Re: idle question about distro popularity in Japan

[Jonathan Q <jq@example.com>]

Scott Robbins (scottro@example.com) wrote:

> At any rate, he thought he'd seen an article saying that a particular distro
> of Linux was outselling MS in Japan 5 to 1 and wondered which distro it was.
> Does anyone know?

I suspect that he may be mis-remembering a time a couple or three
years ago when TurboLinux was outselling something (don't
remember if it was MacOS or Windows) but this figure only
included copies bought in stores.  It did not
included anything that shipped pre-installed on a new
computer.  I think it may have also been not long after
a TurboLinux release.    Scott Stone may remember the
exact details of that.

However, I've never heard of a
claim that any Linux was outselling MacOS or Windows
by 5x.  I would suspect such a thing of being a carefully
defined statistic.

If you include Linux downloads, things might look a bit 
different, though.  There's a large disparity between the
installed base of Linux and the number of Linux distros
sold in stores.

Jonathan