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Many people view webstats with a jaundiced eye--with good reason. (page)[1][2]
Linux advocate Robert Pogson finds these statistics interesting; while not taking the numbers as gospel, he finds the trends to be fascinating. In recent weeks, he noticed an upward trend in online Linux usage numbers that has continued.[3]
oiaohm,[4] in the 3rd comment,[2] suspects there is a correlation with the revelation of the preinstalled Superfish malware on Lenovo consumer PCs, with owners apparently abandoning their manufacturer-supplied "recovery" mechanisms, defecting from Redmond's easily-exploited OS, and going instead for Linux install media.
So, Soylentils, any other guesses on a cause? Any estimates on how long the current trend will last? Will it then decrease or increase?
- [1] The comment that was referenced was quickly removed by Ziff-Davis from their site, of course.
- [2] Comments on Pogson's blog are numbered top-to-bottom but appear chronologically bottom-to-top.
- [3] Did Internet Exploder ever get .SVG support?
- [4] oiaohm is a very knowledgeable guy but his dyslexia can make his writing difficult to decipher.
(Score: 3, Funny) by SlimmPickens on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:20PM
It's because I have so many tabs open in each browser and none of my primary workstations run windows anymore ;)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @12:33AM
> It's because I have so many tabs open in each browser and none of my primary workstations run windows anymore ;)
I'm balancing you out. I'm linux-only, and I have a couple of hundred open tabs. But I spoof my user-agent (and associated javascript variables) to say I'm on windows to (a) blend in with all the other VPN users and (b) make it harder for malicious websites to exploit zero-day vulnerabilities in my browser.
(Score: 2) by Hairyfeet on Monday March 09 2015, @03:19PM
Sigh...say it with me boys and girls "Correlation is NOT causation"...sigh. Does anybody REALLY believe that somebody who buys a fucking Lenovo is gonna give enough of a shit to install Linux? Really?
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Appalbarry on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:25PM
If you drill down [statcounter.com] through the various levels of reportage, you'll find that the "massive" increase since February 18th is from 1.52% to 1.76% of total pageviews. Hardly enough to really establish much, both in terms of numbers and timespan.
Nonetheless, I wonder how this number might be skewed (eventually) by all of the TVs and other connected appliances running variants of Linux?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:59PM
0.24% of internet users [statista.com] means 7 million of them.
(do what you please with that number).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 4, Interesting) by choose another one on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:09PM
Why would appliances be counted in the "desktop os" stats, surely they would come under console or maybe tablet ?
But the real question is why is anyone interested in a small increase in desktop market share (just over an eighth the size of WinXP - an OS MS discontinued security patches for over a year ago...) when the desktop market is cratering - now smaller than mobile in several countries, see:
http://gs.statcounter.com/press/mobile-internet-usage-soars-by-67-perc [statcounter.com]
Mobile market looks very different, with about zero windows share, and of course excellent for Linux - well Android/Linux at least, GNU/Linux is as irrelevant as Windows on mobile:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201402-201502-bar [statcounter.com]
All the above is all assuming web usage market stats actually matter, and that you believe them...
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @05:16AM
Well...there's lies. Then there are damn lies. But worse of all there's statistics.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:27PM
oiaohm,[4] in the 3rd comment,[2] suspects there is a correlation with the revelation of the preinstalled Superfish malware on Lenovo consumer PCs, with owners apparently abandoning their manufacturer-supplied "recovery" mechanisms, defecting from Redmond's easily-exploited OS, and going instead for Linux install media.
This possible uptrend is too soon after StupidFish to be associated to it. Non-techies they wouldn't just jump to a Linux distro right away. Most won't know that Linux would run on the same hardware that they own. How do they transfer their documents? "Does it run Office, and Solitaire, and is there a blue 'E'?"
It's nice to project wishes upon probable statistical anomalies and proclaim "Finally! It's the week of the Linux desktop!" Maybe if every Linux advocate makes the declaration at least once a day it will eventually come true. Or, it may just conjure up Stallmanjuice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @12:03AM
possible uptrend
You can claim (even without providing evidence) that the trend won't last--that was 1 of the questions posed--or that it isn't broad-based across user types, but to say that it is hypothetical when their count has expanded where it was smaller before is just fanboy denialism from a competing camp.
One might even call it typical of that camp.
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @02:09AM
You can claim (even without providing evidence) that the trend won't last
Whoa there Sonny! This was moving up, and anything moving up is potentially the first domino on that slippery slope up to the Year of the Linux Desktop! Stand back now. I don't want anyone to get hurt in the stampede. 'Statistics' is one of the Four Horsemen of the Linpocalypse!
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:50PM
It seems to point to a Google search that has exactly 3 entries.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by wonkey_monkey on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:43PM
Because the search term only appears on three pages (as far as Google knows)
Here's another for your bemusement - the search fragment "only appears on seven pages" also only generates three results: https://www.google.com/search?site=&source=hp&q=%2B%22only%20appears%20on%20seven%20pages%22&=&=&oq=&gs_l= [google.com]
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @10:52PM
Yes and stop calling it Internet Exploder. It makes you look dumb
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:18PM
stop calling it Internet Exploder. It makes you look dumb
Why? Isn't that its name? And isn't it named for what it does? Explodes the Internet? And wasn't this what exploded Micro$erf, and got them convicted of being an illegal monopoly? So I don't see how using the real names for things makes anyone look unable to speak (or did you mean a different meaning of "dumb"?).
