Hadron Quark wrote:
> "Rex Ballard" <rex.ballard@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> > I just noted this interesting Factoid
> > Roy Schestowitz wrote:
> >> Grassroots computing
> >> Linux Expo highlights open-source system
> >>
> >> ,----[ Quote ]
> >> | Currently, only 16 percent of PC users in the United States have Linux,a
> >> | and although that percentage pleases Szmajda and Joe Monti, the club's
> >> | other co-president, those numbers seem woefully small for an operating
> >> | system that is virtually hassle-proof.
> >
> > Let's see. 16 percent of the PC users have Linux.
>
> No they dont. Sorry. Impossible : a casual "real world" poll would put
> paid to that idea. I'd be very suprised if it was anymore than 2-5%.
I'd be interested in seeing either poll that showed either number.
It's not that hard to believe that 16% of the PC users have Linux.
They may not USE it all the time, but they could very easily have it
installed on their machine, or on a LiveCD, or on a second machine.
The problem is that we have no clue what people are doing with their
machine after they purchase them. After all, Linux is easiy to obtain,
not that difficult to get at least marginally functional (the display
may not be dazzling, the sound card may not work, or the WiFi card may
be "Linux hostile" but you can get a display and use it as a functional
Linux system), and it's very inexpensive.
With VMWare, VirtualPC, and Bochs, it's not hard to get Linux running
on a Windows system as a client. It's about as easy to install as
Microsoft Office or Visio. All the configuration work is done for you,
and it's ready to run "out of the box".
> > That's about 34 million, just in the united states.
> Not a chance.
If 250,000 people downloaded the latest version of Firefox (not
including corporate, secondary, and "white market piracy"), and about
100,000 people downloaded Open Office, then is it really so hard to
believe that 34 million people in the US could have downloaded and
installed Linux? A simple ubuntu appliance and vmware player would
only take about an hour to download over a broadband connection. About
80 million households now have access to broadband in some form (WiFi
at Starbucks if nothing else).
These could easily be burned onto a DVD-ROM in about 20 minutes, and a
kid who wanted to impress his friends might make 10-15 copies in a
week-end.
Of course, this is all after-market upgrades, which nobody counts. And
many people would see Linux on VMPlayer is just another really neat
application.
I bet that if every Linux advocate downloaded a DVD sized copy of
VMPlayer, and one reasonably good Linux distribution, made 15 copies,
and passed them around to 15 of their friends, that within a year, we
could have 200 million Linux users world-wide.
Of course, something like that happened in late 2002, when Knoppix was
released. Suddenly anyone who wanted to try Linux could just stick in
the CD, boot the PC, and have an "upgrade". Add a flash drive, second
drive, or external USB hard drive, and you suddenly have full Linux for
a nominal effort.
And with people playing with Linux at home, using it for useful work,
and not being plagued by hoards of viruses, worms, trojans, spyware,
malware, and Microsoft monopoly pricing, they might actually think that
Linux was better than Windows.
Linux is like the bamboo tree. For 5 years, it appears from the
surface to be nothing but a tiny little plant, but it's building a huge
root system. In 5 years, that root system produces a trunk that grows
at nearly 3 feet per day until the tree is huge.
Knoppix was released almost EXACTLY 4 years ago.
> > Another 12% are Macs. That puts the total at 28%. Which means that
> > only 72% of the PCs are running Linux exclusively, even though 99% of
> > the PCs were sold with Windows.
>
> A typo there I think.
Actually, a bit of mischief with statistics. Mac sales just climbed to
12% of the units sold in the last quarter. I think the actual current
percentage of total U.S. user base is about 3%.
> > The good news is that if Linux is growing at 40%/year, and Mac is
> It's not.
I'm at least giving some (barely) plausible argument for my
possibility.
All you seem to be capable of is denial. That river in egypt.
> > getting similar growth, this means that about 13 million new users will
> > be adopting Linux, and about as many will be adopting Macs, putting
> > "enhanced" systems at about 30 million or about 40% of annual U.S.
> > sales. That's a huge shift for an aftermarket shift. Keep in mind
>
> If it were true.
>
> > that other countries with larger populations and more new users, Linux
> > has market shares as high as 40%. The US has the lowest Linux adoption
> > rate as a percentage of the PC user base.
>
> One would not be too surprised there : the US is alwys a bit behind the
> curve compared to, say, Germany where Linux is more popular than it is
> in, say, England.
Linux is also very popular in Asia, South America, and India.
Keep in mind we are not talking Linux to the exclusion of Windows, but
as an "Enhancement" to their PC environment.
> > The last time we saw that kind of aftermarket growth was Trumpet
> > Winsock and Netscape, within 2 years, 200 million users, the equivalent
> > of double the annual sales of PCs, were using the Internet and Web
> > browsers. Today, nearly 1 billion devices are used to access the Web.
> --
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