Slashdot Mirror
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."
But, two days ago you said this was pointless.
I'm so confused, I don't even know what to believe anymore!
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.
The next release will be interesting to see. Being a LTS version, I can see it spreading rather quickly and staying there for quite a while. It definitely has had a lot of upgrades since the last LTS flavor.
I think the main reason Ubuntu is doing so well is that it has a consistent and relatively quick release cycle, so it always has the latest drivers/software/utilities and more importantly, it has great package management build on Debian. That was always what I disliked about Debian, that it took way to long for programs to filter down to the stable repos.
Props to you Ubuntu and friends, I look forward to working with you down the road.
Yes it's an anecdote! Were you expecting original research in a Slashdot comment?
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That's the question posed. Well, we only have to look at the market penetration of Windows to know that question is rather meaningless. Ubuntu is a good distribution. "Best distribution" is a bit presumptuous as people who would be interested in a Linux distribution have different needs.
I always mod up spelling trolls.
What does average user even mean? For the average Windows user, I'd say Ubuntu would be the best for them without hesitation. For the average Linux user, the question becomes trickier. I don't know that there is a well-defined "average Linux user".
That depends on where you look.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
VOTE!
Maybe I'm missing something about this article, but it's very short, makes no real points and doesn't back up its claims. How can we ever know which distro is the most used? Distrowatch? Their methods are hardly reliable!
Sadly it seems this article has been written to get people arguing on social networking sites instead of bringing anything new to the table. Yes, I know: I must be new here. :)
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
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.
No doubt, the (*)Ubuntus are great distros. One thing continues to baffle my mind in the general Linux world:
Why won't the fonts look beautiful by default?
Why, after all these years Linux has existed, do we have to seek help from Microsoft with its fonts in order to have a desktop that is a pleasure to look at?
Why is it that there is still debate as to whether wizzard like setps would be good for the desktop or the server? On this point, a wizzard like setup routine to handle an application like the Apache web server would make things easier for a lot of folks.
What makes me mad is that those who have the skills do do the needful, still refuse to see what seems to be obvious. Time will tell.
One more encouraging sign hit the already triumphant Ubuntu community when MadPenguin confirmed that Ubuntu market share has risen yet again, now up to to some number that would actually make this parody much easier to write had been cited in the fucking article.
Coming with a hotlink to a recent MadPenguin.org article which plainly states that Microsoft Does't Care About Destroying Linux, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. It's simply a matter of numbers, despite it being a sore spot with Fedora and SuSe users who've failed to get over it.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict Ubuntu's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Ubuntu has won the hearts of common users. In fact there won't be any future at all without Ubuntu because Ubuntu is not dying. Things are looking very good for Ubuntu. As many of us are already aware, Ubuntu continues to gain market share. Take a cold, hard look around.
Debian is the most endangered of them all, had a much slower development cycle than many of us would amit. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Fedora communicy relations issues only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Ubuntu is not dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
If there were any in TFA, I'd have talked about the number of users Ubuntu has, made a few wisecracks about Theo and FreeBSD, and compared the number of Ubuntu vs FreeBSD articles on Slashdot, divided by the number of modpoints used. So let's just skip that bit and call it as done. Throw me a frickin' bone here, I haven't even had my morning coffee yet.
All major surveys show that Ubuntu has steadily risen in market share. Ubuntu is very healthy and its long term survival prospects are very good. If Ubuntu is to triumph at all it will be over Vista itself. Ubuntu continues to grow. Nothing short of a disaster could kill it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Ubuntu is alive.
Summary: Ubuntu is the biggest Linux distro because I say so. Discuss.
How much did they pay slashdot for the traffic being generated?
You sir, are a horrible statistician. .0002.
The correct way to say it is that the market share has increased to 200%.
See? 200 is way bigger than
Lies, damned-lies, statistics.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
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.
Aych tea tea pea colon slash slash slash dot dot org slash
This is kind of confusing to me that the excluded the 'Slackware crowd's preferences. If there exist Linux distros that the 'Slackware crowd' prefers (not rhetorical - I really am not aware of Linux user preferences), then isn't there scope for improving the user interface of these distros to make them more accessible to the common user and trump Ubuntu?
