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Linux popularity across the globe (Royal Pingdom)
Royal Pingdom has published
an analysis
of global Linux usage.
"The Linux landscape is constantly changing and has a strong community of both developers and users. But where is Linux the most popular, and where are the different Linux distributions the most popular?
To try to answer these questions, we have looked at data from Google with the highly useful Insights for Search, which gave us a number of interesting and often surprising results.
Aside from just looking at Linux itself, we have included eight common Linux distributions in this survey: Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Red Hat, Mandriva, Slackware and Gentoo."
(Log in to post comments)
Linux popularity across the globe (Royal Pingdom) Posted Aug 21, 2008 20:59 UTC (Thu) by lmb (subscriber, #39048) [Link] What I want to see is a study into what "foo is a popular search term" actually means. Does this imply that people know about it? Does it mean they are interested? Does it mean they adopt it? Or is it just a meaningless number to bridge the gap of real news? I personally never google for Linux, and I'm quite a heavy user. I don't think it is an indicator of usage or even interest.
Linux popularity across the globe (Royal Pingdom) Posted Aug 21, 2008 22:00 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (guest, #774) [Link] > I personally never google for Linux, and I'm quite a heavy user I'd say you're an extremely _happy_ user, then; when I buy a new foobar hardware, plug it, and it isn't recognized (or doesn't fully work), the first thing I do is "foobar linux" in the "G" input of firefox. Similarly, a strange syslog/klog message, unless very specific, is best to google for together with the name of the OS. So, again, I guess you've never encountered any problem with Linux...
Linux popularity across the globe (Royal Pingdom) Posted Aug 22, 2008 2:35 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link] I'd say you're an extremely _happy_ user, then; when I buy a new foobar hardware, plug it, and it isn't recognized (or doesn't fully work), the first thing I do is "foobar linux" in the "G" input of firefox. Hehe, sounds like me. :-) What's concerns me is how the overall quality of information has declined due to the Internet. I sort of feel sorry for libraries as their patronage seems to be declining, and meanwhile I've got multiple tabs opened to the likes of Wikipedia (I know, I know!), Google News, LWN (obviously), and some article about digital piracy of print-magazines (a sad irony, isn't it?). I can certainly feel a little guilty for (over-)using the "Google Crutch", but with the sheer numbers of reduced-quality content articles online, I'm bound to find a HOWTO somewhere on how to get my shiny new foobar working in Linux. Back to lbm's (parent) comment, I'm reading between the lines that perhaps you feel that measuring Linux penetration based on raw Google searches with Geo-IP tracking is a poor metric. I agree with you--this seems like a cheesy correlation at best. But, I'm left wondering whether, in this day and age, one really can establish market penetration merely by Google (or other search engine) hits categorized by geopolitical regions. Comments, anyone?
Linux popularity across the globe (Royal Pingdom) Posted Aug 22, 2008 6:12 UTC (Fri) by asamardzic (guest, #27161) [Link] > What's concerns me is how the overall quality of information has declined due to the Internet. I'd say that the quality of information on the Internet declined radically too - back in the day, an Altavista/Yahoo/Lycos/Google search could usually get you right to the point, while today one has to wade through lengthy list of blog posts and alike random crap in order to find a meaningful answer...
Linux popularity across the globe (Royal Pingdom) Posted Aug 22, 2008 10:56 UTC (Fri) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link] In the very beginning you don't even needed to search at all. See a pattern? Google won his current status by being more accurate than Yahoo and Altavista. Maybe the time has come for the next step? Build a system that makes easier for people to get to the content they want and the price can be HUGE. It's not an easy task, mind you.
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