Trendspotting: “The Amiga Line”
I have been playing with Google Trends, which will be happy to generate a pretty graph of keyword frequency over time. A rough gauge to the relative popularity of various things. This evening, I was riffing off a post from the Royal Pingdom, regarding the relative popularity of Ubuntu and Vista, among other things.
I got started graphing various Linux distributions against each other, XP versus Vista, and trying to figure out the best keyword for OS X. Then, I wondered about FreeBSD. Against Ubuntu, it was a flatline. So, I asked myself: what is the threshold for a dead or dying Operating System?
Amiga vs FreeBSD:
Ouch! Can we get deader?
Amiga vs FreeBSD vs BeOS:
To be fair, the cult of Amiga is still strong . . . BeOS is well and truly dead. But how do the BSDs fare?
Amiga vs FreeBSD vs BeOS vs NetBSD vs OpenBSD:
NetBSD has been sleeping with the BeOS fishes for a while, and OpenBSD is on its way. And that’s a league below Amiga!
In Red Hat land, only Fedora beats “the Amiga Line”. For Unix in general, nothing stops the Ubuntu juggernaut. But there’s a long way to go to catch up with Uncle Bill.
(Yes, it is a rainy night and the girlfriend is out of town.)
Postscript: Ubuntu versus Obama
Responses
Mike
How did you used the search terms exactly?
Because Amiga means “girl friend” (not girlfriend) in spanish… can this tamper the results a little bit?
dannyman
Mike,
I think Google tries to filter by language, but I guess that is imperfect, and that helps explain why Amiga’s popularity seems so much higher than like, BeOS. That said, I imagine that Spanish-language interest in friends remains fairly constant . . .
No, this is hardly a scientific survey. :)
-danny
nix_user
Well, here is a search that might be a little more interesting:
Ubuntu, Windows XP, FreeBSD, Windows, XP
or
Ubuntu problems, Windows XP problems, FreeBSD problems, Windows Problems, XP Problems
Sometimes not even being on the radar may be a good thing. Just a different perspective.
Disclaimer: BSD user stuck on an Ubuntu laptop; using Fluxbox.
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