Ubuntu Continues to Grab Market Share

slasher writes "MadPenguin.org discusses the future of Ubuntu and confirms Ubuntu's growing market share in the Linux market. Author Matt Hartley writes, "Now, for the biggest question: do high numbers mean that Ubuntu is the best distribution out there? Some will argue that this is an impossible point to make, as each person has different needs from their distribution. But for the sake of this article, we will be considering the average user, not the Slackware crowd, who is obviously much more comfortable within a command line environment than mainstream users."

Comments

My Opinion

[CastrTroy]

Personally, I've been using Mandriva/Mandrake for about 5 years, and I don't see anything that Ubuntu has that Mandrake didn't have 3 years ago. I'm not sure why Ubuntu is catching all this attention. Maybe I'm missing something really big, but I seriously don't see what makes Ubuntu so much better than Mandriva, or most other desktop oriented distros. I actually prefer Mandriva, because I find that the Admin tools are much better.

Re:My Opinion

[Wylfing]

I'm foregoing modding you (it would have been +1 Insightful) in order to reply.

I used to be a Mandrake "subscriber." I paid my yearly dollars, because Mandrake was really the best distro out there that I had tried. Even when Fedora came around, I gave that a whirl and it wasn't up to the Mandrake level in my opinion.

It is true that Mandrake pioneered most of the user-friendliness that Ubuntu now capitalizes upon. However, in my time with Mandrake there was always something that didn't work right. It changed from release to release, but it was always something. Like they had 98% of everything nailed down, but that one thing just bugged me to death, because it would be something like, oh, printing. I frequently built custom kernels under Mandrake in order to get things to work, and even then there were often a few things that were broken beyond my ability to repair. Now when Ubuntu came around, I installed on a test machine (I do this often with new releases of distros I'm not using just to see how they fare). I was so happy -- there was nothing that didn't work, straight out of the box. No fiddling, no custom kernels. They had closed that last 2% of functionality. It was almost zero configuration for printing and wireless networking, two things that historically have been a problem.

So yes, Mandrake was (and is) a leader in making an easy-to-use desktop distribution. But Ubuntu blew the doors off with its "it just works" quality. That's why people love it, and that's why it's on all my desktops to this day.

Yes, the best distribution.

[An Ominous Coward]

For this particular situation, yes, Ubuntu's popularity does mean it is the best distro. Ubuntu is the first Linux that's had "mass market" appeal, bringing in people from outside the *NIX world, due to its easy of install and use, but also for being "hot" at the right time: when Microsoft is trying to shove a slow, bloated, DRM-filled downgrade called Vista on its users.

So even if Ubuntu isn't ideal for all Linux users, it has the opportunity to greatly increase the Linux user population, bringing more and wider-ranged development to the OS, which will benefit us all regardless of our distro of choice.