Recently, I have written some posts about Linux’s marketshare and how to know what it is. Today, I want to entertain a completely different possibility.

I think everyone would agree that there is no definitive way to be able to say for sure what each OS’s marketshare is. It just is not technically possible at this point, as far I know. We do have a lot of evidence, ranging for statistics from the data web browsers report to web pages to people’s general feeling about how many people around them use Linux. Of the information we have, all of it has major flaws that essentially make the results irrelevant. Plus, none of it agrees with any of the other pieces of evidence.

What I want to suggest is that the fact that you cannot prove what the marketshare is, combined with general perceptions that computers are Windows, combined with Microsoft and Apple’s PR all make it perfectly possible that Linux’s marketshare is, in fact, closer to 15% or 30%, making it possibly more than the Mac. After all, a lot seems to suggest that the Mac is weak outside the US and Linux has cought on more outside the US. But hey, that is just a guess too!

The fact is, we have no real evidence and no way of getting real evidence, so, until we get some good evidence, we shouldn’t just assume no one uses Linux.

What do you think? Is it possible we are all underestimating Linux? Have you thought this all along?