from the does-homework-suck-less-with-Linux? dept.
According to StatCounter, in September 2014, Linux usage in Malta was 1 percent. By October, usage was over 4 percent. There was a peak after Christmas and current numbers are around 5 percent.
Blogger and Linux advocate Robert Pogson has charted the numbers. He says:
Malta is one of those places where the small size allows one to see significant migrations to GNU/Linux desktop in their full glory. Notice the ascendance of GNU/Linux in the same week that school started that year. The peak usage was on Thursday, 2015-Jan-8 at 6.83% a day or two after the Christmas break ended. Even use on weekends showed dramatic growth.
Related Stories
Blogger and Linux advocate Robert Pogson reports via one of his many charts that, according to StatCounter, the usage rate for Linux in Gibraltar has increased dramatically.
What is it about islands[sic] that allow them to plunge into FLOSS unlike most larger countries? Here's another. Gibraltar moved from almost nothing to ~16% GNU/Linux desktops this week. High school resumed last week. Further, FreeBSD is along for the ride.
FreeBSD (0.67%) and Chrome OS GNU/Linux (1.68%) peaked on September 21. GNU/Linux began to ramp up on September 20 and is still rising (16.41%). Even "Unknown" jumped to 0.67% on September 20 and reached 0.96% yesterday. It could be Gibraltar's schools have adopted FLOSS as affordable and robust. Nearby, Malta stood at 5.42% and Reunion stood at 6.71%.
Previous: Interesting Usage Statistics for Desktop Linux in Malta
Big Jump in Bahrain: Linux Now At 16 Percent
[Ed note: Gibraltar is not an island; it "is a British Overseas Territory located on the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula at the entrance of the Mediterranean" with a population of about 30,000 people.]
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Thursday April 16 2015, @03:36AM
Did some university on the island start using Linux on their latest laptops? Wentworth in Boston does.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday April 16 2015, @04:02AM
In a small town, all it takes is one interested instructor to get a lot of kids to try something like a new OS, but risking the family computer might not be too popular with the family. So it might be something line a corporate or government refresh sending a lot of older computers to surplus and getting them donated to schools or something.
In spite of Washington state having a massive refurb project for surplus state computers into shcools (run by the state prisons). The schools put them into labs. They beg licenses from Microsoft who would rather give windows away than get a bunch of kids trained in linux.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday April 16 2015, @12:36PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @01:32PM
Well it is a technology institute, at least theoretically. Knew a girl who went there once....to see her boyfriend.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @03:38AM
This is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever seen. And I've seen Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @04:01AM
There was a time when the anti-FOSS crowd would point to the numbers given by these aggregator services and scoff that Linux usage was 1 percent.
Now, when the numbers show something different, the services and their statistics are suddenly of no consequence.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @04:06AM
100% of Maltese users using Linux would still be pretty much 0% globally.
1000% of Maltese users using Linux would yet still be pretty much 0% globally.
Even 10000% of Maltese users using Linux would once more be pretty much 0% globally.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Thursday April 16 2015, @05:07AM
Yes and no. Not sure if Malta is quite big enough but if any notable political subdivision were to get anything like 100% penetration top to bottom it really would change everything. Suddenly every commercial entity doing business with it would have to take that fact into account. IE only webpages are already becoming rare outside narrow niches but such a development would instantly end it outside of internal WANs. Office documents would also suddenly offer alternatives assured to be readable. And so on. The network effect that has locked Microsoft and Office into a position where they are considered unassailable by 'all right thinking people' would quickly fall apart... even faster than the mobile revolution is already challenging many of the same assumptions; but only madmen are deploying Android and iOS in corporate productivity right now so Windows/Office is still almost entirely dominate. Being forced to interop with Linux would challenge it because once the calculus became 'everything must be interchanged in a cross platform format' the lock in vanishes. Many more would suddenly be free to shift platforms and many of them would, although many would still be locked to internal systems like Exchange.
And some lock in is probably good. I wouldn't want a sudden bandwagon away from them to destroy Microsoft and leave Google and RedHat to dominate, meet the new boss(s) which would (are) quickly become the same as the old boss. I want to see Microsoft reduced, but still a double digit player, only more like 20-30% instead of 90%. I even want to see new players. Linux under RedHat's iron rulership is in need of a new scrappy competitor.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday April 16 2015, @06:15AM
100% of Texas students would still be pretty much 0% globally.
However, when looking what the Texas School Board does with the "controversy" to the entire US education and how many education ministers exist in this world and stoopid enough to follow US as a model... (shudders).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tangomargarine on Thursday April 16 2015, @07:05AM
The population of the U.S. isn't even 5% of the world's.
