The Decade of Linux on the Desktop. You're in it.

[liam_on_linux]

Apple macOS is a UNIX™. It's the best-selling commercial Unix of all time. I wonder if how many old-school Unix folks consider all Mac users in the 21st century to be their brothers-in-arms? Not many, I'd guess.

When it happened, many Unix folks don't consider it a _real_ Unix. Even thought just a few years later, and AIUI after spending a _lot_ on the exercise, Apple got the UNIX™ branding.

 

Now, by contrast:

 

I've spent proper time trying to get some rough estimates on Linux distro usage. Ubuntu is cagey but claims ITRO low double-digit millions of machines fetching updates. Let's say circa 20M users.

 

Apparently, over 95% on LTS and the vast majority on the default GNOME edition. (Poor sods.)

 

The others are cagier still, but Statistica and others have vaguely replicable numbers.

 

My estimates are:

 

~2x as many Ubuntu as Debian users

 

Between them they are about 2/3 of Linux users

 

All Red Hat/CentOS/Fedora derivatives are about 10% of the market.

 

Comparing them to Steam client numbers, Arch is much of the rest: the gap between ~75% Debian family and ~10% RH family.

 

In China, the government has been pushing Linux *hard* for 8-9 years. Uniontech (Deepin) is one of the biggest and last November boasted 3M paid users. 

 

Is that all? 

 

Kylin is also big but let's guess it's #2.  

 

So, if, optimistically, 10% pay, then that's only 20-30M, comparable to Ubuntu in ROTW.

 

Maybe Kylin (also a Debian BTW, they both are) brings it to 50M. 

 

ChromeOS is a Linux. It's Gentoo underneath. Google sells hundreds of millions. Estimated user base is 200-300M and probably a lot more.

 

Chromebooks outsold Macs (by $ not units, so 10x over) in the US by 2017 and worldwide by 2020.

 

Which means there are, ballpark, order of magnitude scale, 10x as many ChromeOS users as all other Linuxes put together.

 

The year of Linux came 5-6 years ago.

 

But it's the _wrong kind_ of Linux so the Penguinisti didn't even notice. 

Comments

[lovingboth]

Given the number of bots, I wouldn't trust any stats from web browsing.

Be interesting to know the splits of, for example, downloads of Zoom.

[liam_on_linux]

A fair point... and something that is getting worse and worse...