[...] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptI wanted to be among the first to post about how 2008 looks to be the year of desktop Linux (half jokingly, of course). Then I thought about how far the Linux OS has to go before it is approaching even Apple’s slice of the market (which … [...]

[...] Read the rest of this great post here [...]

Then I thought about how far the Linux OS has to go before it is approaching even Apple’s slice of the market (which by the way is getting bigger).

Actually, GNU/Linux on the desktop caught up with Mac OS a few years ago. They are doing well these days in the year of the Vista flop. NetApplications lists GNU/Linux at less than 1% while w3schools lists GNU/Linux at more than 3%. They cannot both be right and in fact both are underestimating GNU/Linux because they have a North American/Windows leaning. GNU/Linux is very hot in Brazil/Russia/India/China. See Google.com/trends and look up linux,windows for USA and for China to see what I mean. Checkout Beijing while you are at it. The growth rate of GNU/Linux has been very high for years and we know millions of GNU/Linux systems run there due to deals by SUN and TurboLinux and RedFlag. There are many more people in the developing world who will absorb GNU/Linux on the new cheap platforms. Expect dramatic growth in 2008. ASUS alone expects to add 5 million seats. ASUS competitors will jump on that bandwagon.

Nearly every group that looks at share, looks at paid share, where someone has gone into a store, and purchased a copy, either off the shelf or with a new computer, This is fine for Windows, because that is the way most people obtain Windows. However, Linux is more often obtained through online downloads, and there often is no indication how many copies are downloaded.

Often a person purchasing a new computer, ends up with a copy of Windows, whether they actually want it or not, even if they remove it and install Linux, that’s still a paid copy of Windows, and it’s counted for Windows, but not Linux. So Linux on the desk top may be far more popular then the “paid share” indicators show,

I suspect that as Windows gets more and more expensive, and hardware continues to get cheaper, making Windows a larger and larger piece of the cost pie, that more and more vendors will be pressured into looking for alternatives, especially smaller vendors.

[...] This work is highly commendable and is the kind of thing that gives Linux staying power in a variety of uses, including server, mobile, embedded and desktop [...]

[...] is a very interesting move, and one that potentially backs-up Jay’s contention that 2008 will be the year of non-desktop [...]

[...] advantage Jay Lyman, June 24, 2008 @ 5:46 pm ET We had a feeling this might be a big year more for non-desktop Linux, particularly for mobile and embedded uses of the open source OS. This week’s deal by Finnish [...]

[...] director Jim Zemlin how significant Linux is in the mobile and embedded spaces, some of the non-desktop Linux uses we predicted would be hot this [...]

[...] into the Linux Sandwich of 2009 Jay Lyman, January 8, 2009 @ 1:22 pm ET I wrote last year about how 2008 would be the ‘Year of Non-desktop Linux’. As we embark on [...]