I develop for Android and own a Samsung 10.1" Galaxy (Android) tablet. I know someone who owns an iPad.

Several months ago, I wanted to give them SSH access to a server. So I looked at what iPad had to offer. I could find no free SSH client (as of a few months ago). Not even an ad-supported one. The best I could come up with was a nagware one - it allowed you 500 or so SSH keystrokes and then logged out and asked you to buy the client.

Meanwhile on my Android tablet, I have a free SSH client. It doesn't even have ads, it's open source! ConnectBot. There are other free Android ssh clients as well, but ConnectBot works for me so that's what I know.

Admittedly, I know more about Android than iPad. But the one thing I ever needed from iPad, I couldn't get for free. On Android I could. So which would I want to own more?

And as I said, I develop Android apps. If there was no good free SSH app for Android, I could have developed one. But there was one - ConnectBot. ConnectBot has no ads, but I would have been perfectly happy to have used a free SSH app with ads.

There are many revenue models for applications. Most of the top free apps have various alternative methods of getting revenue - and not just the apps like Facebook or ESPN Sportscenter. Ads are just one method, there's also upselling, and other revenue models.

At the end of the day, the real question is not what's good for the developer, but what's good for the customer? We have a platform that is developer-friendly but not user-friendly, it's called the Linux desktop. I like platforms that are good to developers, but there are many ways Android is good to developers that Apple is not. It costs me $25 for life to publish and Android app, without any application approval process (not $99 to $299 a year like Apple). I can publish the app anywhere, not just Apple's walled garden App Store. I can write and compile my app on Linux, Windows, Mac or whatever - I don't have to buy a Mac and then get Xcode. And it's not no one ever buys Android apps - some apps have made millions of dollars in sales (that we can see - in-app sales, ad revenue etc. is less visible). The revenue model just depends on the particular app.

1) You can develop from any platform. I develop on my Ubuntu 11.10 desktop. But you can also develop on Windows, MacOS or other Linux flavors. With iOS, you have to buy a Mac to start developing

2) It costs $25 to publish on Android Market for life. And you don't even have to - there's no "walled garden" like iOS has. The App Store has an annual fee which is $99 - with an even larger fee for the "enterprise program" whatever that is. (Speaking of Android's $25 fee, Admob just sent its first check to my Paypal account today for $22.95. So once they send me another $2.95 I'll be in the black. Actually I've already earned more than that extra $2.95 on my Admob account - they send you the money 6-8 weeks after earning it if you've accumulated $20 or more.

3) With Android, most non-game development is done in Java. A language many people know. With iOS, development is done in Objective C, a language that is not used outside of Apple-world anywhere near as much as Java. Objective C seems obscure to me - I have some written code at one time or another in C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Common Lisp, Basic, PHP and probably some languages I'm forgetting, but have never had cause to use Objective C. It might be a perfectly fine language, but I'm stuck having to learn not only iOS's SDK, but a new language I'll probably never use again. Java I've used before Android, and would be useful to know even if I stopped programming for Android. Of course, with some wrappers, Android will do C++ (and OpenGL) code just like iOS will.

4) Android is open source. It has derivative products like Cyanogenmod and the Kindle Fire. Instead of just getting hardware one company decides on, we can get a range of products from a number of manufacturers. This has a downside in addition to the upside, but I think the upside outweighs it.

5) Android smartphones have been outselling iPhones in past months. It seems like a trend that has taken hold. As far as the tablets, obviously Apple dominates. But I'm happy with my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1". I'm sure the ICS tablets will be even better. As far as Android users spending money, just with some basic math I can see some apps have made millions of dollars. Slingplayer mobile (does DVR stuff) has made at minimum $1.5 million. Beautiful Widgets has made at least $1.4 million. ATOK, which makes a more Japanese-friendly keyboard, has made $1 million. I haven't looked much at the games, I understand some of those have made money as well. The number of people with Android smartphones keeps growing, as do the quality of the phones, as do the quality of the apps - some apps are making millions, but more apps will probably make millions as well.

