2017 Linux Laptop Survey Results

Following the two week survey process, here are the results from our inaugural Linux Laptop Survey. There are 30,171 responses, a lot of data to now sift through while in this article is an overview of the initial findings. There may be some additional follow-up articles in the days/weeks ahead when sifting through more of the data.

The factor most sough after by Linux users when deciding on a new laptop was the build quality at 30.7% followed by performance at 25.2% and then in third place at 14.1% was the Linux pre-loaded / official Linux support factor. In fourth was then the battery life at 13.2%.

While there are more Linux laptop vendors around the world now then in the past and some notable companies like Dell offering pre-loaded XPS laptops, a vast majority of Linux users are still getting their laptops without Linux pre-loaded. Only 10.3% of the respondents had said their most recent laptop purchase came pre-loaded with Linux.

To little surprise, Ubuntu was the most popular Linux distribution running on the respondents' laptops. 38.9% of the respondents were said to be using Ubuntu while interesting in second place was Arch Linux at 27.1% followed by Debian at 15.3%. Rounding out the top ten were then Fedora at 14.8%, Linux Mint in 5th at 10.8%, openSUSE / SUSE in sixth at 4.2%, Gentoo in seventh at 3.9%, CentOS / RHEL in eighth at 3.1%, Solus in ninth at 2%, and Manjaro in tenth at 1.6%. The other Linux distributions had each commanded less than 1% of the overall response.

From this survey, 62.2% of the participants said they are not dual-booting their laptop with another operating system. To some surprise, nearly 30% of those surveyed are dual-booting their Linux laptop with Windows while 4.4% were dual-booting their laptop with another Linux distribution and 3.5% were dual-booting with macOS.

In terms of the primary tasks for Linux users' laptops, 82.5% reported web browsing followed by 73.1% for software development followed by office work in third at 47.7%. Following close by in fourth was multimedia at 45.2% and then in fifth was school work at 25.3%. In sixth was gaming by 21.1% of those responding.