Since I don't want results to be skewed in the future, I won't identify
the two domains involved. This will hopefully prevent fans of certain
os types from intentionally visiting the site thousands of times to skew
the results :)
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Windows 95 86792 67.12% Windows NT 9649 7.46% Windows 98 325 0.25% Windows 3.1 8186 6.33% Macintosh 8216 6.35% All X11 (see below) 4459 3.45% Search Engine 5751 4.45% WebTV 1438 1.11% LibWWW 613 0.47% OS/2 350 0.27% Java 2850 2.20% Prodigy 52 0.04% Amiga 6 0.00% Solaris (not X11?) 121 0.09% Linux (not X11?) 3 0.00% OSF 64 0.05% Other Mozilla (OS?) 279 0.22% MSProxy 164 0.13% Breakdown of X11 OS Type (4459 total entries were classified)
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Windows 95 36090 70.59% Windows NT 4711 9.21% Windows 98 173 0.34% Windows 3.1 3473 6.79% Macintosh 4114 8.05% All X11 (see below) 1732 3.39% Search Engine 57 0.11% WebTV 234 0.46% LibWWW 143 0.28% OS/2 77 0.15% Java 3 0.01% Prodigy 24 0.05% Amiga 2 0.00% Solaris (not X11?) 67 0.13% Linux (not X11?) 1 0.00% OSF 19 0.04% Other Mozilla (OS?) 71 0.14% MSProxy 138 0.27% Breakdown of X11 OS Type (1730 total entries were classified)
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As for overall client OS's for Internet users, Linux is still just a little more than half of one percent of all installed Internet clients. I would also expect that a higher proportion of Linux machines are actually used on the Internet than are Windows machines, since so much of the Linux community is rooted in the Internet (whereas there are likely a lot more Windows users who simply use Quicken or Word and don't even know or care about the Internet). Therefore Linux's share of the total desktop client market is still likely less than half of one percent of all desktops, but perhaps not much less. Still, that's not bad. With the releases getting better and friendlier (to name a few: Debian, Redhat, Caldera, SuSe) the market is only just beginning to open for the less-sophisticated user.
I think an analysis of server OS's would be much more in Linux's favor. Consider that Apache is installed on 50% of all web servers; Linux is certainly disproportionately represented as a platform on which Apache runs, since Apache didn't even run on Windows at all until very recently (and still only in Beta, I believe).
For those who are interested, here is the source code for webagent.c, the program I wrote to analyze the "agent_log" put out by the Apache web server (and other servers).
For another approach to estimating the number of Linux users, see Redhat's "Linux Market" page.
Rich Drewes
Your questions and comments are welcome.
drewes@interstice.com
3/11/98
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