(Score: 2) by dyingtolive on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:39PM
I'm actually okay with the first two. The last two read like op-ed.
Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Sunday March 08 2015, @07:29PM
Basically you're saying, i.e., IE?
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday March 09 2015, @10:40AM
Microsoft will do way more to get $$ than many other companies. They are completely spineless. On top of this they are convicted of being a monopolist in US and EU courts. So they the deserves the name Micro$oft. Since 1984 "the bomb" is a symbol for malfunctioning software that are on the way to explode, with great inspiration from Apple Macintosh. Internet Explorer is known in the spineless tradition to ignore or bastardize standards. And it's prone to software malfunction, serious malfunction. Thus it get the name Internet Exploder.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:10PM
Don't care for the editorializing footnotes. They would be better as comments in the post.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:35PM
All of the footnotes are mine.
The editor only added the li tag to those.
Some here may object to the barb directed at the single-platform browser, but all others are perfectly appropriate as-is.
Let me guess: You skipped out on English Composition class.
If you like to see stories that agree perfectly with your sensibilities, there's a cure for that.
http://soylentnews.org/submit.pl [soylentnews.org]
-- gewg_
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @01:37AM
Did Internet Exploder ever get .SVG support?
You are pure troll baiting there. It would have taken you about 3 seconds of googling to see if it were true or not.
You are using baiting questions to foster 'we vs they' 'debate'. It is nothing more than trying to create a fight. Someone called you out on it.
Your other 'questions' are basically of the same ilk but slanted towards what you want people to think.
Let me demonstrate how it works "Can gewg_ tell the difference between fostering debate and pushing his agenda?" See how I phrased my opinion in the form of a question that is backed up by what you have done? The media 'news outlets' use this form of 'debate' to good effect for not fostering debate. But to make fun of their perceived opponent. I keep saying this but it is getting harder and harder to say gewg_, you are better than that.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday March 08 2015, @05:48AM
Don't care for the editorializing footnotes. They would be better as comments in the post.
Only one that seems out of place is 3, because 1. a search would find it and 2. "Internet Exploder". Though to be fair, the editors have been trying to clean that stuff up. Gewg is just determined to add as many as possible because he likes putting more work on the editors.
I didn't even noticed he did it in this one until others pointed it out. Funny enough, the last submission he did something similar on, I said his name replacement habit was "only a small step above complaining about "MicroSux Internet Exploder" so maybe he added that footnote specifically for me. Either that, or he's slowly devolving into a stereotypical neckbeard linux user and by sometime next year his posts will be indistinguishable from parody. :)
(Score: 1) by Refugee from beyond on Sunday March 08 2015, @09:28AM
They are fine as long as news text and footnotes are visually separated in some way.
Instantly better soylentnews: replace background on article and comment titles with #973131.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:28PM
Personally, I am rooting for Linux Desktop to stay right where it is. If it gets too popular it will attract the attention of the bad guys (Virus, BotNets, etc.) in much greater numbers than today.
Everybody is fooling themselves if they think that Linux is some how much more secure than Windows. Social Engineering is the same....all it takes is one bad click and your toast.
It may be a false sense of security, but I feel I can browse without too much fear that simply visiting a WWW page will get me powned.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @02:03AM
I'm with you but for a different reason. I've been using Linux since the mid-90s and have witnessed the community tear itself apart in the name of chasing more desktop users. We keep reinventing stuff and dumbing things down to attract the lowest common denominator. Average users aren't the problem, it's our belief that we need to modify our OS to fit their needs. Nobody modified Linux to make it easier for me when I was first learning. However, despite all the rough edges and a lack of technical knowledge, I wasn't turned off and I didn't need the training wheels. In fact, breaking stuff was part of my process and I learned many valuable lessons along the way. I didn't need safeguards to protect me from my own stupidity because I wasn't smart enough to configure a production system that mattered, let alone manage one for somebody else.
Linux is certainly better today in many ways but it's also worse in others. I have vision issues and I suffer from migraines and light-sensitivity. Back in 2010, I was able to easily invert the colors of a window (Super+N in Compiz, Ctrl+Super+U in KDE) which was such a relief at night. Fast forward to today and it's extremely hit-and-miss. Compiz is practically dead and the Invert plugin is flaky on a good day. KDE's invert, which is more modern, is just as unpredictable because of issues with OpenGL/CL versions and GPU drivers. I've got three machines of varying ages/specs and KDE's invert works on just one of them -- and often crashes. I can sometimes get it working with XFCE+Compiz but it often takes hours of troubleshooting during the initial install.
My point is that my multi-monitor 3D accelerated Linux desktop was absolutely amazing in 2010 but is much less so in 2015. How does that happen? With five years of development, all the bits should have improved, right? From what I can tell, the issue seems to be that the community keeps 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater' (reinventing) in the name of chasing more desktop users.
