LinuxWorld reports:
Nearly one-third of the 35 million netbooks on track to ship this year will come with some variant of the free, open-source operating system, ABI Research said. The exact split is 32% Linux versus 68% Windows, said Jeff Orr, an analyst at ABI, which works out to about 11 million Linux netbooks this year.
“Just because you live in the United States, don’t assume that everything is on Windows,” Orr said. Orr said Ubuntu is a popular choice on netbooks, though he declined to confirm that with any hard statistics.
As netbooks running the ARM processor become a major factor, Orr predicted Linux will overtake Windows on netbooks by 2013. That will be driven by consumers in less-developed countries buying Linux netbooks as their primary PCs, rather than North American consumers buying netbooks as secondary machines as predominates today.
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