Hard Numbers On Linux Desktop Adoption.

If you were to only examine the "enterprise" world, Linux's numbers would look much better than this, but these numbers are still good.

NetApplications’ hitslink.com measures marketshare by percentages of OS's accessing webpages, and hence a good measure of the "desktop" marketshare. This is the market that represents normal lay people's computer use.

As you can see from the graph below, Linux's marketshare has grown 300% in the last 4 years. If this rate continues, Linux would be the dominant OS by 2025.



Another way to look at it is to notice Ubuntu did not release their first "stable LTS" version until April 2006. If you look closely, the data could be interpreted as if Linux was flat-lined until Ubuntu matured, than has grown at a rate of 300% in 3 years. If Ubuntu is responsible for all this, and the trend continues, Ubuntu could be the dominant OS by 2020. Next decade could be the decade Ubuntu overthrew the desktop OS market.

At least this data suggests my prediction is possibly coming true. The only way average lay people could migrate to Ubuntu is if the market took it seriously. The market couldn't really take Ubuntu seriously when it is a > 2-sigma outlier. ( < 2% of marketshare) However, by this data it could be Ubuntu overcomes being a 2-sigma outlier sometime next year.