In the context of writing about the merits of Qt, Aaron Seigo mentions in a comment on his own latest post that 'KDE has single deployments that are bigger than the entire Ubuntu user base'. Conservative estimates put Ubuntu at around 10 million users, which would make said KDE deployments huge. I know of the large Debian+KDE based educational effort for over 50 million brazilian schoolchildren but from what I have read that is planned and deployment has only started.
More generally large Linux or OpenOffice deployments usually make headlines when they are announced but little is written that I could find about actual production use of setups of tens of thousands of seats. I know OLPC has a few hundred thousands in South America, Guadalinex is also quite successful, that China and Russia occasionally appear in the news when someone learns again that they plan a National Linux-based OS, but I cannot think of one coordinated deployment that serves millions of users.
Having KDE, GNOME and various distros advertise such successful stories would help a lot when answering questions from the press or potential users regarding the number of Linux users.
Netbook and smartphone Linux use is on the rise and it counts when thinking about 'developing for Linux platforms' but these are not really deployments in the sense I understood Aaron's words.
OpenOffice.org has this page but few of the entries pass the 10K seat mark, and many are at future tense.
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7 comments:
What about Red Flag linux? They primarily use KDE and there are a lot of chinese in the world. Although I'm not sue whether they use KDE 4.x
The Aspire One and EEE pc (linux versions) both have quite a bit of both KDE and Gnome on them but neither really have a full KDE or Gnome desktop. But we are talking about millions of devices so it is worth mentioning. I know the french government is playing with Mandriva a lot, and some eastern european countries use Linux as well. But solid numbers of deployments - I wish I had those...
It's Aaron Seigo. He's the guy that said KDE 4.0.0 was usable day to day 1), and KDE has retail sales (???) rivaling Apple's 2).
1)
"And what a beginning 4.0.0 is .. it looks great, it's usable day to day and so many of the apps already blow me away every time I use them."
2)
"Yes, we have huge deployments in the education sector, have made terrific inroads into private and public offices and have annual global retail sales rivaling Apple's but these deployments are both limited in their visibility and geographically bound (meaning: we are doing a lot better in, say, Brazil than in the USA)."
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2009/06/building-brand-together.html
Anonymous, this post is not questioning Aaron's words so no need to turn this into ranting. Especially not anonymously.
"I know of the large Debian+KDE based educational effort for over 50 million brazilian schoolchildren"
To clarify: We're talking about 53000 seats (labs) here, serving 52 million students.
In Andalusia (Spain) we have deployed (so far) 220,000 PC and Laptops in >2,100 Schools and we have > 600,000 students and >75,000 teachers involved.
Ubuntu based, indeed we have prepared an Educational package similar to EdUbuntu.
www.guadalinexedu.org
You can install it on top of Jaunty.
(sorry, we are translating now the menus into english and French)
the Brazillian deployment is mostly one at this point afaik; some time in 2009 was the end of the deployment period and there were already ~30k labs in place a year ago.
@olingerc: the last Red Flag #s i've seen gave them 4mm retail unit sales in '07 in S. America and Asia. in Brazil, retention rate of Linux based desktops purchased via retail channels is ~70-80% according to market research (which is well over double what it was a few years before that), so hopefully we can assume that # holds for the RF sales in general.
@anonymous mark 2: "53000 seats (labs) here,"
it's actually 53k labs, each with up to (and most having) 15 seats in each. that makes for some 700k seats.
@anonymous mark 1: quote #1 is out of context, and quote #2 is actually accurate. thanks, though :)
@AJ: the Andalusia deployment is indeed impressive and i'm very happy that it's kept going over the years.
several areas in Spain are doing just amazing things with F/OSS. the Canaries are also using Linux on the desktop, and the on-the-ground community of F/OSS contributors and companies in Spain is terrific from what i've experienced.
the regional nature of the success of client side Linux to ate is, imo, to be expected but so often masks the overall accomplishments made.
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