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What if we had a year of Linux on the desktop and no one realised?
For years, Linux fanboys have been insisting that this year will be the time of Linux on the desktop. Now, ZDnet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols thinks the take-up of Linux is much higher than numbers suggest.
"By my count, Linux has over 11 per cent of the desktop market," he claims. He reached that number by adding in the bits that StatCounter and the US Digital Analytics Program keep mislabelling as “unknown” or pretending are something other than Linux with a fancy coat of paint, and dividing by his shoe size.
What appears to have set him off was the numbers Zorin OS reported last week. For those who came in late, “Zorin OS 18 has amassed 1 million downloads in just over a month since its release.” The outfit said “78 per cent of these downloads came from Windows” users. That is a lot of Windows refugees downloading a 3.5-gigabyte ISO.