You are correct that untargeted ads are worth less, and my sense is with yours that game advertising is worth less as people go into a game app to play a game, not click ads.

You imply, or an implication can be drawn, that this is so throughout Android, but I have not found it to be the case. I have two apps that use Admob. One is an app used by many bartenders, bouncers and so forth, and I've found the Admob ads often reflect that line of work. Another app is a database app and I've found the Admob ads often advertise database-related things. So it is somewhat targeted - people who work with databases download my database app, get database-related ads, and click them when the ad interests them enough. I'm sure with Google's purchase of Admob that they're working on future versions which will probably be more targeted - I know they already do targeting by geographical location.

I think I'll take your mention of OpenOffice off on a tangent to do a little plug of my free software project...

A few months ago, I began the process of trying to port Apache POI to Android. For those who don't know, Apache POI is "the Java API for Microsoft Documents". It does Word and Excel, and also tries to implement other Microsoft formats, with various degrees of success.

I decided to start with a spreadsheet. I spent two weeks writing some scaffolding for a spreadsheet in Android. When I got it to where it looked good enough, I began working on loading Excel files with POI. And I could do so - with Excel xls files up to 2007. When I tried to load Excel 2007 and 2010 xlsx files, I ran into some problems...a topic which I'll get back to in a moment. Anyhow, I worked on trying to load Excel 2007/2010 xlsx files for a few more weeks, and when I saw I wouldn't, without luck, make any immediate breakthroughs, I put it aside. A few months later I open sourced my code on Github and cursorily described my 200/2010 problem in the README file. If anyone wants to look at it, feel free. As I said, I worked on features for two weeks and then got hung on one the 2007/2010 xlsx problem. The one big feature I did not include in the spreadsheet is the ability to finger swipe through the spreadsheet rows and columns - you can look around the spreadsheet with the arrow buttons on old, old Android phones and the Android emulator, but I spent all my time working on Excel 2007/2010 xlsx instead of features like that. It's only two weeks worth of work (plus the 2007/2010 xlsx work), and that minus my last six months of Android knowledge, but it's decent enough for what it is.

I sent a message to the POI mailing list after posting the code on Github. One of the POI dev's made a suggestion as to what to do - strip all non-Excel functionality from the schemas file - but that was what I already had for the most part done. I say for the most part because I probably stripped more than 80% of the non-Excel code. Why did I need to do this? Because Android Dalvik executables have a 65,536 method limit, and with all the Apache POI XSSF required libraries to do Excel 2007/2010 xlsx files included, my program would exceed that limit. Now there are two paths to get around this. One is the easier path - strip 100% of the POI stuff unneeded for Excel compatibility from the POI schemas jar. But I already stripped the low hanging fruit of this, and whittled 80+% of that stuff from the schema. Unless the other

Anyhow, back in July, when I stripped 80+% of the low-hanging fruit non-Excel schema and it was still a no-go, I put this aside and began working on other Android projects. In October I began thinking about this, and realized I was not going to get back to it in a while, so I cleaned it up (a little bit) and put it up on Github under the Apache 2.0 license (POI is Apache 2.0 so I figured I'd just use that as well), and posted to the POI mailing list.

I've had enough Android projects, and non-Android projects and things to distract me from returning to this. If my attention was turned to this again, the first thing I would do would be to repeat my 80+% non-Excel POI schema cleaning with the latest POI trunk (or last released jar, or whatever) and make my results public on a web page, or the POI mailing list or something. I would try to get it from 80%+ to 85+% and up to 100% clean of everything unneeded. If that didn't work, I would see if I could strip stuff from some of the other jar's, like xmlbeans or something.

If all of this didn't work, I would go the way of two Dalvik executable files in one Android project. With custom class loading, an interface for each needed method and all of that. An effort I seriously doubt I would start on my own - but who knows? If others were interested in this, I might put some more time and effort into it when I can. It would be nice to have a free software Excel-compatible spreadsheet for Android. We could make it open document format (ods) compatible as well - although that would mean more methods! Honestly, I haven't looked at the ODF stuff much with regards to it. If anyone's interested, I put the link to the Github page above.

