Photo by Gabriel Saldana, used under licence

Ashley Highfield, my boss’s half-boss, has posted on the BBC Internet Blog that the BBC’s Linux userbase is around 0.3 to 0.8% of all BBC visitors.

Over the last month, Media UK, a mostly-used-at-work media website I run (583,000 visits a month, so a decent size), splits down like so:
Windows: 93.49% (95% in 2006)
Macintosh: 4.89% (4.02%)
Linux: 1.40% (0.28%)

My own website, james.cridland.net, has 4.56% Linux users, though that figure is much less accurate due to much lower traffic levels and a skew of subject matter. Media UK is closer to the ‘real world’, and reflects at-work usage as well as at-home usage - as reflected by a lower Firefox percentage of use too (just 14%). It contains nothing that would attract Linux users more than the average.

I’m quite interested about this. First, it shows that Linux users are still firmly in the minority - albeit a vocal minority. But it’s clear that Windows is in trouble: gains over the year by the premium Macintosh and the free GNU/Linux makes it clear that even with Vista, Windows is losing many users from all areas of its business. Yes, they still have a sizeable majority, but it seems more of us are happy to try something new.

But, of course, the most interesting thing is the stark fact that in just a year, Linux use has increased fivefold. This is no fluke - Google Analytics reports consistently increasing Linux use on mediauk.com (0.24% in December 2005, for example), and a similar increase, though more statistically noisy, is also shown on my personal website.

Fascinating. With the advent of the very cheap gOS machine, I’d see Linux use increasing in the future - possibly at an even faster speed. Now’s the time to move your software to the web, before your customers disappear…

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