What Linux desktop is most popular?  Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Slackware, or another distro?

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that he thinks it’s Xandros. Yes, that’s an unexpected result, but he has a point — Xandros is the distro shipped on the Eee PC, and by SJVN’s count, they’ve pumped out about 1.1 million Eee PCs and are still going strong.

Now, by my count, that puts Xandros in about 4th place, but closing rapidly. Ubuntu, unfortunately, doesn’t track — or at least doesn’t release — their installs, but Mark Shuttleworth has been quoted a couple of times as saying that they have 6 million or 8 million users. But they don’t have hard numbers (that I know of) so if we’re conservative and reduce the quoted numbers by half, that still gives us about 3 million Ubuntu users — well ahead of Xandros.

Fedora’s most recent stats say they have about 2 million Fedora 8 users in six months, and our tracking says we have at least 1.5 million openSUSE users on various releases. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that 1.1 million users is impressive, but Xandros probably isn’t in 1st place. Yet.

However — I think the Eee PC’s runaway success shows that the UMPCs are going to be Linux’s path to the mainstream desktop, and we need to be thinking very heavily about that. (Note that we’re on several UMPC devices as well — like HP’s Mini-Note systems that actually have a usable keyboard…)

The new wave of UMPC devices and new mobile devices are a strong opportunity to put Linux in the hands of new users. The resource requirements mean that Linux is well-suited for these devices, and the fact that Linux can be heavily customized also means that Linux is a great choice for manufacturers looking to differentiate themselves from the competition in ways other than hardware and pricing.

But Xandros’ strong showing on UMPCs hasn’t put it in the lead just yet, at least not by my count. Stay tuned, this is going to be a very interesting year for Linux on the desktop…

openSUSE 11.0 is getting good reviews — and it’s not even released yet! We put out openSUSE 11.0 beta 2 last week, and it’s already being looked at by the press. Ryan Paul over at Ars Technica has some nice things to say about how openSUSE 11.0 is shaping up:

There are a lot of things to like in openSUSE 11 and it will make a good choice for many users—it is already shaping up to provide better PulseAudio integration and stronger desktop search capabilities than Ubuntu, for instance. OpenSUSE also has excellent support for KDE 4, which is why we have used it as our reference platform for KDE testing and reviews.

He also has several good screenshots for the more visual types.

I haven’t had a chance to bang on the beta much yet, but when I get home from CommunityOne Tuesday, it’s at the top of my list. I think it’s time that the ThinkPad move over to the beta full time.

If you support multiple desktops, which one gets top billing? Kind of like Lennon and McCartney (please tell me that most of my readers are old enough to get the reference…), it doesn’t really matter very much — there’s so much awesome in each one that it’s just not possible to detract from the choices with an arbitrary decision about which one should go first.

There’s a discussion going on in the Factory mailing list about how to arrange the desktop choices when a user installs openSUSE 11.0. Stephan Kulow posted a screenshot of the selector to the list:

Of course, there were the inevitable (but polite!) comments regarding the order of the selection. I do like the suggestion that we replace the radio buttons with checkboxes, so users can choose multiple desktops from this screen.

And then Lukas Ocilka provides the helpful suggestion to arrange the desktop selections in a circle, so as to show no preference whatsoever.

As a sometimes Xfce user, I’d like to see that choice added to the list. Perhaps we should add Xfce and then place the desktops in reverse alphabetical order…

Maybe we could take a cue from Google, and add an “I’m Feeling Lucky” button here. Users who don’t have a strong preference could just take the luck of the draw and have the opportunity to get to know a new desktop environment.

Of course, it really matters very little what order the desktop choices are ordered in — the majority of users are going to pick the desktop that they’re familiar with, and it won’t matter if that choice is placed first, second, or third. The users who have no idea which desktop is which are probably going to pick the desktop that has the most appealing (for them) description — not the desktop that happens to be placed first.

Given that the two projects are working quite well together these days, it shouldn’t really matter much whether KDE or GNOME gets top billing, and not worth spending a lot of cycles on.

