Survey results in

News posted on Sat, 2011-08-20 15:53

Here is Miroslav's summary of the survey:

Although the respondents answered that their favourit operating system is Haiku respectively BeOS, the most often used operating system family is Microsoft Windows (see the results corresponding to the questions 1 to 5 in the chapter 6.2.1).

On average the people use Haiku less than 6 hours per week. When calculating the median instead of the mean, then it is even only one hour per week (see the results corresponding to the question 6 in the chapter 6.2.1).

In general, the respondents use Haiku respectively BeOS at home and very rarely at school or at work (see the results corresponding to the question 7 in the chapter 6.2.1).

When they use Haiku, then it is mostly installed on a hard disk partition of a physical computer or it is used as a VM image run in a virtual machine (see the results corresponding to the question 8 in the chapter 6.2.1).

More than two-thirds of all people answered that they had used BeOS before they became interested in Haiku (see the results corresponding to the question 9 in the chapter 6.2.1). This means that Haiku did not gain many new users and fans. It could be necessary to improve the marketing activities.

When using Haiku or BeOS, most people use applications that are typical for desktop computing, such as browsing the web, playing music, playing videos and internet in general (see the results corresponding to the question 11 in the chapter 6.2.1).

Many people are interested in Haiku because they are fans of BeOS or ZETA. Other often given reasons are the booting speed, the responsiveness, the ease of use and the facts that Haiku is light and free (see the results corresponding to the questions 13 and 14 in the chapter 6.2.1).

The respondents think that the most important tasks for the next version of Haiku shall be the development or porting of a powerful office software and a powerful graphic editing software (see the results corresponding to the question 15 in the chapter 6.2.1). These results are no wonder because there exists no worthy of mention office software for Haiku. The old office software products available for BeOS are not compatible with Haiku. The most powerful available graphic editing tool is WonderBrush. Although this graphic editing software is useful for small private projects and supports layers, it is not powerful enough to be used for professional graphic editing and can not enter the competition with GIMP or Adobe Photoshop.

Almost all Haiku users are male. Less than one percent of the people, that answered the survey, are female. Most of the people are about 30 years old, have a high level of education and work in fields of computer sciences or information technology. Quite many are singles and about three-fourths have no children (see the results corresponding to the questions 16 to 23 in the chapter 6.2.1).

The older the people are, the more they appreciate user friendly operating systems and the more they think, that Linux is difficult to use.
Most fans of BeOS respectively Haiku do not hate Microsoft. There seems to be no hostility regarding Microsoft or Windows, in opposite to the situation in the Linux community where such a hostility exists.
In general, the fans of Haiku respectively BeOS appreciate the speed, simplicity, low hardware requirements and multimedia features of these two operating systems (see the bivariate correlations and partial correlations in the chapter 6.2.2).