Linux anyone?

[MIGNAL]

I have a website that probably averages 10 hits per day :roll: according to my statcounter. Not only does the statcounter tell me which country each visitor comes from but it also tells me other useful (?) things like which operating system they are running. In the 10 months the website has been operational I have had precisely 2 visitors who were running Linux. I know it can be a bit geeky but that ain't many considering it's basically a free OS (and legal). I've just installed Mandriva and managed to get my USB modem working and I'm not very clever at this computer thingy. Anyone run Linux? What flavour?

 

[MrJay]

Gentoo at the moment, Slackware in the past, possibly ubuntu in the near future. In fairness, Windows is also free and legal for nearly everybody with a PC, only with the advantage of not needing a degree in text file editing.

Getting a USB modem working is pretty smart. I gave up and bought a proper modem.

 

[Fecn]

I'm a big linux fan...

Debian on most of my linux machines
Gentoo on the home file server
Ubuntu-server on a couple of client firewalls.

(Windows on my desktop)

I've been using linux one way or another since about 1993

Fecn

 

[Gill]

I'd love to install Ubuntu or similar on a redundant laptop I've got, just to learn more about it. However, I'm discouraged by the way that all the sites you go to for the download start off by claiming how simple it is to install and use. Then they subside into pages of geek-speak... :roll:

I'm all in favour of open source software - I love Open Office and I'm beginning to use the GIMP for my graphics. I'm just not confident enough that I'd be able to cope with an open source operating system.

Gill

 

[mr]

Ubuntu on my desktop
Debian on my server.
Mike

 

[A_n_g_e_l_a]

For December I have the following stats:

Operating systems:-
Windows 46782 hits 62%
Unknown 23521 31%
Symbian 3632 3.1%
Macintosh 1112 1.4%
Linux 317 0.4%
FreeBSD 42 0%


My only thought is that perhaps some linux users are in the group listed as unknown operating system.

Angela

 

[tigerturnings]

I went from Windows 98 to FreeBSD 4.3 because '98 simply crashed too much for my liking, and found, after a steep learning curve, I got on very well with FreeBSD. I still use an old version of FreeBSD on the PC in the workshop, mostly for playing music off the network.

I've switched to Gentoo on my desktop and OpenBSD on my "server" now, but am planning to switch the desktop to Debian once the new release is available.

On my mum's and sister's PCs, I've got Fedora Core which seems quite polished and probably is the most new-user friendly of the distros I have in use here.

I think the one thing I would still be tempted to Windows for is using Sketchup. Apart from that, Linux does everything I want it to, and many things are better than on Windows. One example is software like LyX and LaTeX, both free programs for typesetting, which I'm finding invaluable in my physics degree. Although there are Windows versions of both, the Linux ones seem to have fewer bugs, due to having been more widely tested. Compared to Word, they also have the advantage of no "auto correct" to change what I write into what they assume that I want to write!

Cheers

Neil

 

[MIGNAL]

For December I have the following stats:

Operating systems:-
Windows 46782 hits 62%
Unknown 23521 31%
Symbian 3632 3.1%
Macintosh 1112 1.4%
Linux 317 0.4%
FreeBSD 42 0%

Yikes! over 70,000 hits?Your quite popular, aren't you?
62% is too low for Windows. It's on over 90% of PC's if you believe Bad Bill.

 

[Dave S]

Been using Linux since Redhat 4, mainly Redhat and Suse. I'm now running Suse 10.1 (64bit) on my machine, hosting vmware with a WinXP Pro virtual machine.

Until recently I was using a pentium 166 as a router/firewall running Smoothwall.

You don't say what your website is - given that Linux is still a fairly 'specialist interest' OS, should your site stats be expected to reflect the overall popularity of Linux? Perhaps the type of person who uses Linux is not the type of person who would be interested on your website? Just a thought.

Dave

 

[A_n_g_e_l_a]

Yikes! over 70,000 hits?Your quite popular, aren't you?

No, not me, it's aviation weather that's popular, especially by mobile phone... see activitae.com and yaws.mobi,

Angela

 

[Alf]

However, I'm discouraged by the way that all the sites you go to for the download start off by claiming how simple it is to install and use. Then they subside into pages of geek-speak... :roll:

I'm all in favour of open source software - I love Open Office and I'm beginning to use the GIMP for my graphics. I'm just not confident enough that I'd be able to cope with an open source operating system.

I've found exactly the same, Gill. I use Open Office, Gimp, any darn thing that's free, but the geek factor when you try to investigate Linux is just off the scale.

fwiw my website, which while being specialist interest isn't techie, seems to get noticably more variety now.

January 2005

Windows 21463...90.5 %
Macintosh 1029......4.3 %
Linux 772.......3.2 %
Unknown 440.......1.8 %

January 2007

Windows 95292......88.8 %
Macintosh 7750........7.2 %
Unknown 1864.........1.7 %
Linux 1635..........1.5 %
NetBSD 613............0.5 %
Sun Solaris 17 ...........0 %
FreeBSD 17..............0 %
CPM 4.......................0 %

Don't even know what some of those are. :lol:

Cheers, Alf