Open Source Blog

Market share figures are not easy to come by, which is part of the reason for the Linux community to believe that Linux is being far more successful on the desktop than it really is.

But a firm called OneStat.com did some recent research into the desktop operating systems being used by 2 million visitors to various websites around the world. OneStat.com's system can discover what desktop OS website visitors are running. According to its research, just 0.36% were running Linux. 96.7% were running Windows, and 2.7% Macs.

So for all the hype, it seems there still aren't many users running Linux on their desktop machines - at least, not the kind of users that visited websites being monitored by OneStat.com. Which is actually quite a large caveat, because it seems one of the areas where Linux has started to make in-roads on the desktop is for uses such as call centers, where high volume, low-cost desktops are the order of the day. In some cases, those machines would never be used to visit websites.

The $6bn services and consultancy firm Siemens IT Solutions & Services was installing so many Linux desktops for its customers back in 2003, that it predicted Linux would leapfrog MacOS (which is a Linux-based OS anyway) as the second biggest desktop operating system after Windows by 2008. Of course, it may yet achieve that, but the OneStat.com figures suggest it still has a way to go even if we allow for a margin of error of a few percentage points.

The OneStat.com figures are probably not too far out though: they also found that the latest Windows OS, Vista, was in use on around 3% of desktops worldwide (with 94% using older versions of Windows). A recent survey by Computer Business Review found that out of 200 senior IT decision-makers in the UK, 2% of their firms had already upgraded to Vista. That suggests the OneStat.com figures are pretty representative.

Linux may yet make significant inroads as a desktop operating system. Many believe it can deliver productivity equal to Windows at a fraction of the cost, and the Linux community would claim it is a more secure, robust operating system than Windows.

The Linux community points to large Linux roll-outs in the public sector as proof of its growing popularity on the desktop, but perhaps an even greater market lies in developing countries, where Windows may prove too expensive for a vast proportion of the world's population.

On the other hand, many doing business with the more developed nations may opt for Windows for compatibility reasons. Ultimately though, there is surely room in the market for three viable desktop operating systems, and Linux is one of them. As its message spreads - by word of mouth as much as the marketing of any vendors - we expect it to overtake MacOS as the second most-popular desktop operating system inside of three years. The question is, exactly how much share will it steal from Microsoft's Windows?

Current growth rates suggest Gates and Ballmer do not need to lose too much sleep just yet. Indeed, a bigger concern for them right now is getting existing Windows users to buy into Vista.

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