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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."
I've had a much easier time getting my boss to look at it because when I install it, it just works... Also it's very nice play with dual boot for the skittish XP users is a good thing. They have it very well packaged, though that may be all it actually is, it's very nearly a deal closer with skeptics who hate command lines, but still should be learning linux for cost reasons. I have it on my host, and personally, I like it very much. (A quick vmware-server install allows for all of the windows one will ever need.)
Speak for yourself.
I've completely switched to Ubuntu at home. For the most part, it has been relatively painless. My wife has had a few printing issues. I had to spend some time getting the wireless to work in our Dell laptop and I had to tweak our ATI card settings in xorg.conf manually to get a good resolution.
Other than those minor things, it has just worked.
I use our main PC as a studio PC. It has a M-Audio 1010LT card which worked, but it took me some time to get the recording issues sorted out. JACK has a slight learning curve as did Ardour, but no more so than Adobe Audition did on XP. I've been rather pleased with the free available software for studio use.
I've even used GIMP a few times to edit some photos. While I had to hunt around a bit looking for the feature I wanted, I haven't run into anything it can't do that I need. Photoshop was always overkill for me anyway.
My experiment at home to run Ubuntu on our laptop has turned into a complete conversion and I'm not looking back. I talk it up to anyone who'll listen.
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Maybe I just have different hardware or software needs, but for me, there is no 2% of stuff that doesn't work on Mandriva. For me, personally, it has always just worked. And considering only 2% isn't working, it's probably not that uncommon for people to not experience any problems with Mandriva. Also, Ubuntu might also have 2% of stuff not working, and you just haven't run into it. Like I said, the administration tools from Mandriva are much better, and maybe that's the "2%" of stuff that I don't like from Ubuntu. Also, saying that Ubuntu blew the doors off of Mandriva by filling in the last 2% is a little bit of an exaggeration. At most it is a minor improvemnt, and if you were already a happy Mandriva user, I don't think it would be worth switching over to Ubuntu.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
I've been in the computer industry for 20+ years. I've pretty much used every flavor of Unix and several different linux distros. Needless to say I'm in the "command line friendly" crowd. I enjoy tinkering with thing and yet I chose Ubuntu. My main job, day today needs solid email, web browsing and office apps world. So as long as I have a good text editor for code, and those apps, I'm happy. Fedora was too much work. I had to think about it as I'm trying to do my job. It was bloated, way too much stuff running, different tools trying to update/install software that didn't work together (update manager - yum - rpm), one could run while the other was running and hose your database, etc. I need to reinstall the OS and after 4 hours and 5 CD's of Fedora I was quite unhappy. So the next time I installed, it was one disk, 30 minutes, minimal bloat and I've never had my software package management fail to work together. With Ubuntu, I don't have to think about the OS and the apps. I can think about my work. And there is still plenty of tinker room with Ubuntu!
Rob Miracle http://www.robmiracle.com
I think ease-of-use is what made Ubuntu distro with mass-appeal. A friend of mine was using my laptop for a day, and asked me where I got the "skin" for windows from. I know he did not try to install anything, and used it primarily for browsing, but still it speaks volumes of Ubuntu's ease-of-use.