The recent press release from IDC, “U.S. Growth Slips, But Worldwide PC Shipments Remain Healthy, According to IDC”, contains some interesting data we can combine with web stats to gain further insight into GNU/Linux adoption.
- The US PC market is not bad with 3.5% growth Q1-2008/Q1-2007. The US is a mature market, but there is no “pop” for the pent-up demand for a new OS from M$. Apple gets 6% of this market with 25% growth and is in fourth place, after Acer and before Toshiba.
- The global PC market is hot with 14.6% growth. This is a largely expanding market with many newcomers becoming consumers in China, India, Russia and South America. Here, Apple is a no show, not in the top five, presumably with fewer sales than Toshiba at 4.4%.
Combining this with Apple’s 10Q (2.289 million units sold) and knowing that MacOS is only allowed to run on Macs, we can tell pretty surely that a little more than 3% of PCs are Macs running MacOS. Web stats show that other OS has dropped below 90%, so that leaves more than 6% for GNU/Linux. QED

8677
8549
96
2
0
12279
5573
5536
3532
1570
1426
189
0
0
0
0
0