...the one-eyed man is king, is something Desiderius Erasmus once said.

You may consider the metric "worthless". But as I said, "Hits to Wikipedia is not a perfect metric, but if anyone knows of a better one I'd like to hear it." I noticed you offered no metrics of your own. People who want metrics would probably settle for Wikipedia statistics over nothing. The only metrics I can find from this article are from the web logs of Distrowatch. I'll choose a metric from the logs of a web site that Alexa says is the 6th most popular in the world over one the logs from a website mostly used by a much smaller number of Linux aficionados.

Let's look at a better popularity metric - what percent of which OS hit the servers of Wikipedia in October 2011.

Ubuntu was 0.41% of all Wikipedia traffic with roughly 16.9 million hits in October. Mint was 0.01% of Wikipedia traffic, with roughly half a million hits in October. Ubuntu traffic dwarfs Mint traffic by many multiples.

In terms of the popularity of Linux distros hitting Wikipedia: Android was #1. Ubuntu was #2. Fedora was #3, just barely surpassing SuSE which is #4. Debian was #5. Mandriva was #6. Then comes along Mint at #7. In fact, Mint is barely even beating Kubuntu. Hits to Wikipedia is not a perfect metric, but if anyone knows of a better one I'd like to hear it.

Things can change, and Mint may be gaining popularity, but we have to be realistic about things. I like a lot of things about Debian and Trisquel, but I'm also aware of the fact that for every Debian desktop hitting Wikipedia, there are 20 Ubuntu desktops hitting Wikipedia, including my own. That number goes to 1:30 for Mint to Ubuntu. So no, Mint will not be surpassing Ubuntu any time soon.

I have an app on the Android Market which is not that popular relative to others in its category, I submitted it to Amazon, and they wanted me to tweak it (mostly because of how Facebook's Android-style app is broken more than mine was, Facebook answers one of my Intents badly, a problem many people have had). This particular app has no ads yet, but I wonder who does ads with Kindle Fires. I don't see anything on Google-owned Admob. I don't have an Inmobi account yet, but don't see any mention of Kindle Fire on their web site. I wonder which vendor ad-supported Kindle apps will use.

I use a fairly up to date version of the latest Ubuntu, 11.10, as my desktop.

One thing I dislike is when they complicate things that used to be simple. It used to be if I wanted to switch to another workspace, I would move the mouse to the top of the screen and click which of the other workspaces I wanted. Simple.

Now to do that I have to move my mouse to the left side of the screen. Then a bar pops up on the left side of the screen, then I move to the workspace changer and click on it. It moves to workspace switcher mode. Then I move the mouse across the screen to the workspace I want and click. It complicates something that had been simple. In fact it's changed my behavior in a way I did not want it to - I used to run Firefox and Eclipse in separate workspaces, but as workspace switching is more of a hassle, I now have both open in one workspace.

Aside from things like that, Canonical decided it wanted to do things its own way and has been moving along with a Gnome fork. Which might be OK if it had enough resources. But it does not. for example, here is a bug that I encountered. Orange windows pop up all over your workspace while you're trying to work. It can be quite annoying, as the users comments suggest. It was reported over three weeks ago but a fix has not been released yet. Unity does not have a wide base of developers supporting it like Gnome or KDE do, almost all of the developers doing this type of work are working for Canonical.

I met someone months ago who liked using Google Voice Search on his smartphone. He said the best thing about it was that he didn't have to use the small screen keyboard on his phone. I wouldn't underestimate this as a motive for usage, if it's faster and easier to do it this way, people will use it. My tablet had come with it preinstalled, with a microphone button on the top left, but I never bothered with it until I met him, after I did I tried it out and it worked well. I myself don't use it regularly, if I'm showing the tablet to someone I might show them it can do that, but I haven't used it much otherwise.

I don't see this as an Android killer at all. Today you can download various Android apps, including Google Voice, that can perform tasks by voice activation and recognition. Even if Siri is superior to them, and maybe it is currently, they're good enough in the time being for most people.