I was perusing my blog statistics this morning via StatPress, and found some interesting statistics. I was curious to see what operating systems and browsers were most common among visitors to my humble digs here, and the numbers are not what you might expect.

I also see a huge opportunity for the Linux desktop, when I look at these numbers.

With 25.1% of the “market” that visits this blog, Konqueror comes in a close second to… Internet Explorer 6. Firefox places third after Konq, with 22% of the visitors.

IE6 has 28.6% of the share, and then IE7 with 13.3% and FF3 is already climbing the chart with 3.4%. FF 1.5 has 1.8%, so if you unify the Firefox stats, it would come in second over Konqueror, but only slightly.

Operating System Stats

Operating systems stats indicate that Windows XP is still alive and kicking with 47.6% of the visitors hitting my blog using XP. I don’t have a breakdown of SUSE versions, just one lump sum of SUSE, which accounts for 36% of the visitors to the blog. Generic Linux only has 6.5%, and Mac OS X is the next OS, with 2.3%.

I assume that XP has such a strong showing because many people are visiting the blog from work (hello, slackers!) and/or surfing the Web using Windows while they do some research on Linux. I’ve also been linked from a few non-Linux specific blogs, so that is going to set the traffic stats a bit askew.

The other interesting thing to take from this is that Windows Vista comes in with only 1.8% of the traffic. More than a year after its release, Microsoft hasn’t managed to capture much market share with Vista, despite its marketing prowess. (If you haven’t seen that video yet, go watch.)

I think we have a window (no pun intended) of opportunity here to capture some of the elusive desktop market share. Microsoft is playing catch-up, for a change. Its customers don’t want Vista, and it is having trouble reconciling the market’s desires with its corporate strategy.

Right now, Vista’s biggest competition is XP — we need to change that, and make sure that Linux (and openSUSE/SUSE in particular…) is a more attractive option. We can’t assume Microsoft’s next release will be as bad or poorly received as Vista, so we should be focusing on the consumer and business desktops, particularly now.

A quick note for those of you who might be interested in testing Firefox beta 3, but also want to have access to the del.icio.us extension — an alpha of the next version of the extension was posted on April 4, which does work with FF3 beta 5.

You have to sign up for the Yahoo! group to access the file while it’s in testing, though. But, if you were holding off on this extension to use FF3 beta, it’s all good. I’ve used it over the weekend and yesterday, and haven’t run into any problems with it yet.

Also, FF3 beta 5 has been fairly stable — two crashes since I started using it six days ago, which is a bit of an improvement over FF2, so no complaints there.

Quick reminder — we’re having a Packaging Days event tomorrow and Saturday. A number of openSUSE contributors will be holding an online workshop all day April 4 and April 5 on Freenode in #opensuse-buildservice.

Anyone is welcome to join, but it is helpful if you have some experience compiling software.

What will you learn? The event is designed to teach you how to create packages using the openSUSE Build Service. If you have any favorite applications that you’d like to see packaged for openSUSE — or if you’re a developer of any packages that you’d like to see packged for openSUSE — this is for you.

If you’ve been meaning to learn to package, this is definitely for you. Lots of openSUSE contributors with tons of packaging and build service experience will be standing by to answer questions. (OK, sitting by, more likely, but still…)

You’ll probably want to have an account in the build service, and look over the docs linked on the wiki about creating packages.

See the wiki page for more info, we’d love to have you! (Thanks to Dirk for pinging me to put out the reminder.)

Just grabbed Firefox 3.0 beta 5 — it’s looking real good so far, so I thought I’d post a few notes about the release. I spend far more time than is healthy at the computer, and Firefox is probably the application I use the most (next to Vim) so expect more commentary on this throughout the week.

Nothing jumps out at me as a huge change from Firefox 2.x, but I see lots of little improvements here and there, and it feels faster, even though I don’t have any hard data to support that.

