Is there only 1% on the Linux desktop?

Recently, according to a netapplications survey, the authors conclude that GNU/Linux Desktop Users only account for 1.02% of global computer users, which is pitiful. What is the actual situation? This is a basic issue of understanding and must be clarified.

 

As we all know, all commercial surveys require a large amount of investment and external support, with a clear purpose and will not be purely a survey of public welfare. In fact, there is a lot of objection (controversy) to the above investigation, and there are many different voices.

 

First of all, we need to understand how netapplications (this article referred to as Na) is investigated. In fact, in such a huge global market, the NA survey sample (that is, the survey site group) is relatively small, limited to the United States, or even more focused on Canada. The investigation conclusion of Na must be biased, and it is inevitable that the results will be partial. It is easy to imagine that different survey samples (spaces) have different conclusions. Assuming that our focus is on some active technical websites, we are sure that the number of GNU/Linux users is more than 1%. For example, according to the Netcraft survey, GNU/Linux users account for 45% of the server (assuming that most Apache servers run on GNU/Linux ).

In fact, it is difficult to accurately count the user groups of GNU/Linux, because its boundary is not clear, which is caused by the free propagation of GNU/Linux. People can observe the GNU/Linux user groups from different angles. For example, according to the trend function of Google's search engine, some people found that over the past four years, people (globally) have been paying more attention to Ubuntu, but XP has been paying more and more attention, today, the former has even exceeded the latter (see "ubuntu, now more popular than Windows XP ). Of course, the level of attention cannot directly represent the number of users, but there is a certain relationship between the two. Because, assuming Ubuntu has a very small number of users (such as less than 1%), how can people (globally) Pay more attention to it than XP? (It is an objective fact that Ubuntu pays more attention to XP than we do .)

 

In fact, over the past two years, I have been paying attention to the global automatic survey results published by www.w3counter.com every month. For example, in January April this year, 22,926 independent IP addresses were investigated based on 64,263,702 websites, GNU/Linux accounts for 2.16% of users. I think this number is trustworthy.

 

According to Bruce byfield's article (in May 4, Linux Desktop Macet share: greater than one percent ?), After strict logical analysis and data comparison, he believes that the number of GNU/Linux users in the world accounts for 2 ~ The 5% formula is more practical. In fact, in some countries, in some regions, the number of GNU/Linux users is now far more than a few percent. According to officials, this year's China International software expo does not have a Linux exhibition area. I think this is probably related to the "paradox" of 1% of the GNU/linuyx users. In China, in recent years, the GNU/Linux user base has not increased, but has shrunk! No matter what you say, in China's software industry, I just can't see any "domestic" GNU/Linux software. This is not something I can't use. That's the truth!

Source: http://blog.csdn.net/yuanmeng001/archive/2009/05/06/4153336.aspx