I've been developing for the Android Market since May. There are some things to consider. One is some companies don't expect immediate success - lots of banks and such which may have been slow to get a website, have decided to get on smartphones and tablets now. The return for this might take years to come, but they have plenty of money. Why not do it now? They have the money and forecasts show they'll need it eventually, to stay competitive. Sometimes it is existing software. For Android, the Adobe PDF reader was really junky for the past few months. They just released an update, and now the app is much, much better. So they also are protecting their brand.

My capital costs, other than my labor time, are approaching $0.00. Well actually approaching $25.00 as that's what a lifetime Android Market account cost me. I have Admob ads in most of my apps, and average 5 cents a click. So after 500 clicks, I'm in the black. I can go on vacation for two weeks, and come back and see how much I have earned in the interim on Ad clicks. If I wanted to, I could sell apps, or do in-app sales and the like, and maybe I'll try that in the future.

This is something I enjoy doing. I do everything - I look over the entire market, I think up what to do, I write the code, I do the layout, I do the artwork (or get free for commercial ones from findicons.com, iconfinder.com etc.), I decide which user-requested features to implement and which to ignore. I decide whether to work on a new project or improve my existing projects. And then I get the money. Another thing is with work, in this young market, my check is increasing every month. Some of it is my improved products and some of it is people getting new Android devices for the first time.

Some of the things our community knows are relevant here I think. Release early, release often! Are there any Android apps which could load and search Microsoft Access databases on the phone, even if it had no network connection? There wasn't back in June. There still is not one as far as I know other than mine - Panacea Database. I didn't even have to do the Access-specific work, there was a LGPL license library out there I used called Jackcess. My first release took four days - all it did was load the database and iterate through the table rows. You couldn't even iterate backwards, and users said it then looked like junk on smaller phones. But in terms of competition, only one app came close, and for some things (free for an unlimited time, able to handle Access without needing to install a desktop app), it had no competition. Now, 1500 active users later, I have made a lot of improvements, many suggested by users. Which is another thing known by our community - listen to the users, and with a little bit of discrimination, let them have a large hand in determining the roadmap.

Panacea Database was really just an experiment to see if I could successfully port a popular open source Java library to Android. The experiment was an all-around success: I ported it, I sent patches back to the library which helped improve its Access 2010 usage (actually the lead developer took my patch and improved it even more), and lots of users are happy they can do what they want on their Android phones and tablets, and I'm making money on ads. And - I'm helping, in a very small way, an open source Linux platform be more useful. It's a small effort, but combined with a lot of other people like me, it has an effect. The users make out, the library makes out, Admob makes out, Google makes out, the manufacturers make out, the carriers make out, and I make out.

So the map seems pretty open to me. As the Cathedral and Bazaar says, whether its open source or not, scratch your own itch. Think what you'd like to see that is not on Android - or not on it in the way you want. Will people be able to find your app? There's 2 or 3 popular file managers, and those apps are easily findable by searching for file explorer or file manager or whatever. Will your app be as easily findable? Will people be looking for "file manager" or whatever yours does? I use file manager as an example as it's something to avoid - there are 3 popular file managers with many features, and you'd really need to bring something new to things to compete with that. Yours would need to be as good or better than the best of those 3 to make a dent in market share. But plenty of things people want are not out there yet. Read the message boards and forums of people complaining what they can't do on Android. If you can program, you can fill that niche.

Another thing of release early, release often - I try for my first version to be put out as fast as possible, with as few features as possible - but that people will still be happy. So people won't feel they wasted their time downloading it. Maybe I'd get a 3 or 4 star rating in the market. "Good, but should have feature X and Y as well". So enough people want features X or Y, or if it sounds like a good idea regardless, implement it. The "waterfall" development method of going off into a cave and developing for a year or two and coming back is probably not a good idea. Better to put it out (once it is somewhat useful though) and see if it takes off or drops with a thud. It's a delicate balance of deciding when to release - you don't want to do it too early, but you don't want to spend months of hard work and then learn no one cares. It's generally agreed developers tend toward the latter and err on too late rather than too early. I generally aim to spend no more than a month working on an app before releasing the first version. The idea would have to be really spectacular for me to spend more time.

