Statistics of use of a language

[Tom Davies]

Hi :)
That usage figure of 1-2% has been quoted for decades without anyone really looking into it.  MS keeps telling us that it's still only 1-2% according to studies they paid for.  

Mostly it seems that any machine bought with Windows pre-installed counts as a Windows user.  Plus any new versions of Windows bought in order to be installed also count don't they?  

How do we count the number of users, or the number of machines, in total!?  Number of users is very different from number of machines.  Do virtual machines or machines for testing count?  What about distro hoppers?  A single download might be used on many machines or may never get used at all.  So all the percentage stats seem extremely dubious to me.  

About 50% around me seem to have some sort of mobile device, some have 2 or 3.  Only 1 person i know has a Windows smart-phone and i have not even seen a slate or Windows tablet at all.  I have seen a few iPads and iPhones but not many.  So i would say around 80% of the market uses Android, 15% Blackberry and the remaining 5% iThings.  Windows is in at under 1%.  So that is 99.something% using unix-based machines or 95% on Gnu&Linux if we want to exclude Apples.  

I spend around 75% of my day in Ubuntu and 25% on various Windows machines fixing all the problems my colleagues have managed to create.  But i might have 5 Windows machines on and actively doing stuff such as defrags and only 1 machine on using Ubuntu.  It's the Ubuntu one that gets my normal work done.  

Even on Windows people have found it's easier to get OpenSource products speaking their own language while MS stuff all seems to keep reverting to American (which results in people ignoring their spell-checkers).  Some entire countries have gone over to using "Ubuntu Clones" or other Gnu&Linux systems and sometimes that's because they want to use their own language and their own culture instead of paying an american company for translations that don't make a whole heap of sense.  

Regards from 
Tom :)  





>________________________________
> From: Michael Bauer <fios at akerbeltz.org>
>To: ubuntu-translators at lists.ubuntu.com 
>Sent: Thursday, 4 July 2013, 13:22
>Subject: Re: Statistics of use of a language
> 
>
>Before we get too excited, I'd like to query the ... likelihood of these 
>stats.
>
>I went and looked at those I'm most familiar with
>Irish 5418
>Gaelic 4570
>Manx 1244
>
>Now, I'm not sure what the starting point of these is but they look very 
>wrong. At best, there are 100 Manx speakers in the world. Also, I get 
>weekly blocklist reports from Mozilla which is essentially a very 
>reliable way of measuring active users of Firefox and according to which 
>there are some 100 regular users. Even if this is a cumulative figure 
>over many years, both the Manx and the Gaelic figures are waaaay over 
>what one might expect.
>
>Or looking at it another way, Linux OS has an approximate share of 1-2%. 
>So since there are less than 58,000 Gaelic speakers in the world, at 
>best we would expect 1160 users or so at 2% penetration. Which is 
>essentially impossible.
>
>I have noted a similarly bizarre bloating in the Joomla langpack 
>download figures and I have the sneaking suspicion that the stat counter 
>there makes no difference between some bot downloading the pack for 
>whatever reason and actual users.
>
>I don't know how the technical details of this work but perhaps we would 
>get more reliable figures if we checked to see how many langpack 
>downloads there were in conjunction with downloads of system software 
>upgrades to weed out downloads of langpacks which don't actually 
>represent systems in use.
>
>Michael
>
>04/07/2013 13:00, sgrìobh ubuntu-translators-request at lists.ubuntu.com:
>> Original David's message can be found (with the references to the code)
>> here:
>>
>> http://ubuntu.5.x6.nabble.com/LanguagePack-statistics-td1747839.html
>
>
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