Ubuntu Claims 12 Million Users — Before Lucid

darthcamaro writes "It's always a challenge to try and figure out how many users a particular Linux distro has — but Canonical is now providing a new figure for Ubuntu that is 50 percent more than what they were claiming just 18 months ago. 'We have no phone home or registration process, so it's always a guesstimate. But based on the same methodology that we came up with for the 2008 number, our present belief is that it's somewhere north of 12 million users at the moment,' Chris Kenyon, vice president for OEM at Canonical, told InternetNews.com. Just in case you were wondering, Fedora still claims more — actually almost double, at 24 million."

Comments

Re:Fedora *had* 24 million users

[birukun]

Had meaning I am no longer a user. Guess I should have said they have 23.999999 Million users. I still left that unstable project and never looked back.

Ubuntu works for me like Gentoo did (and I got flamed for that but oh well) and Fedora still gives a lackluster performance.

Re:Some guesstimate?

[Alex Belits]

I don't need to know everything that it supports (why would I care?). I only need to know how well it supports my hardware.

Googling doesn't help much, because, frankly, it's quite a mess - you find a lot of old, outdated data (sometimes "outdated" by a month or two, e.g. by a fresh kernel, X, or other major package release), and this can go both ways - something that was fully supported fine before now has problems.

Name one.

Most often this happens with graphics

That's simple. Anything that requires fglrx is as good as unsupported. Everything that uses Nvidia driver may at some point fall into "legacy" support and require an old version -- and that version often has to be installed from Nvidia packages even if distribution supposedly supports it. Everything else always remains supported.

, but there have been other regressions as well.

Name one.

Well, it's better than arguing against using Linux unconvincingly (i.e. not backed by any facts, as in "lunix sucks"), don't you think?

I am good at bullshit detection but not its comparative analysis, so you are asking a wrong person.

For what's it worth, never in my time had I argued against using Linux in general. I may argue at times that Linux is not the best solution for a particular scenario - and same for any other software or hardware offering (with the sole exception of PHP; there is no good scenario that would warrant the use of that abomination).

For all practical purposes, all popular scripting languages and their web-backend implementations are abominations, so PHP is not exactly prominent among them.

I help people install and configure Linux if they ask me (and advise on the distro to pick),

First and foremost, if someone does not know what Linux distribution to install on a desktop or server, the only valid answer is Ubuntu. Not that other distributions are any worse, but those who need them wouldn't have to ask.

Second, having a desktop box where you occasionally install and reinstall Linux does not make your advice any more useful than searching Google or looking at Ubuntu forums.

I advise people to install OO.org if they need an office suite but can't afford MSO, and so on.

Sure, you do.

I'm also somewhat puzzled by what in my original post in this particular thread you have construed as "arguing against Linux"?

Because it has all hallmarks of Microsoft supporter claiming to be a Linux user.

If anything, the only comparison point I had mentioned was in favor of Linux (namely, availability of good Common Lisp implementations).

What is not true.

The rest is, frankly, just your overzealous imagination, which may have been triggered by me mentioning that I use Windows as main OS.

Anyone who actually used Linux as his primary OS in the last 15 years has no good reason to use Windows, except for running AutoCAD or playing some games. This is however irrelevant, as you have brought up Windows for no other reason but to smear Linux without actually making any meaningful, and therefore refutable claim.