People have been quoting Steve Jobs lately, and one thing he basically said is he didn't think about making money but about releasing great products that people wanted. He figured if you focused on that, the money would follow, and in his case he was right. For Panacea Database, the nice comments, occasional five star ratings and thank you emails are in many ways a payment for the work on that app, along with the ability to be giving back patches to the Java library I built around, and writing useful apps for an open source platform, Android, which I enjoy using. I also enjoy the craftsmanship of doing a job completely by myself. The money from Admob is just icing on the cake.

I do Android development, and I had a look at the SDK and emulator when it was released last night. I created an emulator and was testing my applications out on it.

The first thing I noticed is that there are more help screens. I believe they disappear after first use, but they tell users how to navigate around the phone. Or tablet as it may be - that's probably the biggest thing about ICS, it integrates Gingerbread (smartphones) and Honeycomb (tablets) into one OS. I've been getting the hang of Android layout, and it is not so hard once you get used to it, you just stick with the things they recommend - density-independent pixels, scale-independent pixels, objects sized by width and/or height by fill-parent (fill layout container object is in) or wrap-object (make object only as large as it need be), objects or layout containers being assigned by weight. One trick I learned - I start design with the smallest device - WVGA - a small device with a low number of dots per inch. I do a portrait (device held with more height than width), and if I have time a landscape (device held with more width than height) view. Sometimes that is enough, and those two layouts work from the smallest to largest devices. Usually it requires a little tweaking, especially Activity classes that make use of buttons. You take the layouts you made and increase text size, increase the distance between objects and other objects, or objects and the edge of the screen. Some people rethink the design, they use Fragments so that where something that would be done on a small screen with ten screen changes with ten different Activity views, is now done with five screen changes with the same ten different Activity views - you just use Fragments to put two or so Activity views per screen. The ICS smartphone/tablet integration will help in that department, although you can do it to some extent already. In fact Fragments were introduced in Honeycomb (the old tablet Android version, before this ICS tablet/smartphone integration), so some of this is just bringing Honeycomb advances back to the smartphone. Another example of this is the Actionbar - over time the Android designers realized it would help UI consistency, ease of programming etc. if they put a bar on top that let people do things (open an email, go to the next page, whatever). So Actionbar was in Honeycomb, now it is in ICS as well. I should mention there is a compatibility package which allows apps to use many (but not all) of these new features on older phones like Gingerbread, Froyo, Eclair etc.

The next thing I noticed when looking at my apps in the ICS emulator is the new Roboto font. It is said to be able to be a good font for everything from a small, low density to a large screen with a high density. Some of my apps use the Android non-default fonts, and the ones I looked at looked most the same, although there may have been small tweaks I did not notice. And Android lets you use your own fonts.

One of my applications runs in the background, doing a database search while updating a progress bar - and while all of this is happening, an ad is often being loaded as well via the web. It seems to be stalling on something in the ICS emulator, I will do some debugging later to see where it is getting stuck. It may be one of those cases where I was doing something wrong but Android allowed it, and they increased the strictness of things. With ICS's use of Fragments, I can probably just load one ad Fragment when my app starts and put that on every screen anyhow.

Regarding source code, I'm sure it will be released. It will be a month or so before you can buy a Samsung Galaxy Nexus anyhow. The sooner the release the better for me, but Android's open nature beats Windows 8 Mango and iOS any day. I can sit at my Linux box, use open source tools to develop everything, and then just push it out to Android Market (or some other market - Android does not lock phones to their store like Apple does). It is beyond me why Apple punishes developers with an app store yearly fee, the need to develop an app on a Mac and the like, not to mention how most iOS programming is primarily in a more obscure language like Objective C and that sort of thing (although yes, you can port C++ etc., just like on Android). Even Microsoft has a free (for now) app store and a free as in beer OS and dev kit preview that you an stick into a virtual machine image. Apple is already paying the price for this I think.

