| Who are the Linux desktop users? |
May 06, 2007
Analysis -- A typical Linux desktop user is a guy in his twenties who's computer savvy but may very well not be an IT professional. Those are some of the conclusions you can draw from the just-released openSUSE survey results.
The survey, published by OpenSUSE.org (PDF download), was run for almost three months, and more than 27,000 users participated in it. Novell and the openSUSE group will be using the results to make openSUSE, and its commercial big brother SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) better.
Professionally speaking, an openSUSE Linux desktop user tends to be a student. Since a plurality of users are in their twenties, it seems safe to assume that most of them are undergraduate or graduate students. For those who are working full time, the greatest number, 21.4 percent, work as system administrators.
However, while 32.9 percent of openSUSE users said they make a living by working on computer-related jobs, the single largest group of openSUSE users, 35.7 percent, describe themselves as experienced users but without any great technical skills. These users can set up openSUSE the way they like and keep it updated, but they don't consider themselves Linux experts. Perhaps the term "power user" could best describe them.
What these users look for in an operating system is -- in order of ranking from most important to least -- stability, security, hardware support, and usability. The first two items are on almost eveyone's list of why Linux is an important operating system. The latter two are on almost everyone's list of areas where Linux could stand some more work.
Interestingly, the least important criteria for these users is technical support. Yes, they like good documentation and easy administration, but the current openSUSE users, at least, aren't looking to have their hands held when they're using their favorite Linux distribution.
The single best thing about openSUSE, the users agree, is its price: free. A whopping 75 percent give openSUSE an excellent score on this. They also like its security, stability and ease of installation. Interestingly, the area that the most users felt needed some work was technical support.
Although they may want better support from the community-based distribution, very few of them actually work on the distribution. 84.7 percent aren't involved in the openSUSE project, except as users of the distribution.
Of those who do work on bettering the distribution, most of them participate on bug reporting and on the mailing lists. The latter is the source of much of openSUSE's support. Only 1.9 percent actually create new programs, and just 0.9 percent work on patches.
This supports the results of Jonathan Corbet's recent study of who wrote what in the Linux 2.6.20 kernel. Corbet found that, contrary to popular belief, Linux is not written by volunteers, but by paid developers dedicated to improving Linux.
Looking ahead, what 68.9 percent of openSUSE users want from their favorite Linux is better hardware support. This is no great surprise to anyone who follows desktop Linux. The lack of hardware drivers continues to bedevil Linux users. The OSDL Desktop Linux Working Group's 2006 Desktop Linux Client Survey showed similar results.
Along with better hardware support, a significant number of users (44.6 percent) want to see more software programs and an easier way to configure openSUSE (31 percent). The last is already being addressed by the openSUSE developers. Beginning with openSUSE 10.3, the package management system is being simplified by dropping the ZENworks Management Daemon.
When they're not using openSUSE, which just more than half (50.9 percent) do as their main operating system, the people surveyed say that Windows is still the operating system they use the most (31.6 percent). After openSUSE and Windows, there is a gigantic drop off to No. 3, Ubuntu, which commands the attention of 5 percent of the users. Other operating systems that survey participants use as their primary desktop OS that scored more than 1 percent was a mix of Linuxes and other operating systems (5.7 percent), Debian (2.2 percent), Mac OS X (1.9 percent), Fedora (1.7 percent), and Mandriva (1 percent).
Considering these results, it's no surprise that the vast majority of openSUSE users (69.5 percent) run computers that dual-boot Windows and openSUSE. The survey, unfortunately, did not ask any further questions in this line, such as, "Why do users have dual-boot systems?" Is it because they still need one or more Windows-specific software programs? Is it because they can't tear themselves from Windows games? We can't tell from this survey.
Most of the openSUSE Linux users have been using Linux for more than a year. Still, a substantial number (36 percent) have used it for a year or less.
Of these, only a tiny number (2.7 percent) use openSUSE as a business desktop operating system -- 64 percent use it as a home operating system. That isn't to say openSUSE doesn't get some business use: 33.3 percent say they use it for both home and office uses.
What they don't do with it, not surprisingly, is play games on it. Only 38.7 percent say they do. Linux is not a popular gaming operating system. Although companies such as TransGaming Technologies with Cedega 6.0 bring many popular Windows games to Linux, relatively few users, it would seem, take advantage of such gaming platform programs.
Instead, over 96 percent of those surveyed use openSUSE for its Internet capabilities. They use Konqueror and Firefox for Web browsing, Thunderbird and Evolution for email, and so on. Office work, multimedia, and graphics work follow Internet usage.
The survey didn't ask which Web browser people used but with 71.8 percent of openSUSE users being KDE users, Konqueror and Firefox are far more likely than GNOME's Epiphany. Only 22.4 percent use GNOME, while a handful of users use other desktop environments such as xfce or a character-based terminal.
A good number of users, more than half, also use openSUSE as a home server. Of those, 64.8 percent use it as a file or print server with Samba, 53.7 percent use it as a firewall, 51.6 percent use it as a Web server, and 40.8 percent use it as a network router or gateway. There's little question about it: openSUSE may be used primarily as a desktop, but more than half also make use of its server capabilities.
So where does openSUSE go from here? Besides working on the universal Linux sore points, such as hardware drivers, the openSUSE community will be working on cutting down the time needed to install openSUSE and improving openSUSE's YaST administration and package management program.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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