This may be the release that causes me to break up with del.icio.us for good. Not because I don’t like the site/service, but because I always have to choose between using Firefox development versions or using the del.icio.us extension for Firefox. I strongly prefer using del.icio.us to using Firefox’s own bookmarks, particularly since I use multiple machines and trying to sync bookmarks between browsers is usually a pain.

But, it never seems like the del.icio.us extension supports the development releases. Since I like to hop on the development releases of Firefox with the last round of alphas or the first round of betas, I have to decide between my bookmarks or the browser for several months.

The good news is that I’m able to import the del.icio.us bookmarks with no problem. The bad news is that all of the tagging is lost, so all I have is an uncategorized lump of nearly 700 bookmarks that isn’t terribly useful in that form.

What is useful is that I can create a tag and then a smart folder from the tag and put that in my toolbar. So, I can have a smart folder of all bookmarks tagged with something like “openSUSE” and have them show up in one folder on my bookmark toolbar. This is how I was using del.icio.us, and it’s very convenient.

Back to work, more to come on the beta soon. If you’re using the Firefox 3.0beta builds, feel free to comment on your experience or any new features you find useful. I’d be curious to hear what others are finding.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while… I have an Eee PC, but want to go ahead and put openSUSE on it — which isn’t quite as straightforward as putting openSUSE on a standard laptop or PC.

Lucky for me, Sonja Krause-Harder took the time to figure things out and document the experience of putting openSUSE on the Eee PC. Now all I need to do is follow the instructions and slap openSUSE on the machine. I’ll give a report on Monday about it, and the openSUSE on Eee PC experience, after I’ve had a chance to do the installation.

Also, I’d love to hear from openSUSE users who have installed openSUSE on “unusual” hardware — especially if you have some documentation for other users to follow.

Polishlinux.org has a great preview of KDE 4.1 by Korneliusz Jarzebski, which has tons of screenshots and info on KDE 4.1 applications and new features. Spiffy!

Hello from Salt Lake City! Today was the first full day of BrainShare sessions at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah.

First thing this morning I went to the General Session (a.k.a. “keynote”) with Ron Hovsepian, Jeff Jaffe, John Dragoon, and Jim Ebzery. (If you couldn’t make it, or just want to relive the experience, the vids are already up on the BrainShare site here.) The room was packed — not sure how many people were at the general session, but it was a huge room, and looked quite full from where I was sitting.

Jeff talked about Novell’s Fossa project, which is about “computing and collaborating with agility.” (The fossa is a particularly agile animal that’s native to Madagascar.) Jeff spent a fair amount of time talking about Linux and the importance of open source to Novell’s strategy.

Even though I knew that already, it’s good to hear it articulated during a major keynote like this — and, of course, it’s important to talk about with Novell’s partners and customers. One of the things I’m enjoying at BrainShare is the opportunity to talk with people who’ve been using Novell stuff for years and years, and who are getting excited about Linux and open source. It’s also fun to get to talk about openSUSE with BrainShare attendees.

I had a chance to wander backstage after the keynote… I don’t mind saying that Novell really has some grade A showmanship going on. Seriously — I’ve spent quite a lot of time attending trade shows as a journalist, and I don’t think that I’ve been to any other shows that are quite so well-produced. (The Salt Palace, by the way, is huge — I wonder if I can rent a bike for getting from the Technology Lab to the Press Room…) After the session I spent a fair amount of time catching up with fellow Novell employees that I typically only interact with over the phone, or via email and IM, and spending some time at the openSUSE counter in the Technology Lab.

Tomorrow Adrian and I will be giving a presentation on KDE4 at 4 p.m. We went over it this afternoon, and I think it’s going to be a good session — many thanks to Will Stephenson who put the presentation together originally, but was unable to be at BrainShare to do the presentation himself.

If you’re at BrainShare, be sure to stop by the openSUSE booth in the Novell Technology Lab. We’re showing off openSUSE Factory and answering questions about openSUSE development and the build service.