Linux may be a free platform for many and a reasonably inexpensive alternative to Unix and proprietary platforms for others, but make no mistake.

Have you ever wondered which Linux distribution was most popular during the previous years? If you have, then you may be interested in some of the data that I’m going to present to you.

Basically, Novell and Red Hat won’t be trying to get consumer desktop market share, focusing instead only on the ‘enterprise’ desktop market; Fedora and openSUSE thus appear to be relegated to ‘hobbyist OS’ level. Ubuntu is now THE distro of choice for home use, with no major competitors, but I think we’ve known that for some time:

It's possible that the Linux desktop will never be anything more than a fad among geeky enthusiasts. If so, a growing swell of people appear to be much more faddish of late, as numbers from W3Counter.com appear to indicate.

Analyst firm Research and Markets has just put out a project on Linux-based server and client hardware sales, and is projecting that the market will more than triple between 2007 and 2012.

Red Hat continues to demonstrate its dominance of the enterprise Linux market. The company reported a blow-out third quarter, with total revenue of $135.4 million, an increase of 28% from the year ago quarter and 6% from the prior quarter. Subscription revenue was $115.7 million, up 30% year-over-year and 6% sequentially.

Year after year, industry pundits state, "This is the year of Linux," and year after year, those same pundits say, "The market is just not ready yet." So the big question here is, "Where are the Linux desktops?" For the most part, they're not anywhere.

It appears from almost two years of IDC data that the Unix/Linux share of the market is stabilizing in the 40-45% range. The major question is how quickly Linux systems will displace Unix. That’s the market chunk that Red Hat (RHT) is aiming at with its recent announcement that it plans to “own” 50% of the server market by 2015.