I’d like to try a poll. I have some data on what operating systems people use based on IDL downloads from our website. However, there are a lot of floating licenses, which may skew the actual number of users per OS (e.g., three people could share a single Linux float license). My hope is that this poll, though unscientific, will give us another look at the OS distribution of IDL users.
In the poll below, please select the operating system(s) (multiple selection is OK) on which you use IDL. I’ll keep the poll open until next Thursday, when I’ll share the results.
I’ve already voted: my three laptops are Windows (64-bit), Linux (64-bit) and Linux (32-bit). If you use Linux, feel free to vote several times. (OK, maybe I shouldn’t have said that.)
If this poll is well-received, I’ll try a few more this year.
Update (2013-02-28): I’ve closed the poll. Check the results! Thanks to everyone who participated.
I’d say Mac made quite a showing. In the PC market in the US, Apple is at about 11%. So, IDL users (or the poll respondents, anyway) are on Mac at a rate more than double that of the general population. Linux estimates are in the couple-of-percent range worldwide, which shows even more starkly how IDL users are a particular sample significantly decoupled from overall computing market trends.