Linux Usage Doubled in Past Year

Although Linux still can't hold a candle to major commercial operating systems like Windows or Mac OS X, it made significant progress in adoption last year.

It looks like user-friendly Linux installations like Ubuntu really are boosting the operating system’s overall popularity – even if only from a sliver to a bigger sliver. New statistics from Market Share show that Linux’s overall footprint more than doubled from .4 percent of all surfers in December 2006, to a current .81 percent.

While the shift seems insignificant as a portion of the big picture, for Linux it marks the most significant shift in acceptance on the books. According to Market Share, Linux’s market penetration stagnated at .29 percent in 2004, .31 percent in 2005 and .29 percent again at the beginning of 2006. In the Linux ecosystem, a leap to .81 percent in one year represents a major spike.

As a provider of live statistics for small- and medium-sized businesses, Market Share collects its data from the visitors at more than 40,000 URLs and releases its aggregated results for free.