My argument isn’t about how we’re classifying and counting desktop operating system installs. I know how we’re doing that. I’m saying it’s stupid and doesn’t make any sense to count that way if your goal is to grow this community of Linux users.

Most desktop Windows users don’t belong to a community of enthusiasts. For them, Windows is just a tool they use at work and in many cases hate using. Microsoft doesn’t care about community-building at all.

For Linux it’s different. Linux has both a community of enthusiast users and a number of large companies who use and package Linux as part of a product and service offering. Valve and Google are 2 such companies. Neither of them care about the broader Linux community. Their goal is to make money using SteamOS and Android respectively. For them, Linux is just a tool to save them money on development costs: an off-the-shelf, royalty-free operating system to build on. The vast majority of Android and SteamOS users will never interact with the Linux underpinnings of their respective OSes, never mind coming to participate in this community!

The fact that SteamOS users count as desktop market share and Android users don’t (also: what about Chromebooks running ChromeOS?) should not matter at all to us, just as I don’t care that one of the printers at work runs Windows on its print queue server and the other runs Linux.