Arm Community
Arm Community
  • Site
  • User
  • Site
  • Search
  • User
Arm Community blogs
Arm Community blogs
Architectures and Processors blog How many people develop on a laptop with Linux?
  • Blogs
  • Mentions
  • Sub-Groups
  • Tags
  • Jump...
  • Cancel
More blogs in Arm Community blogs
  • AI blog

  • Announcements

  • Architectures and Processors blog

  • Automotive blog

  • Embedded and Microcontrollers blog

  • Internet of Things (IoT) blog

  • Laptops and Desktops blog

  • Mobile, Graphics, and Gaming blog

  • Operating Systems blog

  • Servers and Cloud Computing blog

  • SoC Design and Simulation blog

  • Tools, Software and IDEs blog

Tell us what you think
Tags
  • mobile
  • AArch64
  • Linux Developers
  • infrastructure
Actions
  • RSS
  • More
  • Cancel
Related blog posts
Related forum threads

How many people develop on a laptop with Linux?

Richard Henwood
Richard Henwood
April 26, 2019
3 minute read time.

I've been a huge fan of Linux for many years. I have been fortunate to have it as my primary development platform as it has morphed from a workstation to a laptop. Today, you can buy a Lenovo Yoga C630 laptop/tablet with Windows 10 and 8GB of RAM. I can live with 8GB of RAM so I was very excited to learn that there is active work to make this platform run Linux natively.

That's great news for me, but if I were Lenovo and thinking about possible additional sales, how many people care about Linux on the laptop anyway?

Developing on Linux with a laptop: the figures

I decided to try and figure out how many developers (like me) have a laptop as their primary platform and run Linux as the OS. I started looking around for some data I could piece together into an estimate. First thing I did was look at the Stack Overflow survey for 2018. In these results, I found the ratio of primary platforms respondents used:

Primary OS Respondents
Windows 49.4%
MacOS 27.4%
Linux-based 23.0%
BSD/Unix 0.2 %

The Stack Overflow 2018 survey was completed by more than 100,000 developers. This is a good number, but not all. Stack Overflow estimate that 21 million professional developers visit their site each month. This is not the same as the quantity of professional developers in the work, but it is a good estimate in my opinion.

I found another measure for the number of professional developers in the world from the Global Developer Population and Demographic Study 2018. This study put the number of professional developers at 23 million. There is good agreement between these two figures. I decided to split the difference and say there were: 22 million professional developers. Now we can apply our radio from our sampled subset to the whole population to discover.

Five million developers who use Linux as their primary OS

It is important to recognize that I've used an unsubstantiated assumption that the same ratio holds for the sampled population to he whole population. Sampling theory describes the pitfalls in this approach and suggests methods to capture the uncertainty in this method. For the proposes of this blog post, I'm going to ignore these methods and carry on with my crude model. Another interesting point is that since I drafted this blog, Stack Overflow released the results for 2019. Linux users increased more than 2% to 25.3% or respondents.

Now we know there are five million developers who are Linux based, how many of them use a laptop as their primary platform? For this step, I needed to discover how many laptops are shipped annually. Looking around, I found that IDC helpfullly provide data for 2017:

Form factor Shipped platforms (2017)
Desktop + DT & Datacenter Workstation 97.8M  23.1%
Notebook + Mobile Workstation 161.6M  38.2%
Detachable Tablet 21.9M  5.2%
Slate Tablet 141.8M  0.2%

We can now proceed with our second approximation: 38.2% of all five million Linux users are using a laptop. This gives us the triumphant result:

1.9 million developers Linux on a laptop as their primary OS

Linux on a laptop is an excellent experience. It works well because the open source software tools are mature, stable, and polished for productivity. Arm laptop platforms are not new, but the new Qualcomm 850 parts have their boot loader unlocked and boot with UEFI. These machine boast 4G always-on internet and 30 hour batter life -- truly unique capabilities. For the first time, a generic Fedora should be installable on these platforms. For the sake of balance it is worth noting that generic Ubuntu and SUSE are expected to work out-of-the-box as well. That means 1.9 million developers can pursue Arm as their primary development platform.

Grab yourself a Qualcomm 850 based laptop.

join the Github project now

Anonymous
Architectures and Processors blog
  • Introducing GICv5: Scalable and secure interrupt management for Arm

    Christoffer Dall
    Christoffer Dall
    Introducing Arm GICv5: a scalable, hypervisor-free interrupt controller for modern multi-core systems with improved virtualization and real-time support.
    • April 28, 2025
  • Getting started with AARCHMRS Features.json using Python

    Joh
    Joh
    A high-level introduction to the Arm Architecture Machine Readable Specification (AARCHMRS) Features.json with some examples to interpret and start to work with the available data using Python.
    • April 8, 2025
  • Advancing server manageability on Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystem (CSS) with OpenBMC

    Samer El-Haj-Mahmoud
    Samer El-Haj-Mahmoud
    Arm and 9elements Cyber Security have brought a prototype of OpenBMC to the Arm Neoverse Compute Subsystem (CSS) to advancing server manageability.
    • January 28, 2025