even sprinkling of all the other Windows versions. In Indonesia, it's Windows 7 with Windows XP trailing not far behind.

The country where what you said does hold true is Cuba: it's 6.8% Linux adoption there, due to national promotion. Still Windows XP has the vast majority there. And then there's Western Sahara, where it's 100% Linux usage Though honestly I have no idea what's up with that, since it isn't just one person using the internet there overall... It's like 36 people in total.

This is all data from StatCounter, which is not super reliable, but as good as it gets.

[Awesomeness]

What market share are you talking about? U.S.? Global? And how is it being measured?

Funny that Ubuntu fanboys never question Ubuntu's alleged popularity, yet it's Red Hat which makes more than a billion USD profit per year while Canonical loses money.

Anybody actually able to back up the claim that Canonical increased Linux' public awareness and that it did not simply shift from other distributions to Ubuntu but overall stayed the same?

Well, that remains to be seen. They could still turn that around and make a profit.

No indication for that.

It's not like Ubuntu is the worst operating system in the world

It's the worst GNU/Linux distribution.

"Should"? Maybe not. But some still do. Not everyone follows best programming practices.

Why should any application programmer make his app talk to Mir directly? Toolkits talk to the display server. Nothing else does usually.

[chrisb]

That's not really the case. In China, Windows XP is still dominant. After that is Windows 7, Windows 8 and Mac OS X.

This is all data from StatCounter, which is not super reliable, but as good as it gets.

It does not seem reliable at all: according to that site, Android usage in China is 0%.

[chrisb]

Funny that Ubuntu fanboys never question Ubuntu's alleged popularity, yet it's Red Hat which makes more than a billion USD profit per year while Canonical loses money.

It depends what you mean by popularity. Red Hat makes money from enterprise services and support, with an emphasis on servers. If that is what you mean by popularity, then Red Hat is indeed more popular. If by popularity you mean "number of desktop users", and you also believe that web browsers are a good metric for measuring that, they Ubuntu is more popular (Wikimedia stats)

At the end of the day, they are both good distributions, but perhaps for slightly different reasons.

[GreatEmerald]

It does not seem reliable at all: according to that site, Android usage in China is 0%.

That's the "Desktop OS" stat. If anything, it's odd that they show Android as an option to begin with. What you're expecting is this: http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os...306-201306-map

[GreatEmerald]

It depends what you mean by popularity. Red Hat makes money from enterprise services and support, with an emphasis on servers. If that is what you mean by popularity, then Red Hat is indeed more popular. If by popularity you mean "number of desktop users", and you also believe that web browsers are a good metric for measuring that, they Ubuntu is more popular (Wikimedia stats)

You can't really tell, because most distributions don't have user agents advertising the distributions. For instance openSUSE doesn't (hence why it shows up so low ? those are ancient openSUSE versions from the time they still used to do that). Ubuntu might still be doing that, but from the statistics we can only say that Ubuntu has only 39% of the desktop Linux share. Definitely not more users than everyone else combined.

[dee.]

This is all data from StatCounter, which is not super reliable, but as good as it gets.

And those stats are totally useless. They're biased, counted with flawed methology, and do not represent real usage statistics in any way. All they do is count page views on websites that are in co-operation with statcounter (about 3 million websites). That's already a biased sampling.

Seriously, there are no accurate statistics for desktop OS shares, and pages like netapplications or statcounter are just selling bullshit in a bag.

[GreatEmerald]

And those stats are totally useless. They're biased, counted with flawed methology, and do not represent real usage statistics in any way. All they do is count page views on websites that are in co-operation with statcounter (about 3 million websites). That's already a biased sampling.

Seriously, there are no accurate statistics for desktop OS shares, and pages like netapplications or statcounter are just selling bullshit in a bag.

Yes, and yet their data is still as good as we can get. There are no accurate statistics, but have to use what we have.

[Vim_User]

Yes, and yet their data is still as good as we can get. There are no accurate statistics, but have to use what we have.

If you put garbage in you will get garbage out, regardless if garbage is anything you have.

[GreatEmerald]

If you put garbage in you will get garbage out, regardless if garbage is anything you have.

By that definition, Linux owns the majority of the desktop market share. No, it's better to know things, even if inaccurately, than not to attempt to do so to begin with.