Brazil KDE Usage by End of 2009: 52,000,000 Students

Regardless of whether you are talking about 52 million dollars or 52 million grains of rice, 52 million is a huge number. It’s also the projected number of students to be using KDE by the end of 2009 in Brazil. According to reports, by the end of this year, 29,000 labs will be serving 32 million students, and by the end of next year, that will increase to 53,000 labs and 52 million students using KDE.

This news isn’t only great for the KDE desktop (which it is), but Linux in general. That is huge adoption, right there. The screenshot below is somewhat misleading because it won’t be KDE 4 they’ll be using right off the bat, but rather KDE 3.5 – a good move in my opinion. I’m not against KDE 4, 3.5 is very lightweight and very customizable.

If interested in seeing how this project will play out, be sure to check out this blog entry.

The systems use KDE 3.5 and take full advantage of Debian as well as KDE’s Edu and Games projects, use of KDE4 in future implementation is just starting to be explored. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of the deployment is how they maximize investment in hardware by putting several heads on each system.

Source: aseigo’s Blog