Is Apple Killing Linux on the Desktop?

Domains May Disappear writes "Chris Howard has an interesting commentary at Apple Matters on recent trends in OS market share that says that while OS X has seen continual growth, from 4.21% in Jan 2006 to 7.31% in December 2007 at the same time, Linux's percentage has risen from only 0.29% to 0.63%. The reasons? 'Apple has Microsoft Office, Linux doesn't; Apple has Adobe Creative Suite, Linux doesn't; Apple has easily accessed and easy to use service and support, Linux doesn't; Apple is driven by someone who has some understanding of end-user needs, Linux is not,' says Howard. 'Early in the decade it seemed that if you wanted a Windows alternative, Linux was it. Nowadays, an Apple Mac is undoubtedly the alternative and, with its resurgence and its Intel base, a very viable one.'"

my rebuttal

[Reverend528 (585549)]

linux has apt, apple doesn't;

Re:my rebuttal

[AmaDaden (794446)]

Apple might be good for a grandma or for a graphic designer, but for a programmer it's an annoyance.

Exactly. Keep in mind since most people are not and will not ever be programmers I fully expect these kinds of numbers. Us Slashdot readers can hate using macs all we want but I know that I am grateful that OS X is Unix based and is gaining ground over Windows. It is far easier to port from OS X to Linux then from Windows to Linux. This means that in a world where OS X is king a programmer should have no problem getting Linux support for his hardware and games. Good OS X numbers are GOOD for Linux.

Re:my rebuttal

[abigor (540274)]

Ha, I own one for that exact reason: it's the best machine for me, a non-Windows, Java/Python/C programmer, that I've found. To each their own, I guess.

Re:my rebuttal

[jav1231 (539129)]

So why didn't just keep it and load Ubuntu on it? Sounds fishy to me.

Re:my rebuttal

[u-bend (1095729)]

Not to be mean but Ubuntu, and Red hat have 1/4 of the pacakges of Debian apt suppositories.

You know, I enjoy Linux as much as the next man, especially Debian-based versions, but that's either a brilliant typo, an inside joke I'm not 1337 enough to know, or some aspect of open source I'd rather not know about.

Biased, however....

[BWJones (18351)]

Obviously Apple Matters is going to have a bias towards OS X and that should be taken into account. However, that said we've been reducing both our Windows and Linux systems in favor of OS X for some time now for many of the reasons outlined in the referenced article.

I'd like to add in another reason why Linux is not growing as fast as OS X use: fragmented distros. Supporting multiple flavors of Linux is simply a pain in the ass and the typical end user of Linux is likely to have their own preference (Red Hat, Yellow Dog, Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, etc...etc...etc... In fact, last time I looked there were over 1000 different flavors of Linux and BSD and with the exception of OS X (a descendent of BSD) every single flavor that I've tried out of that 1000 all required significant effort just to get the OS up and running with wireless networks, not to mention all the various voodoo required for the printer support.

No, for me it is all about getting work done and I don't want the OS getting in my way or becoming an impediment to accomplishing things and I don't want to have to spend time with all of our students on various flavors of Linux. In retrospect, the last project that we worked on with a contractor got developed for Red Hat and in terms of system support, backup, management and more I really wish we had developed it for OS X now. That is not to say that we will not develop our algorithms cross platform, as that is our goal to release them totally open source, but for anything that is going to be developed for intensive use or for further development it is going on OS X and taking advantage of all the platform specific pleasantries such as Cocoa, Core Image, Core Animation, Quartz and more.

apples 'n' oranges, perhaps

[Quadraginta (902985)]

These are all the reasons Microsoft gives for using their product, and I expect if their product wasn't riddled with bugs and annoyances, you'd be a closed MS shop.

I think the bottom line is that Linux is, and always will be, a bit of a hobbyist and/or experimentalist bleeding edge platform. It's like the difference between commercial radio and amateur (ham) radio: the former is all about "getting work done," as you say, and so it's streamlined, standardized, and widespread. The latter is about experimenting with new ways of doing stuff, about cooking it up at home by yourself, about trying out your individual creative thoughts and ideas. So it's idiosyncratic, quirky, customizable, and thinly spread.

Each has its place, of course. Without streamlined standardized production platforms, people trying to get stuff done who don't give a hoot about computers and software would be endlessly frustrated. Without weird individual experimentation, advancement stagnates. (I don't doubt that one of the reasons OS X is so much more useful than, say, OS 9 or, God forbid, that bombing monster Mac OS, is because it was goosed by Linux coming up fast from behind.)

Point of view

[reynaert (264437)]

Linux market share has increased by 117%, while Apple's increase is only 74%.

Re:Point of view

[Neil Watson (60859)]

Someone promote this guy to VP of Marketing right now! :)

Linux market share?

[Scarblac (122480)]

OS X sales can be counted, Linux downloads more or less can't.