Linux would be better today if we had stopped trying to dumb things down in the name of attracting new users who can't be bothered to read and tinker. In my opinion, we don't need those users. There is value in having a technically challenging OS (weed out the idiots). People who stick with it long enough to become 'Linux users' are generally smarter in the end for doing so. Those people are then able to help others or continue to learn and eventually contribute back. Linux itself was breeding technically-competent users and developers, but today's flavors are increasingly producing more consumer-like users. We need to stop worrying about them and start fixing the backlog of bugs and focusing on building a Linux for the tech-savvy. It's okay for the masses to use Windows and Mac...
Incidentally, I still have an old install of Ubuntu 10.10 and it still rocks! I am sad to have watched as Compiz rotted, as KDE imploded (v3->v4), as Gnome became a dumbed-down pos, as systemd divided the community, as Debian betrayed everybody... I could go on...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @03:40AM
With all due respect, no one in the corporate world wants rough edges, wants users to break stuff, or wants their IT staff to have to tinker with each and every everything. Dumbing it down and making it eaiser is necessary to make it desirable for companies and the vast majority of consumers. Except for those who want to get elbow deep in this stuff, and those who have the technical skills to do so (e.g., not your average user), no one wants things that are harder to use. They don't want technology to make their lives harder because technology is supposed to make their lives easier.
Some of us want to tweak things to no end. Mechanics can be like that with their cars. But the vast majority of people just want things to work. If being an IT wiz was required to use a computer we wouldn't have the ginormous computer industry we have today. Same goes for people having to be a mechanic in order to use a car.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Nerdfest on Sunday March 08 2015, @04:34AM
Corporate IT wants a single image that can be deployed and managed for all users, and that is quite easy with Linux. They also want security and stability, which Linux covers quite nicely. Also, if a company is not from the US, claims it cares about security and then uses Windows, it's not thinking very clearly. The fact that non-US governments use Windows is completely beyond me.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Whoever on Sunday March 08 2015, @06:55AM
Many years with the availability of alternatives to Windows show that Corporate IT doesn't really care about security. Yes, there is a lot of lip service paid to security, but in the end, what they really want is to be able to pass the blame elsewhere.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday March 08 2015, @11:50AM
Desktop linux is a teenage boy who does well in math class and is not one of the cool kids.
The old graybeard teacher tells the kid, "keep working hard and you'll become a great mathematician". In comparison to that, some of the cool kids get tramp stamps and goof off a lot.
So the kid, wanting to be cool, gets an ugly tramp stamp and goofs off.
End result is the kid is no longer seriously in the running to be a great mathematician, has an ugly as F tramp stamp that everyone laughs at, and still isn't one of the cool kids. Because the cool kids were cool despite their stupid design decisions, not because of them. Oh well, there's always freebsd.
Meanwhile you got squads of 50-something white boys trying to figure out in their echo chamber which color scheme for tramp stamps is cooler and more likely to increase sales simultaneously to grannies and female urban minorities, because they're so cool (LOL) that they're experts on selling crap. Hmm we can make money selling dorks earrings or 3d desktop compositors... lets see if the kid is dumb enough to fall for it again and make a fool of himself while sending us sweet sweet contracting money "Hey, come here kid, we can sell you something to make you cool..."
Thank you gnome, kde, and systemd ! I'll be laughing at you from my freebsd desktop over here...
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @04:48AM
Everybody is fooling themselves if they think that Linux is some how much more secure than Windows. Social Engineering is the same....all it takes is one bad click and your toast.
But your toast is not the same as my toast, or anyone else's toast. Perhaps you should read Dr. Suess's Butter Battle Book. Or learn the difference between "your" and "you are" contracted into "you're". For a better and more literate Soylent News, we rely on you, and yours.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday March 08 2015, @07:30PM
That should be "nor", not "or".
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by mtrycz on Sunday March 08 2015, @06:02PM
You hope that it won't take off, so you can be part of the minority? Windows is targeted both because it's popular *and* is a security colander. Linux, being open source, the more users means the more security in the long term. The security of the two just can't be compared on terms of popularity alone.
In capitalist America, ads view YOU!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 09 2015, @11:24AM
I do hope that Linux Desktop skyrockets. Because what will skyrocket is the "standard" desktop environments. Since I don't run those, I'll not be affected by the rise of attacks on those (and the attacks will be on those environments, because they will be the easy targets). On the other hand, hardware compatibility is largely independent of the desktop environment, therefore I'll still profit from improved hardware compatibility as soon as manufacturers cannot any longer afford to ignore Linux.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 07 2015, @11:48PM
-5; troll, not funny
Personally, I attribute this entirely to systemd.
It makes linucks so much moar usable.
2015 is the year of teh lunix desktops. Gnome 3 ftw!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 08 2015, @09:14PM
those should definitely show up as 'desktop OS' Linux. i wonder if some of the newer Roku, Fire TV, and Chromecast devices show up as mobile, console, desktop, or what?