Being an Ubuntu user who is also part of the "Slackware crowd" (you insensitive clod!), I think there's also a danger in running too far with the notion that a particular distro suits a particular number of users. I am but one user with multiple tasks to perform; I don't have requirements - my tasks do. I use Slackware on my servers, because I have evaluated it to be the best tool for the jobs I need the platform to do. I use Ubuntu on my desktop workstations because I think it is the best tool for those jobs.
I understand the need for simplification when doing an article like this, and maybe that's why the author just wanted to start by moving pains-in-the-ass like me off the table and stick with ye-average-joes who have perhaps one PC that they use. It drastically limits the complexity of the issue; but it inexorably limits the relevance of the article at the same time.
Running Windows^H^H^H^H^H^H^H OSX and Linux in the home. (I don't have time for Solitaire any more.)
We were right! OS/2 can compete with Windows 95!
If we just hang in there, we'll overtake them yet!
I've been using Linux for about 8 years (desktops and servers) and have tried numerous distributions (Redhat, SuSe, Mandrake/Mandriva, Slackware) as a desktop OS. As far as the desktop goes, here are some things off the top of my head that Ubuntu offers me that other distros did not at the time of my experience with them (which may have been several years ago).
#1: No nonsense software manager. Ubuntu's Add/remove programs system just works. No dependency nightmare, rarely the need for command line, no need to compile/mock around with make files (although I'm comfortable with the process) but if there is the need, the option is there. Don't need to signup to get updates, it just works.
- All of my hardware works. ATI card, LCD (minimum tweak needed to get native res), ipod, firewire card, cellphone through USB, digi cams, cd/dvd writers, etc, etc.
- Relative cutting edge and stable software versions, I don't remember the last time I had x/gnome crash on me.
- Great software selection through their reps.
- Sane directory structure/menus setup.
- Excellent community support / forums.
- Ease of installation (although most distros offered this as well)
Never been happier with a Linux desktop.
[alk]
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
Obviously. And Ubuntu is no exception to that. On old PCs that have less than 256M RAM, you can't use the standard Ubuntu live/install CD. Laptops have always been a little behind desktops, making it even harder to find a suitable distro for an old laptop. If one of the brags of Linux is that old hardware isn't left out in the cold, many of the distros make that untrue by building for Pentium IIs at a minimum. Embedded is even harder-- there are few enough options that you can be pretty much stuck heavily modifying and compiling some sort of Gentoo style distro, or even making up a distro yourself. A 386 with 4M of RAM isn't a usable computer anymore, but it's not because it can't do useful work, it's because software has become so much more demanding. I used to surf the Internet on just such a 386, with Netscape 3 running in X.
I've been trying distro after distro, trying to find something lightweight and full featured not just because I have old computers, but also because I like fast response times. Slackware derivatives seem most promising, so have tried Zenwalk, Vector, and Slackware itself. Also tried Xubuntu. Next on my list of distros to try is KateOS.
Someone asked why Mandriva wasn't more popular. In 2 words, nagging and blinders. Mandriva by default points a lot of things to various nag messages, like the default browser homepage. Lot of the help functions launch a browser which, guess what? Loads up another part of the Mandriva web site with both a) nagging, and b) blinders, as in a search function that searches only Mandriva's stuff. Once you get tired of not finding answers there, you forget their help functions, and try your luck with a real search engine, or the Howtos from linux.org, or (gasp) the docs from the homepage of whatever generic app you're trying to use.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Maybe you should read through the other comments on this page to see how different people feel about Ubuntu and other distros. Personal preferences are all over the map. There's good and bad things about all distros. Usually a distro is started because existing drivers don't fill a particular need.
Head over to DistroWatch and read a little about some of the distros, you'll see what the unique purposes of most of them are. Ubuntu is a relatively new distribution, and before that I messed around with RedHat/Fedora, Suse, Slackware, and Gentoo. Now I've settled on Ubuntu, because it has the look and feel that I think a computer should have, and because it works for me. Other people I know prefer Fedora or Suse, and that's fine. I still use Gentoo at home on my Mythbox, and for me, it's alright for that purpose. But on my laptop I use Ubuntu. In the last week, I tried out Suse and Fedora one more time, and realized I still like Ubuntu the most. To each his own, but at least we're not all stuck with the same distro.
