Are Windows users *really* interested in Linux?

I’ve gone though my website logs to see just what kind of visitors I’ve had in the last few days. I’ve received well over 2000 page views over the entirety of my blog, with a majority of those being referred from the Linux section in Digg, where I submit most of my articles.

But this part is what is so puzzling – 46% of unique visitors to my website in the past few days are using Windows. It goes something like this:

1. Windows 46.10%
2. Linux 44.96%
3. Macintosh 7.23%
4. Other 1.71%

“Interesting information,” you’re saying, “but why do I care?” I’ll tell you why. I only write about Linux here.

However, Internet Explorer users alone account for 300% more traffic than any of the other browsers. That’s a aneurysm waiting to happen for Microsoft!

With the right kind of publicity, we can make a change. Just over a year ago, there was a little something called Firefox Day. The adoption of Firefox has florished amazingly since then, with good reason: It’s a really great product. Firefox Day helped get people motivated to contribute to growing the installed base of Firefox users.

I personally finally feel that Linux has finally reached the stage of being a great product. Except it’s free as in speech, and upgrades don’t cost you anything other than a internet connection and a little bit of your time. I’ve been using Linux since late 1997 when a friend of mine burned me a copy of Redhat4.2. Way back when CD burners cost hundreds of dollars. Ahh, good times.

I recently asked my girlfriend what it would take to get her to switch, as a hypothetical question. She just wants to be able to turn the computer on, get in, get out, and turn it back off again.

How close is Linux to this in reality? It’s not too far off from this idea. I think anyone could make a case that even two years ago, Linux was not in good shape to be a desktop platform.

I’ve worked for an ISP for a couple years, and I’ll tell you that 50% of people paying the internet bill in the USA use it for two things.

Yep, just two things. Email and recipes. That’s it! Google has it right. They’ve got GMail and a recipe search!

I am actually so confident that this is true, I just registered a not so terrific domain name to prove it. http://www.LinuxRecipes.com. Now that I think about it, that one isn’t too bad.

Two years from now, who knows where we will be? Maybe I’ll still be registering weird domains, and hopefully you’ll still be reading.

Stay tuned! Subscribe to the RSS feed for the latest articles.