Published at LXer:

Shopping for a home computer involves more than just choosing hardware — buyers must also pick what kind of operating system they want to run that new machine. And for most people, that's long meant choosing between Microsoft's Windows, which runs on PCs, or OS, the system that operates Apple's Macintosh. Enter Linux, an operating system created by Finnish university student Linus Torvalds as a hobby. Once only a toy for geeks, Linux now is vying for a place in the consumer operating system market.
[Not "news" really, but these kinds of stories are appearing more and more on non-tech sites. – Sander]


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Wow!!! fabulous article

It is a good article. Although they admitted that it is hard to measure Linux market share since the bulk of the computers that run it did not have it as the machine's original OS, they did estimate it as approaching 7% by next year. This is a higher number than I have seen before.

I question the numbers.

My website attracts a visitor demographic that is skewed toward the non-computer-literate population and the demographic is probably a bit more Microsoft-centric than that of more sophisticated users.

Nonetheless, my site statistics hover around 88-89% Windows visitors, 4-5% Mac, 1-1.5% Linux, and most of the rest labeled "unknown" (though Solaris is starting to appear more frequently).

This suggests that presently Linux is less than 1/3 the marketshare of Mac. If we make the (rather bold) presumption that Linux scales as Mac does, and we say that Mac is 7% of the marketplace while my site shows it as 4.5%, then this suggests that the "real" Linux marketplace is around 2-2.5%. For it to rise to 7% by next year would be a formidable advance.