Dude, you know that Bambi is a guy, right? ;)
...the Canonical distros are nothing special. As a 24-7 sysadmin... I believe your second sentence there identifies you as someone that is not in Ubuntu's primary target audience. I think most Ubuntu users, including myself, will openly admit that regular Ubuntu releases (long-term releases such as 6.06 are somewhat different) are not really intended for mission-critical servers. If I have to spend half an hour rebooting my Ubuntu system at home and fixing the Xorg config file, I'm probably annoyed, but nobody has lost millions of dollars. The same can't always be said for production servers.It isn't Xorg/XF86 that are in question, it is the distro tools that configure them for you.
I have re-written quite a few xorg.conf files to deal with my dual-head display and have not yet come across a distro that handles it well enough to just use a GUI. I haven't tried Ubuntu on this setup but I can tell you that Mandriva, Slax and CentOS5 all do a decent job of setting up a basic config. I have to go in and reconfigure for every one of them but it beats the heck out of rebuilding from scratch for any of the dozens of distros I've tried that don't. Rebuilding is probably 30 minutes worth of work, but if that is representative of the average for tools in a distro, and I suspect it is, then you can use it as a quick rule of thumb.
If the dual head configuration is easy, then the distro is probably mature, if not then you will need command line expertise. For users who wonder what that means, if you don't know how to use vim then you shouldn't use a distro that doesn't handle dual head displays gracefully.
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
I've had a much easier time getting my boss to look at it because when I install it, it just works..
All the distributions are like that these days, despite Bill Gate's best efforts.
What you noticed though raises the more important issue. It's not if Ubuntu is gaining share from other distributions, it's if Ubuntu is gaining users from non free software. Once the user goes free they lose their M$ bad habits and blinders and then can move to other distributions without problems.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
And, FWIW, the following worked flawlessly on my wife's computer with Ubuntu, without modifying any configurations:
My blog
You won't like the answer, but it's in TFA.
It's more that Mandriva has something Ubuntu doesn't, something that drives people away. RPM-based distributions are not popular with users. That's because in spite of band-aids like Yum, the user experience for RPM still sucks.
Lots of people have been saying so for years, but the denial in the RPM camp is amazing.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Well, if *your* wife can do it; I most certainly want to do it too!
Please tell me how to configure my Wireless USB Network Adaptor - it's a LinkSys WUSB300N Wireless-N.
Heck, I'll do you one better...since you and I both know you won't be able to tell me how to get it running in Ubuntu, with or without ndiswrap'in it, (and if you *can* tell me how - then please head over to the Ubuntu Forums and post it form everyone; I'll totally apologize for my ignorance) - why not just give me a link to *any* Wireless-N USB Adapater I can get at BestBuy.com - that will be autodetected/configured/natively supported by Ubuntu (any version you specify). None of this using a windows driver and adding an extra layer of processing and all that junk...just something I can buy, today, from Best Buy that connects via USB, and can handle Wireless-N speeds.
P.S. While I sound a little sarcastic, because I do think that hardware support still blows in Linux - I REALLY do want a wireless USB device that will work, natively, in Linux. I've asked on plenty of Linux forums. If you can link me something, I really am going to go and buy it - I'm sick having a 30 foot long cat-5 cable running down my hall.
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.
He's a confusing writer and has confused some points so you sort of get lost in the message. What is really at stake is whether Linux is growing and what distro is the distro driving the Linux growth. I think he's saying Ubuntu is at the expense of the other distros. So, what do you do? Do you politely disagree with him or do you do something about it? Is he just saying Linux is growing or is he saying that you can't grow your user base of new users with the complexity found in some Linux distros (such as Slackware)? Is he trying to drive these more difficult to use distros to accept a more user friendly model?
It doesn't matter who wins the market for Linux. Linux is growing at a very good rate. New and advanced users can and do use it and are very happy, even though some aspects of Ubuntu are left wanting. Unfortunately he doesn't indicate which elements of the distro need attention.
All in all though, on a feature by feature basis for most feature sets Linux does what Vista does and more and is better at doing it even with less powerful hardware. No, I don't want to encourage others to throw older hardware at it. If you can throw as much hardware at Linux as you possibly can. You'll make your life much easier.
