Linux growth rate?

[DaveWolles]

hi,
anyone has any official links to growth rates of Linux in general and specific Linux distro's? for desktops and/or servers.

the figures i currently have are nice but 3 years old :D

it would be nice to have something that compares with Windows. because a Linux growth rate of say 50% might seem much, but there's far less Linux in circulation than Windows.

thanks :)

[questionasker]

i dont know exactly, but i heard somewhere recently that linux passed mac for 2nd in market share. mac had like 2.9%, now linux has 3.4%
i guess that means that still over 90% use /\/\$ {make sick face, about to throw up} ;)

[Hayl]

not really accurate but at least current numbers

http://counter.li.org/

[DMR]

Originally posted by questionasker
... but i heard somewhere recently that linux passed mac for 2nd in market share. mac had like 2.9%, now linux has 3.4% Yeah- if those numbers aren't exact, they're at least very close to the figures I saw cited in a news article 2 weeks ago.

You should take any published numbers concerning OS market share with a grain of salt though, especially when you're talking about a free/open-source OS like Linux. Different studies use different methods to arrive at their final calculations; some only judge by the number of retail copies sold, some count dowloads in this number, some do not. Sometimes an estimate of "pirated" copies is included, which is pretty much meaningless and usually has a political intent behind it- that is, it only serves to inflate a certain *cough!* MS *cough!* OS vendor's apparent share.

Regardless of the methodology, a true measure of an OS's market share would be an exact count of the number of copies of it in use around the world. Given the fact that one copy of Linux can be freely distributed to as many people you want, that would be a hard number to pinpoint.

[Arjay]

I read this post the other day and it came to mind when i was browsing this site.

w3schools (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)

Hope this helps :-)

[JuiceWVU202]

http://www.distrowatch.com/

[DaveWolles]

thanks for the replies.

the browser stats are very interesting indeed!

i'll check distrowatch too :)