Having seen a lot of press about the 'death of linux on netbooks'. I've started doing some stats gathering myself, from everyone I know who's using netbooks plus some random polls on twitter. I appreciate that these results aren't totally solid, but I expect they offer a better idea of opinion than some of the sales based stats being chucked around at the moment.
Of 27 people polled, 6 of them run Windows XP on their netbooks. Of the remaining 21, one person is running Windows 7 and the rest are a mix of Linux distributions. That gives an approximate Linux adoption rate of 74%.
The statistics that are being used to suggest that Windows has regained the netbook market are all about sales - and a quick study of any of the online stores selling netbooks will show you why: the new generation of netbooks are mostly being sold with Windows. High return rates for Linux based machines have been quoted as a reason for this change, but I would suspect manufacturers only needing to make and suppliers only needing to stock a single version of each model (rather than a Linux and a Windows version) may also have been a factor.
What is significant, in my opinion is that these stats only describe the units as they are sold. I'm looking to buy a new netbook at the moment. The first thing I'll be doing is installing Ubuntu 9.04 on it, regardless of which OS it ships with. The current stats that are being used to indicate user preference fail to capture this and I would be interested to see the figures for the that are reinstalled to a Non-windows OS by their owners .....
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I am surprised, you really pulled some first hand research data to your article. Respect. The rather prosaic truth with resellers is of course: the higher the price the higher the cashflow, revenue etc... But the worldwide success of the Acer EEE-PC with Linux was even bigger with the XP-Version, because mainstream buys what mainstream already knows - no matter how crappy it is. I still get the jealous looks when I use Compiz in libraries. I used to get a different look from people, when they saw me using BSD on my notebook in 2002.
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