Posted in
Main on December 13th, 2011 by Pingdom
We could read the headline “Windows 7 just became the most widely used desktop OS in the world” earlier this year.
For Microsoft this must have been welcome news as it announced that Windows 7 for the first time ever was used on more computers to browse the web than Windows XP.
We know that Microsoft wants users to retire Windows XP, so does this spell out the doom for the aging OS, which went into retail sales ten years ago in 2001?
We pulled out the latest statistics to investigate and we found that Windows XP is still alive and well in large parts of the world.
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Posted in
Main on November 23rd, 2011 by Pingdom
Don’t panic Ubuntu fans but your favorite desktop Linux distribution has fallen to fourth place in DistroWatch’s latest ranking.
Ubuntu has been overtaken by Fedora, Mint, and openSUSE. Mint now holds the number one spot in all of DistroWatch’s rankings going back at least a year, which leads us to wonder why.
One reason behind this reversal of fortune for Ubuntu could be the change of default interface in version 11.04 or “Natty Narwhal”, released in April 2011. With the new Ubuntu came Unity, an interface previously seen in Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and Gnome was relegated to an option.
There has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding Unity. Now it seems like Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, may be paying the price for the change. Let’s look at the numbers.
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Posted in
Main on November 18th, 2011 by Pingdom
We’re all fans of cool screensavers here at Pingdom so we wanted to pick a few of our favorites and share them with you. A great screensaver is a good way to personalize your computer and to make a statement.
Digging deep through screensaver history we found these 10 that we find especially impressive.
Many of the screensavers below work with both Mac and Windows (and at least one with Linux too) but you should probably check the system requirements before downloading a particular screensaver. All the screensavers are free.
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Posted in
Main on May 12th, 2011 by Pingdom
As a server OS, Linux has long been highly successful and a poster child for open source. For example, Linux currently powers a majority of the world’s web servers and supercomputers. As a desktop OS, however, Linux has yet to gain mainstream acceptance.
That said, there are some countries where people have embraced Linux on the desktop to a greater degree than most.
Since you probably wouldn’t be able to guess which these countries are no matter how hard you tried, we have highlighted them in this article. Read on to find out where desktop Linux is most popular, plus some nice bonus stats.
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Posted in
Main on April 20th, 2011 by Pingdom
We noticed an interesting thing the other day that we’d like to share with you. However, if you’re a Linux enthusiast, you may want to stop reading now…
These are the operating system stats for April for the United States.
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Posted in
Main on January 10th, 2011 by Pingdom
The open source movement is a popular one, and it’s certainly made its mark on the software landscape. But where has it made its biggest mark? What is the most successful open source endeavor of all time?
Actually, when you see it as a whole, isn’t the Web the biggest open source success of them all?
Perhaps the most famous example is the LAMP stack that lies behind so many websites, i.e. Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. But there’s so much more when you think about it.
Here are some of the open source projects that make the Web tick.
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Posted in
Main on December 30th, 2010 by Pingdom
Android has received plenty of criticism for the way the platform has fragmented over time. Most complaints focus on there being so many different versions of Android out there in the hands of consumers, not to mention the different UI enhancements that different phone makers have added.
A fragmented platform is harder for developers to target and makes it difficult to create a consistent user experience, which of course is bad for end users.
But there’s another kind of fragmentation happening on Android as well.
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Posted in
Main on December 23rd, 2010 by Pingdom
Happy Holidays everyone!
Like much of the world, we here at Pingdom will be taking a short Christmas break. Since we won’t be updating the blog until sometime next week, here is a selection of posts from the past year that you might have missed.
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Posted in
Main on October 7th, 2010 by Pingdom
These days it seems like Android is on the lips of every tech geek out there, and it is arguably one of the most successful Linux-based products ever. But Android is not the only Linux-based mobile OS in town. Far from it.
In fact, Linux is such a common base for mobile operating systems that you may very well have used feature phones or smartphones running Linux without ever realizing it.
Here we will present 10 Linux-based mobile OSs other than Android, and these aren’t even all that exist.
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Posted in
Main on August 10th, 2010 by Pingdom
Linux has been around for almost two decades now. It has become a resounding success as a server OS (for example as the L in the famous LAMP stack), and more recently as a mobile OS (Android). But what about on the desktop?
Linux enthusiasts have been predicting the rise of Linux as a desktop OS for the better part of a decade. To name just one of many examples, in 2003, Siemens Business Systems predicted that Linux would have captured 20% of the desktop market by 2008.
Well, it’s now 2010, and desktop Linux isn’t even close to 20%. Or one tenth of that.
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