With the explosion of smartphones and tablets, HP announcing they're leaving the PC business and all the news being how Windows 8's perhaps main feature being tablet (and smartphone) ability, the mobile aspect of Windows 8 is what many people will be looking at.

I hear some Windows fans talk about how Windows 8 is going to come in and eventually dominate smartphones and tablets. However, Apple already has been in the smartphone space since mid-2007, and the tablet space since April 2010. Android has been around since October 2008 in the smartphone space, and Honeycomb came out in February of this year (and a few months earlier things like the early Samsung tabs were coming out). Developers have spent a lot of time learning these platforms and writing code for them. The App Stores and Android Markets are filling up with apps, which are being improved continually by updates based on user feedback. Over 550,000 Android smartphones are being turned on a day. Customers are familiar with the apps on their phone, and how to do various things on their phone or tablet.

What do we he hear from Microsoft? It's all just vaporware so far. Even if developers want to develop for an SDK with no device, there's no SDK out yet. Maybe it will be put out after this conference. Also - Microsoft has been saying a lot of it is HTML 5 and Javascript. I'm happy about that, but it doesn't really exploit all the code and experience for Visual Basic, Silverlight, .NET and so forth. I understand they backpedaled on this a little bit, although HTML 5 and Javascript will still be on it. They're kind of forced to do this - they can't force mobile developers to develop just for Microsoft, they have to hope that the popular iPhone/iPad/Android applications are easy to port to Windows 8 so they can get some applications that way. Microsoft's Windows 7 smartphone/tablet market share is very, very low, so due to the lack of any kind of monopoly strongarm, they're forced to open up a little bit.

The two things Microsoft has going for it is the existing Windows code base, and the ability for people to connect to their PCs, or PC formats (Word, Excel) or Microsoft servers at work (Exchange etc.). As people dump Microsoft PCs for iPads and Android tablets, this lock-in becomes less important. Also insofar as the Windows existing code base, both Apple and Android have had a lot of C++ OpenGL code which used to be primarily dedicated to Windows ported to Apple and Android mobile devices. Miguel de Icaza and company have even brought Mono to Android, so a lot of C# and .NET code can get on Android. As existing Windows code can often be used on Android, this lessens the advantage of Windows 8.

And then there's other things. Microsoft makes money selling Windows 8 to manufacturers like HTC and so forth. Google gives Android away for free, and makes money on the hook-ins it has for Google Maps and so forth. I guess with the Motorola purchase, Google will make some money actually selling the hardware as well. Microsoft has to sell an unwanted product to manufacturers, when a free, popular OS already exists, with a user base of millions, with an Android app market with hundreds of thousands of apps, and many developers working on creating new apps and improving existing ones.

I also wonder how hard it is to develop for Windows 8. For Android, I can download Eclipse on a Linux machine, and the Android SDK, make an Android emulator, develop code in Java (with a few calls to special Android SDK Java classes like Activity), pay Google a one-time lifetime $25 fee to put as many apps on Android Market as I want, and I'm all set. I can even release the app to a non-Market competitor site and save the $25. So the whole shebang costs $25 for life. What will Windows be like? Will I have to pay to get on their app store? Will I have to buy Visual Studio or something? If they don't make things real easy and cheap for developers, they're going to have problems. They might even have problems if they do make things real easy and cheap.

The article says that "The ultimate killer feature that Android and other tablets have failed to replicate is the care Apple took from the start to ensure enough iPhone applications were available that took full advantage of the iPad’s 9.7-inch screen. Today, over 90,000 of the 475,000 applications available online from Apple’s App Store fully exploit the much larger screen size. By contrast, only a paltry 300 or so of the nearly 300,000 apps for Android phones have been fully optimised for the Honeycomb version of the Android operating system developed for tablets—though many of the rest scale up with varying degrees of success."

