Most widespread linux

Jean-Francois Stenuit

the problem with hard numbers is that there are so many mirrors dotted around, with private mirrors coming and going on a daily basis, that even a shot-in-the-dark figure is hard to come by.

Pretty much the only way to ascertain actual usage is to query the machines as they come online. Representative samples will always be skewed as to availability of one OS over another in said locality, the prevalence or not of pirated copies of proprietery platforms in said locality, whether or not installed systems are actually connected to the WAN, and if so, whether they are there as servers (ie headless, dumb boxes with but one or two functions such as web-ftp-mail servers) or full desktop systems. And of course, there's the question of the individual or group actually carrying out the survey skewing the results themselves to make things look good for M$ or OSS, whichever one's paying more.

Here's a representative sample for you to start: I have 11 fully functioning systems, out of which 8 are dual-boot Win-Lin. Four of them have a direct connection to the Internet, one is a specified-build for video capture and has no direct WAN connection (tho it does have a proxy connection through my webserver), and one is a tablet PC running Windows ME (Barely. XP just falls over on it and I'm not brave enough to try and get Linux on it yet) which I use for wardriving.

Confused? You will be.

-- Cheers,

Jim

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