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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 […]

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% fsckin.com visitors by Operating System
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.

6 replies on “Are Windows users *really* interested in Linux?”

Do you think that a lot of those IE and Windows visitors have a lot to do with Linux users accessing the site from a work computer running only Windows and IE?

If you could, a simple poll on the website would benefit this “study”.

Could it be that human nature is to use the work systems, or library computers? Or, are they very curious, but, are all too human, and abhor change?

LiveCDroms fix that! They boot, and run, in CDrom, and in RAM. Prefer, for all my K-12 students in Woodruff Academy, that they run Mepis. http://www.mepis.org with it’s 1900 games, apps, browsers, suites of Office and editor, spreadsheet, Magic Point, offerings!

Install is a click away, on the icon on desktop!

No RIAA or MPAA trackers / backdoors, in kTorrent!
The Pirate Bay holds lots of ISOs of Linux and other OSes!

All FREE to DL and try! Also, http://livecdlist.com has 315 Live CD ISO’s!

Hey, I can’t speak for anyone else, but as home I run Gentoo Linux and use Firefox, and I love it. At work on the other hand (where I’m most often liable to use ‘Stumble’ I use Windows and Firefox (I only *ever* use IE to check pages look okay having been developed for Firefox)

Yeah, a lot of us coming in from Windows boxes are stuck using it at work, but run Linux at home. Kinda the opposite of the way things looked a few years ago, Linux for business and Windows for recreation. It’s just too bad that many of us are still tied in to MS only software at the workplace. Reading Linux blogs and such do help to ease the pain though.

Same here for me, I’m using Windows from work because I have to but I am a new user of Ubuntu 7.10. I used to use UNIX exclusively at college. Since then, it’s been nothing but Windows until I tried out Vista on my sister’s computer and decided NO WAY. I ordered my brand new Dell XPS laptop with Ubuntu 7.10. I love it! At work, I may be stuck using Windows but I take Portable Apps Firefox to use for all my internet needs. I hate IE.

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