Guess we don't matter either, then.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 3, Funny) by aristarchus on Thursday April 16 2015, @08:04AM
But it is Malta. Do you know of what you speak? Malta, the base of the Knights Templar, and then the Knights of Malta (still extant). Home of a language unrelated to any on earth, almost. Possible site of Atlantis, or the Isle of Circe, or that other nymph Odysseus had after (Calypso?). So yes, your math is correct. But numbers are not all the world is made of. I recommend "V" by Thomas Pynchon. Mediterranean. Big time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @05:27AM
in a sample that has 15 billion page views per month, how many unique visitors do you think are coming from Malta? Take into consideration that preferential attachment means that highly populous countries are more likely to be overrepresented in the sample since there are more websites catering to the larger populations.
Also, what are the odds that webcrawlers are excluded from the sample?
Dumbass.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @04:01AM
It is a gewg_ submission, after all. We should be thankful that we didn't get an eyeful of extreme left-wing wackiness.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @06:27AM
We should be thankful that we didn't get a google link
FTFY
(Score: 3, Touché) by aristarchus on Thursday April 16 2015, @08:17AM
It is a gewg_ submission, after all. We should be thankful that we didn't get an eyeful of extreme left-wing wackiness.
Yes, that would be terrible for you. But it does remind me of my time as a cowboy. We were pushing cattle up a chute, which tend to unnerve them and loosen their bowels. Needless to say, the bullshit was everywhere. In one memorable incident, a bovine kicked a load of such matter directly at the face of an unlucky cowpoke (no, seriously, that's what we called ourselves). The wry comment by another on the entire incident was: " Good thing you had your mouth open or you would've gotten that all over your face."
Do I have to actually draw the analogy in a way that even readers of Sad Puppies could understand? OK, If you hadn't had your mind closed, left-wing wackiness (otherwise known as the opposite of bullshit) would have gotten into you eyes and possibly spread to your mind. But this is where the joke falls flat. It was never going to happen. Do you even know were Malta is? Can you find it on a map? Are you an American? Which way is under?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @08:46AM
I approve of this comment.
(Yes, I did LOL.)
-- gewg_
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @03:43AM
What a combination! You just know that guy's a bottom.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @03:53AM
You must be new here.
Apparently, you haven't noticed that the 1st chance to go ad hominem on Pogson is generally taken by Hairyfeet.
-- gewg_
(Score: 2) by mendax on Thursday April 16 2015, @05:23AM
Excellent news, even if the reason for the increase in installations is not yet known. If the cause for the spike is indeed the requirement that Linux be installed on student computers, this is even more good news. In all religious wars, whether it be YHWH, Allah, Spaghetti Monster or Windows, MacOS, Linux, it's important to get them while they're young.
I've recently installed Ubuntu Linux on my 2008 MacBook so I can have Java 8 to use (the laptop will only support up to Snow Leopard which will only support Java 6). After changing the desktop manager to Gnome, I've come to thoroughly enjoy working with it. It's got some strange quirks but it works well enough. It works so well for me that I'm seriously considering dumping Snow Leopard in its entirety.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @08:00AM
Looks like 2014 was the year of Linux on the Island. Must be the work of the Maltese Penguin.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @06:53PM
With as much stylized artwork of Tux as there is, I expected to find a version by this name.
The closest I came was a crystal sculpture of a non-Tux penguin.
HappyDogPhotos [google.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @11:16AM
You see, this is a perfect example to give to those whiny humanities majors, when they're in their remedial math or science course that they have to take to satisfy a requirement and they say "and when am I going to have to know this stuff in real life?"
No, the small size allows one to see variability in the numbers jump around because root-n is a small number.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @07:12PM
Yeah, when plotted, the curve you get from the data these folks aggregate does often resemble a bowsaw blade.
This point tends to come up each time this topic come up. [soylentnews.org]
The actual numbers[1] are of questionable utility, but the trends are interesting.
[1] Pogson once wrote a column about an item where an inside-the-loop guy noted that, during his affiliation with a webstats operation, observed that that company didn't count something as "Linux" unless the user was running RedHat or SuSE (commercially-supported).
The referenced item was on a ZDNet page and the comment was censored within hours by that M$ partner.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 16 2015, @09:58PM
Last month, Pogson noted that there are 10 places where Linux usage is over 4 percent. [mrpogson.com]
Uruguay, Venezuela, and Cuba (places trying to get away from USAian hegemony) are on that list.
Reunion (an island nation, east of Madagascar) is another.
Timor-Leste (formerly East Timor), another island nation that was murderously oppressed by Indonesia[1] leads the pack at over 16 percent.
[1] Indonesia, in turn, was the site of a USA-funded purge of anti-Capitalists in 1965-1966 which killed millions. [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [transcend.org]
USA hegemony is still very much in evidence there.
-- gewg_