Do you have any references for those statistics?
The figures came from this:
A few months ago (don't recall exactly when) Apple were under pressure from Redmond to sell more copies of OS X so they could make the money back on Office X. They revealed that 1 in 10 mac users were using OS X. That's 0.4% of the worlds installed user base. That's probably gone up somewhat by then, but I've been told recently by somebody who'd know that the vast majority of Macs are still running OS 9.
Around a similar time (perhaps a few months earlier again) IDC estimated (don't have a url handy sorry) that linux had roughly 2% of the desktop market. Even if we assume that was generous That's still nearly 5x the user base of MacOSX.
I don't really care one way or another, but just thought I'd point out that you shouldn't make assumptions one way or another when nobody really knows what's going on out there.
I'm quite unlikely to set up a Linux/PPC box myself, although I am *very* interested in hearing from folks working on Wine for *any* PPC OS.
Hmm, is there any reason for that? Linux/PPC would seem the logical place to start as WineLib already works on this platform, so the Bochs integration would have a solid foundation to work on. As you've said, raw Darwin (at least on x86) is more a showpiece than anything actually useful, and that probably won't change for some time (if ever).
I have been interested in ways to have Linux compatibility on Mac OS X (it is a microkernel system after all), so I will spend a little time investigating that.
For Linux binary support you'd have to do a FreeBSD style ABI export. Considering that like 95% of the software available for it is open source though, it's normally easiest to recompile fink-style.
Jeremy:
I've been waiting oh so long for that to tick from 1% to 2%; that will signal the beginning of the desktop revolution to me.
It'll happen (google told me they basically trunc then balance the numbers, but who knows how it's really calculated). Until then take solace in the fact that Linux is the 4th most popular technology search which beats Microsoft healthily :)
have fun! -mike