Also, those must be US-only figures, surely? OSX 7%!?

meh statistics

[nevurthls (1167963)]

From 4.21% to 7.31% is an increase of ~73% of market share for the mac.
From 0.29% to 0.63% is an increase of ~117% of market share for linux.

Isn't that a bigger victory for linux?
The relative market share increase of linux being about 1.5 times that of the mac...

Re:meh statistics

[colonslash (544210)]

Another way to look at it is that 3.44% of the market has changed hands, 10% of that to Linux and 90% to OSX

Re:meh statistics

[AJWM (19027)]

At that rate, Linux will surpass the Mac's market share in 12 years, with 3161% of the market compared to Mac's 3132%. Oh, wait...

Yes, for me at least.

[MBCook (132727)]

I liked Linux and was slowly switching until I got to see how nice OS X was and became (as it was released/updated). There is a very good chance I spent most of my time on Linux at this point if it wasn't for OS X. My brother is probably the same was, as are many others in small IT department I work at. OS X provides us the unixy goodness we love (command line and such), with a great GUI that's easy to use and commercial software and things "just working". I've been on a Mac for a few years now, yet I still discover nice little things (like my Mac keeps separate mute statuses for when I have headphones plugged in and not plugged in, so it adjusts automatically as soon as I plug my headphones in.)

If you are not a hardcore FOSS person who wants the source to everything they run... OS X provides a fantastic environment for a great many people.

Source

[thePsychologist (1062886)]

It's much easier to measure OS X adoption since most of it is just purchases of Mac computers. It's impossible to do the same with Linux. Who knows how many Linux users there are out there. I've never registered my copy of Linux, for one.

Apple's resurgence helps Linux, not harms it

[postbigbang (761081)]

1. The enemy of my enemy is my friend
2. Linux will get cool stores, too
3. OOO is just as good as MS Office
4. KDE 5 will look just like Aqua
5. Gimp and Adobe work alike.

No, it's not flamebait, just reality.

Who uses support?

[magister159 (993682)]

Honestly, I have never thought of calling my operating system manufacturer for support.

Perhaps it's because I work in IT, and I'm smarter than your average Tier 1 support monkey... But I can't imagine a normal person saying "I can't connect to the Internet, let me call Microsoft".

Then again, I could be completely off base.

The answer is no.

[The Living Fractal (162153)]

When the trend is UPWARDS, I.E. when Linux is being used MORE than before, then why does it make sense to use the word 'killing'? Surely if the trend was downwards this would be sensible, but not the other way around?

And also.. it's very easy to blame others for your problems. What problems are those? Well, they are the plusses of Apple's and Microsoft's solutions. They are those software or productivity suites that those respective companies have which Linux does not have. It is not Apple or Microsoft's fault they have those things as much as it is Linux's fault for NOT having them, or for what they do have simply not being as good. You can only blame yourself for what you lack in comparison to what is the widely accepted and used norm.

It's all a geek dream anyway, that people doing work for free is going to somehow outperform people who do their jobs to get paid and rely on that payment to sustain the quality of living they are used to. Not to mention that during this time that the people are writing free software they have to be working for a living; working on other projects and with other distractions. It just doesn't add up that Linux could be better than Apple, or even Microsoft, despite how completely fucked Vista seems to be so far.

Now, I know there are many ways you can tear up the logic in this post, and I freely encourage you to do so. But ultimately what you need to do is explain why, if my logic is flawed, the situation is as it remains today.

Lies, damn lies and statistics

[Britz (170620)]

I took one look at the statistic and thought: Wtf?

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=8 [hitslink.com]

0.12% of all devices that access the internet are IPhones? How many did they sell?
0.63% for Linux, which means that only six times as many Linux computers are used to access the internet as IPhones.

About one persent for Linux and about seven for Mac: I would buy that. Sounds reasonable, since many open source guys I know use a Mac for desktop stuff.

But with those numbers for the IPhone the numbers look more like something someone pulled out of their a**. Plus all the computer lab computers at our universities got converted to Linux over the past years. And our university is not Linux friendly in any way. So I imagine that this would happen at many universities and colleges.

Re:Lies, damn lies and statistics

[kebes (861706)]

According to this [internetworldstats.com] there 1.26 billion Internet users. According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] there were 1.4 million iPhones sold by October 2007. Assuming every iPhone connects to the Net at some point, that means ~0.11% of the connected devices should be iPhones, which is remarkably close to the number the article quotes.

That having been said, I don't really trust the stats provided in the article. They claim 0.6% Linux usage, but most other [wikipedia.org] estimates based on web traffic put Linux usage at 0.8% to 3% (and as we all know such techniques are inherently error-prone; e.g. Linux users may spoof their agent string).

As usual, estimating Linux market share is nearly impossible. It can be interesting to look at the numbers, but I wouldn't make any sweeping arguments based on such uncertain data.

Linux has staying power

[spiritraveller (641174)]

Linux's strength is in it's staying power. It's not going anywhere. You can't kill it the way you can a start-up company... or even a large and powerful company.

