Talk:Usage share of desktop operating systems

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I put in a list of reasons why the use of browser statistics is unreliable in estimating the proportions of PCs using different operating systems and followed with an example comparing results from surveys, and hits from a particular web site, w3schools.com. I thought the single reason, unreliable reporting, was incomplete. Having viewed server logs, I know it is often impossible to get it right. It would be better to have survey data. Pogson 00:46, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

If we are going to use web stats from unknown pages out there, I wonder whether it would be feasible/desirable to include the stats from Wikipedia. Wikipedia is widely used by everyone so would be a neutral, high-volume site to collect statistics. That might be a better sample than the unknown sites in the three collections in the article. Pogson 01:32, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Other methodologies

Please include some information from sources beside web browsers for comparison purposes. — Omegatron 21:02, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

What other sources are there? --Harumphy 12:09, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
Surveys? Sales records? The numbers will vary, but it would be good to have for comparison purposes. — Omegatron 16:48, 14 October 2007 (UTC)
If you think any such info has been published, please point us to it. --Harumphy 16:26, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
Are these statistics worldwide or U.S.? It appears the stats from w3counter are but I do not know about the rest.DrRisk13 15:20, 22 October 2007 (UTC)
Net Applications and W3 Counter both say they're global, XiTi says it monitors "francophone websites", W3 Schools stats are just for its own site. --Harumphy 14:15, 29 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Usage share of server operating systems

Should this article not also exist to juxtapose the 'desktop operating systems' comparison? Altonbr (talk) 23:01, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

The problem is that apart from web servers, most servers aren't connected to the internet; so how do you collect reliable data? You can't go by licenses sold, since FOSS software typically isn't sold by license. The only reason this article exists is that web browser user agent strings give us a way of estimating desktop share; no such equivalent exists for (non-web-)servers . -- simxp (talk) 00:26, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] The OS Share Data

The article divides Windows into its major reviesions, but groups both MACOS and OSX into one heading; OSX. This is inaccurate. Either the column should reflect only actual OSX data, or it should be labelled something other than "OSX" but "Apple" or somesuch.

Wageslave (talk) 20:59, 11 April 2008 (UTC)

  • The sources are themselves a bit vague about which versions of Mac OS they're talking about. I suggest that in the individual tables we just cite what the sources themselves say, and just conflate everything into "Mac OS" in the summary table. --Harumphy (talk) 07:56, 13 April 2008 (UTC)
That may work better.
Wageslave (talk) 14:23, 13 April 2008 (UTC)