If this is the "ultimate killer feature" that distinguishes iPads from Android tablets, you'd think there would be some basis for them saying that only 300 Android applications are optimized for Honeycomb. What is that basis? They do not say. An educated guess is that some months ago some unofficial lists of which applications are Honeycomb optimized were created, and at least one of those lists tallies only 300 or so applications. But this means nothing, it is just a random list made by some random person out there, which never claims that it lists all, or even a significant fraction of which applications are Honeycomb optimized. This is a rather paltry basis for what is supposed to be a killer feature.

I have an Android Honeycomb tablet - a Samsung 10.1 Galaxy Tab running Android 3.1 (Honeycomb). I also have two applications, the more popular one of which is optimized for Honeycomb. But that Honeycomb-optimized application of mine is on none of those lists of Honeycomb-optimized applications, it is one of the many applications which are not counted in that "300" number.

I have downloaded many applications for my Honeycomb tablet - so far 100% have been usable in Tablet format. Maybe 5% of the applications are badly optimized - they only use 1/5 or so of the screen space. Another 10% or so are fine, but could probably benefit with more tablet optimization - larger text size, bigger buttons.

The 300 Android to 90000 iPad comparison is ludicrous - my Honeycomb-optimized application is not counted in that 300, and I'm sure many hundreds, or thousands of other Honeycomb-optimized apps are not included. Google already has a lot of features which make tablet development easier, such as Fragments - which is part of the compatibility package, making it doable for even early versions of Android. Ice Cream Sandwich will come out later this year and further ease smartphone/tablet integration.

I should point out that Android is not just playing the following tail lights game. Google TV devices are built on Android as well. Smartphones was the first big market, and then tablets, but who knows what devices Android will target and try to replace in the future?

There is no fight for the Linux desktop. Ubuntu completely dominates the Linux desktop in terms of users. Look at how many Ubuntu's versus other desktop Linux's people hit one of the most popular web sites on the Internet with. Ubuntu has twelve times the number of desktop users that Suse has. Ubuntu has twelve times the desktop users Fedora has. Ubuntu has eighteen times the desktop users Debian has. So the dominant solutions for the average user have already been decided in al of the above - Evolution, LibreOffice, Unity.

As this is free software though, there are not winners or losers in the traditional sense. People happy with Thunderbird, Openoffice and KDE can continue using them. It's not like KDE is going away any time soon, even though Unity so dominates the Linux desktop. Unity is still very heavily dependent on the Gnome framework in terms of libraries and applications. Canonical does not have anywhere near the manpower to handle what the Gnome project handles. It's an ecosystem where everything benefits from everything else - Unity benefits from Gnome, KDE benefits from freedesktop.org work by Gnome developers. And vice versa - the fd.o library which handles PDF format is done mostly by KDE-centric developers - only Carlos Garcia Campos is more Gnome-based.

Compared to Windows or MacOS, a Linux desktop/workstation is a dream platform for developers, so it is never going away. The only question is will it break through to the wider public? As Linus says, Linux had done well on the low end with embedded and mobile, and does well on the high end with servers and "cloud" (whatever cloud means). It also is a popular desktop/workstation for IT people. Now, efforts like Ubuntu are trying to make headway into the standard user desktop area. Although they've been more focused on servers, Red Hat and Suse have done a lot of work in the desktop department as well, something which Canonical benefits from.

This is a statistic I watch. Mostly I am curious about Android usage, as well as other mobile usage, versus desktop usage. I'm also interested in desktop Linux usage.

Alexa shows Wikipedia to be the 7th most popular site on the web. Wikipedia is unique in that it is one of the few top sites not run for profit. Consequently, they allow open traffic analysis of their web traffic to some extent, which I have found very useful. Here is what operating systems hit Wikipedia web sites in June 2011. They have that data for May, April and so forth. I made a chart from the data a few months ago on my blog.

For June in Wikipedia, XP was 36-37% of traffic. Vista was about 13% of traffic. Windows 7 was 29-30% of traffic. Mac plus iPhone plus iPad was 12% of traffic. Android was 1.4% of traffic, and Ubuntu was 0.5% of traffic.