On Friday, July 30, 2010 12:29:00 pm Yohan Pereira wrote:
On Friday 30 July 2010 6:27:57 am Kenneth Gonsalves wrote:
where did you get these figures from?
"Web statistics suggest that Ubuntu's share of Linux desktop usage is about 50%" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_(operating_system)
wikipedia is not an authorative source for anything
ok not 60% like i had mentioned before, had read that somewhere else. Due to the method used to record these figures, they tend to vary from source to source.
looking at the so-called web statistics, they seem to be counting hits from various types of OS - this would hardly reflect market share. More Ubuntu users are frantically crawling the net to solve their problems, does not imply that there are more ubuntu users than all the other distros put together.
in my part of the country, most first time users who start with Ubuntu give up and go back to doze - a first time user should be given mandriva or suse where everything works out of the box. Not ubuntu - where a lot of things are b0rked and need tuning.
i think most users shift back to doze because of unfamiliarity and rigidness. People who learn by memorizing the steps involved in doing a task(like first click here, then click there, then type this etc) rather than what they are actually doing will generally find it hard to get accustomed to a different environment. Availability of Application is an issue to but I think its a smaller issue considering that most Commercial application have a equally powerful Free alternative albeit usually with a different interface (like gimp). Hardware problems and "out of box"ness i think is an even smaller issue.
this is not a question of 'think' - it is a question of fact. Every single person I have seen who has migrated back has done so on only one issue - hardware compatibility. And I know any number people who keep dual boot for the same reason.
I bought a netbook with Suse for my daughter - gave it to her and said probably sound, movies, wireless and tata indicom wont work, if they don't give it to the lab for the geeks to tweak - but everything worked out of the box.