There are great things in the world of Linux. The Linux industry is very industrious. We are all benefiting from the opportunities that the industry called Linux is providing the world. With an estimated 100 million Linux users there's potential for every kind of development, including commercial proprietary software such as games.
What the Linux community does need is a solid installer that is cross distro and universal and able to install offline. It also needs much better support for gaming. I use Linux to game and when a game is targetted at OpenGL they play very very very well under Linux. They have advantages that even Windows can't provide due to technical limitations that Windows has. As well, developing under OpenGL opens your market to other platforms, not just Linux--OSX, Windows and Linux are great markets for your OpenGL platform.
Granted Microsoft has used its monopoly power to stint the potential growth of OpenGL (and thus Linux), thus attempting to create another monopoly using that monopoly power. We'll see what happens in the future.
So, get those gaming developers working. Get those universal installer concepts down and get developing. We'll all benefit regardless of which distro holds the lead market share.
Good for Linux. Good for competition. Good for choice. Good for the world.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
After trialling Ubuntu for some time on a second machine, two weeks ago I migrated from XP to Ubuntu. I've been using unix systems for a while but I like a few things about Ubuntu. The package management is certainly one of them. The distribution also seems really committed to open source. The migration is going great; the only thing for which I still use XP is Photoshop Elements, and that is in a vmware server session.
On my second machine I now run Debian.
A lot of people go on about the slow release cycle of Debian. I am starting to wonder about this. There are actually multiple release tracks of Debian, and "testing" could be renamed "Desktop continuous update release" quite honestly, I think. Feisty Fawn was released with an Open Office package in which Base did not really work, and a version of Gnome in which "file roller" uses a drag and drop interface not supported by Nautilus. This has not impressed me. As far as I know, neither problem has been fixed yet. Debian is the natural home of "apt" and maybe Debian understands it better, with the three release streams fully taking advantage of it. One would not have to wait six months for such problems to be fixed, I think.
So I really like Ubuntu, but I am starting to wonder if Debian may have the last laugh, at least on my machines.
Oh, and the kick for me to finally get XP off our main computer: I bought my wife a macbook. After 30 minutes with it, I was embarrassed to be still running XP.
I used to run mandrake. It was my distro of coice before ubuntu, and when ubuntu 5.10 or whatever it was hit I gladly left mandrake in the dust. RPM packages are a pain in the ass, and mandrake had this habit of "upgrading" disk encryption tools from release to release that ended up leaving me having to completely redo my encrypted partitions.
But what really did it was the support tools. I tried mandrake, suse, redhat and fedora and ubuntu had the easiest to use support tools. Mandrake's support forums absolutely sucked ass, and the only alternative was to list a request for paid support in their "geek squad." I actually resorted to this once and STILL didn't get an answer.
I rarely use the support forums now, but when I have an issue its usually easy to find help via google. There's this thing called "critical mass" beyond which the money doesnt matter anymore so much as the simple fact "everyone uses it."
What exactly was "good" about this?
Nothing was actually said, so how can this be "nuff said"?
Markets are measured in dollars. Something that is free has ZERO market share. Zip. Zilch. None. It might be popular with just about anybody, but a market share is a fraction of dollars thay you make out of a total number of dollars that are available to be made. If everybody goes Ubuntu tomorrow and MS and Apple go bankrupt then the market for OS will simply be zero dollars. And Ubuntu will still have zero market share as it is still making zero dollars.
Tech-nerds can be so touchy when non-techies misuse tech-jargon -- and yet they're incredibly happy to mis-use perfectly well-defined and well-understood terms like "market share"...
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
Debian and Ubuntu have compatibility binaries available to support running x86 binaries,
but these are NOT installed by default. There are ways to run various x86 binaries on
both Debian and Ubuntu, and you can search the Ubuntu forums for this.
BTW, Gentoo is similar to Debian in being a 'true 64' bit, but in Gentoo the compatibility
libraries are found in a more logical directory tree structure. In all three distro's
a bit of shell script skulldugery is required to launch a 32 bit binary in a 64 bit world.
How the hell did someone coordinate enough users to tag this article with "matthartleyisagobshite?"
+++ATH0
no, the families are running on it... Soviet perhaps?
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
* yes I am aware that some of the results are not applicable/don't support my end of the debate. Refer to those that do.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...