It's still largely a hobbyist platform. (Remember, I'm talking about Linux on the desktop, not on the server.) But given a time-span long enough, Linux is bound to be a major player on the desktop (possibly even the dominant player).

The economics of Linux don't place the same value on a perfected user experience. But it does place some value on user experience. That value only goes up over time. What was the most user-friendly Linux distribution in 1996? What was the installation like back then? Now compare that with installing today's Ubuntu or SUSE or Fedora or Mandriva or almost any distribution that you randomly pick off the front page of distrowatch.com. The difference is huge, and the user experience can only continue to improve.

If Steve Jobs is the great master of the user experience, what will happen to Apple if when he quits or dies? I don't know the answer to that.

But I know what will happen to Linux if Linus Torvalds dies... Pretty much nothing. Linux is analogous to the internet. It keeps getting bigger and better, and it has no weak link. The same cannot be said for Apple or Microsoft.

Re:Not Quite Universal

[peragrin (659227)]

Guess what!!! some people don't mind paying for software. Especially if it is good software.

Oh and you can use OS X with completely free as in beer software. I use Abi-word instead of Pages or MS Word.

But unlike Linux I can install Adobe Photoshop.

Re:Not Quite Universal

[Seumas (6865)]

The one thing I hate about my OSX laptop is trying to get a lot of CPAN and perl related libs installed on it. If you just want to dump a pre-set LAMP (er.. OSXAMP? Whatever) on it, that's fine. But I was trying to replicate my development environment for a personal project onto my powerbook so I could carry it all with me and no longer have to telnet to my system to work on such things.

I found a lot of seemingly trivial things to be absolutely tedious and borderline impossible on OSX. Something I could have just installed with cpan or apt-get on debian required that I install this lib. Then that lib. Then FINK. Then tweak a bunch of stuff. Then, finally, if I'd sacrificed enough chickens, I could install the actual think I had wanted to in the first place.

I know that OSX is a huge platform among web developers, but I also know most of them are into dreamweaver crap and php, ruby, etc. But I know that it's big enough among them that it can't always be that difficult. For me, however, I simply wasn't willing to invest the absurd amount of energy and time to get my development environment going on it that would have taken me an hour from start to finish on any given linux system. And without that, there is absolutely no reason for me to own a mac (the unix underpinning being the reason I enjoy it so I can do my solaris/linux-ish stuff with it). The only exception being that I do love my powerbook, for ease of networkability in multiple environments and the rather rugged, durable, always-works consistency of it.

I know that I have had to pull myself away from apple.com on more than a few occasions where I was playing with the configurator and so ready to hand out my cash like an idiot, before I came to my senses and said "but you're just doing this so you can have a new shiny toy -- there's nothing you can do on this box that you can't already do on your powerhouse linux box at home... save your $3,000+ and get a hooker, some blow and a couple midgets".

You are right on

[krog (25663)]

Mac OS X is the success of Unix on the desktop, period.

There are a lot of geeks who are reluctant to admit it, though. Most people pinned their hope on Linux + GNOME/KDE for delivering us from evil. While GNOME and KDE brought Unix miles ahead in terms of GUI usability, neither matched the elegance and power of the NeXTSTEP interface developed years before; the evolution from NeXTSTEP to OS X has further secured this lead.

The defeat of their favorite candidate for Unix GUI Savior left many geeks unwilling to even consider or support the idea of OS X as a real Unix, as an improvement to Windows or existing Unix GUIs, etc. Sour grapes, basically. The whole experiment goes to show that in software, as in government, in the ideal case you want a well-backed tyrant with his head screwed on straight. That's Steve Jobs.

Re:hmmm

[Yaztromo (655250)]

But isn't OS-X...under the Aqua interface basically a *nix platform? So in a way, can't we possibly...if we wanted to be REALLY anal about it and help shove it down the throat of M$.... claim that with the migration of the Apple OS to the OS X platform from the classic OS (os 9 and prior), that we have actually dramatically INCREASED the adoption of *nix on the Desktop??

I think this is an important detail. While OS X may compete in some peoples minds in the desktop realm, in actual fact they are complimentary. While some OSS advocates may decry OS X as "proprietary", the fact is that Apple releases a lot of the core of their OS as OSS, uses a lot of OSS software in OS X, and they embrace standards (as opposed to trying to co-opt them).

What this means in practical terms is that OS X and Linux integrate together quite easily. For example, stick netatalk and Avahi on a Linux system, and you have a really easy and Mac-friendly file-server.

I won't claim that Apple is always perfect, but at least it's fairly easy to use OS X with other OSs, especially when it comes to Linux.

(I've had the thought int he back of my mind for some time that if I had the time and resources, I'd love to fork a Linux distro to create a Mac-friendly-Linux distro. All the parts are there -- it just takes someone to put them all together).

Yaz.