Wow! After looking at all the comments on Thursday’s post titled “Linux’s Market Share: Is There Any Way To Know,” I decided that, although I already had something prepared for today (which is highly unusual – I usually write posts the night I post them), it was worth putting that off in order to comment on some of the comments.

Alright, first of all, this comment, by Richard Chapman, wins the award for the funniest comment:

“Although it’s difficult to tell how many people are using Linux, Microsoft must have a very good idea of how many people are not using Vista.”

Now some more serious ones. Lantesh wrote:

“Just about everyone uses Google on a regular basis. Google could record each unique IP address that visits its home page, and what operating system was used. It is not necessary for an end user to have any special software installed on their PC for this. For example if you visit the download page for Adobe Flash the site automatically recognizes what operation system you have. Google could do the same thing and record the results. The same PC would never be recorded twice, because Google would remember the IP address, and if you change operating systems then that could also be reflected in the data.”

To which Eric replied:

“Using Google’s unique IP address log isn’t going to give an exact picture because: a) gateways and routers can be used by multiple PCs; b) some users have a dual boot PC; c) most ISP clients use a dynamic IP address that could change several times over given period of time.

Other interesting points are: as stated before, not all PCs are connected to the Internet; you can have your browser report anything (OS) by changing it in its preferences.”

(Actually, several people discussed the Google idea, but I am only reposting a few here.)

Obviously, there are a lot of flaws, as pointed out by Eric and others, but nothing is perfect. Especially if a number from Google was compared to some other methods of measuring market share, it would be very interesting. Google, are you listening?

In relation to the Google idea, I should also mention Tolan’s suggestion that Google’s data should be combined with data from the top search engine in every major part of the world.

In addition to the Google idea, a couple of people suggested programs whose download numbers might be telling. The first suggestion, by Mahenda, was the Pixel image editor, which is available for just about every OS in the world. Most Linux PCs do come with GIMP and most (or all) Windows PCs come with Paint, but it is likely that people would want to replace those apps. The main drawback I see to using this application is that it is something of a niche application.

The second application suggested, this time by toogreen, is Songbird, an open-source music management program. The problem with Songbird, as Epicanis said, is that “Mac users tend to stick to Apple-branded software.” In this case, the Apple branded software (which is also preinstalled on all Macs and comes with all iPods) is iTunes.

The third application suggested was Skype, which was suggested by r. This might be a good option, because it is not free software, so distro cannot bundle it, and its competitors have not really caught on.

One idea not mentioned by commenters was Flash Player. Except for the 100% free people, pretty much everyone uses Flash Player, making it an ideal choice – if Adobe will release numbers.

Yet another common suggestion was using distribution’s update numbers. I cannot say that I know the details of how updates work, but, especially since most distributions automatically check for updates at regular intervals, it sounds like a good idea. The problem is that this would just give a number of Linux users. Unless there are good numbers about how many PCs are out there, this would be of little help.

While nothing is perfect, if some of the ideas above were compared and averaged, we might get a pretty good idea of what Linux marketshare really looks like. Now we just need to convince people to give their numbers… Adobe? Google? SKype?

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