Re: Octave's goals and motivations (Re: GUI)

[Richard Crozier]

 On 29/09/2011 12:38, Carnë Draug wrote:
> 2011/9/29 Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden>:
>> On 28 September 2011 18:40, tilas <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> 2. consider this simple fact of life: between 80%-90% of all
>>> desktops are windows vs about 1%-5% linux
>> [...] Most
>> of the world's computers use Windows. But that doesn't mean we should
>> accept any of these facts of life nor not attempt to improve them.
> Just would like to point out that the group 'all desktops' is of no
> interest. The group 'desktops of people who have a use for octave'
> maybe is and I'm guessing the 2 linux/windows populations in that
> group will be very different.
>
> Carnë
>

People often suggest this, what's the ratio of windows mingw binary
downloads to linux package users, any stats? I think there's been at
least 1'200'000 downloads of the mingw binary, and there's only about
30'000'000 users of Linux worlwide, are more than 1/30th of them using
Octave? If not then there are more Windows based Octave users than Linux.

The fact that The Mathworks go to great lengths to make their program
cross-platform should tell you that windows users are important in the
scheme of things.

Another poster recently asked why R is so much bigger than Octave when
they started around the same time. I would suggest part of the reason is
that they are cross-platform while Octave is not.

Tomorrow I am giving some basic matlab training to people from a
consortium of small companies for which I have written some software. I
will also be telling them about Octave, even demonstrating it, but will
have to explain that it basically doesn't work in windows, or at least
the windows version is very far behind the 'real' version. They are
engineering companies, familiar with technology, but they use windows.
How could I persuade these companies to switch to Octave or provide
money to the Octave project when they must overhaul all of their working
practices to do so by switching to Linux? Even installing Octave on one
of the most popular Linux versions is difficult, Ubuntu, unless you use
the 3.2 version in the repository. I will be demonstrating with the 3.2
version as it is the version installed on Linux computers in my department.



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