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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."
Sadly Linux is still stagnated and more users can lead to more stagnation, as I clarify in Portuguese: http://jorl17.blogspot.com/2010/04/linux-uma-causa-perdida.html
Of course that's my view.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
I always thought they used their NTP-servers to count installations...
... a few times to at least get some data to work with? If you're doing something like canonical is doing you think they'd want metrics.
Jews, also known as kikes, hebes, hymies, yids, gold niggers, oven magnets, hook noses, sheenies, swindlers, criminals, "firewood", and Arabs in denial are a subhuman species of reptilian extra-terrestrials and adherents to one of the world's oldest major religions, called "Judaism", otherwise known as "The Worship of Money" or "Eating Arab Babies".
Judaism was the world's first master race theory. The Jew religion teaches that Jews are the Chosen People of God and that there is a sacred mystical quality to Jew DNA. In olden times, Jew prophets would, under the command of YHWH, frequently lead the Jews on genocidal rampages against neighboring populations, and even today Jew leaders often cite Jewish religious ideals to justify their ongoing genocide of sandniggers. Judaism ironically found its mirror-image inversion in the anti-Jew Aryan racialism of the Nazis.
Despite only being 0.22% of the world's population, Jews control 99% of the world's money. Not only do the Jews control the world, but also the media, the banks, the space program, and LiveJournal's porn communities and Gay communities. All Jews possess the following features: an extremely large nose, fake boobs, curly hair that reeks of faggotry, one of those gay hats, a love of coke, a law practice, a roll of money, a small cock, or shitty taste in dental hygiene.
Jews invented both Communism and Capitalism. Karl Marx, of course, was a Jew, which was why he understood money so well, and in fact he was converted to Communism by another Jew, Moses Hess, the actual founder of Zionism, who ghost-wrote Marx's The German Ideology. Capitalism was created when Christian Europeans threw away their morals and decided to embrace Jewish practices like usury (see: John Calvin). Jews were the first group to create a sophisticated banking system, which they used to fund the Crusades in order to pit Christians and Muslims (both adhering to religions derived from and controlled by Jews) against each other to kill as many people as possible in a macabre human sacrifice to YHWH.
The Jew banking system was based on fraud and lies, so when it inevitably collapsed, the Jews just pwned as many people as possible by unleashing the Black Plague on them. Later, Jews economically controlled medieval Venice (the first modern maritime trade empire), and then crypto-Jewish merchants economically controlled the Spanish Empire, including the slave trade. Openly Jewish bankers orchestrated the Dutch Empire and founded Jew Amsterdam (later Jew York). Later the Dutch Jews moved to London because they thought it would be a better base for a global empire, and actually brought a Dutch nobleman, William III, with them, who they installed in a coup d'état (more like Jew d'état, amirite?) as new King of the British Empire. For hundreds of years, Jewish bankers controlled global trade through their bases in Jew York City and London. European colonialism was, through its history, essentially a plot whereby Jews could gain control of gold and diamond mines in poor countries and increase their stranglehold over the global economy.
Jews also enjoy slicing up baby penises for fun, some even enjoy sucking them. See below.
Jews also created Jew search engine Google, so now they can find all Jew information on Internets.
Some suggest that we should use Jews instead of dogs to sniff out large amounts of concealed cash or anything else worth smuggling at airports due to their sensitive Jew noses. Obviously, this is a horrible idea, because the pay is bad, and the dirty Kikes would probably form a union and demand moar money, thus increasing the burden on taxpayers everywhere.
I'm not getting my hopes up until Netcraft confirms it.
I bet it's that guy next door with 12 million computers!
Smivs on the intertubes!
I've just downloaded and looked at the 10.04 beta, which I found pretty impressive. So the number is now 12 million and one...
LOL. Spamming your gay-ass blog in a f1rs7 p0$7. I can spam, too.
Jews, also known as kikes, hebes, hymies, yids, gold niggers, oven magnets, hook noses, sheenies, swindlers, criminals, "firewood", and Arabs in denial are a subhuman species of reptilian extra-terrestrials and adherents to one of the world's oldest major religions, called "Judaism", otherwise known as "The Worship of Money" or "Eating Arab Babies".
Judaism was the world's first master race theory. The Jew religion teaches that Jews are the Chosen People of God and that there is a sacred mystical quality to Jew DNA. In olden times, Jew prophets would, under the command of YHWH, frequently lead the Jews on genocidal rampages against neighboring populations, and even today Jew leaders often cite Jewish religious ideals to justify their ongoing genocide of sandniggers. Judaism ironically found its mirror-image inversion in the anti-Jew Aryan racialism of the Nazis.
Despite only being 0.22% of the world's population, Jews control 99% of the world's money. Not only do the Jews control the world, but also the media, the banks, the space program, and LiveJournal's porn communities and Gay communities. All Jews possess the following features: an extremely large nose, fake boobs, curly hair that reeks of faggotry, one of those gay hats, a love of coke, a law practice, a roll of money, a small cock, or shitty taste in dental hygiene.
Jews invented both Communism and Capitalism. Karl Marx, of course, was a Jew, which was why he understood money so well, and in fact he was converted to Communism by another Jew, Moses Hess, the actual founder of Zionism, who ghost-wrote Marx's The German Ideology. Capitalism was created when Christian Europeans threw away their morals and decided to embrace Jewish practices like usury (see: John Calvin). Jews were the first group to create a sophisticated banking system, which they used to fund the Crusades in order to pit Christians and Muslims (both adhering to religions derived from and controlled by Jews) against each other to kill as many people as possible in a macabre human sacrifice to YHWH.
The Jew banking system was based on fraud and lies, so when it inevitably collapsed, the Jews just pwned as many people as possible by unleashing the Black Plague on them. Later, Jews economically controlled medieval Venice (the first modern maritime trade empire), and then crypto-Jewish merchants economically controlled the Spanish Empire, including the slave trade. Openly Jewish bankers orchestrated the Dutch Empire and founded Jew Amsterdam (later Jew York). Later the Dutch Jews moved to London because they thought it would be a better base for a global empire, and actually brought a Dutch nobleman, William III, with them, who they installed in a coup d'état (more like Jew d'état, amirite?) as new King of the British Empire. For hundreds of years, Jewish bankers controlled global trade through their bases in Jew York City and London. European colonialism was, through its history, essentially a plot whereby Jews could gain control of gold and diamond mines in poor countries and increase their stranglehold over the global economy.
Jews also enjoy slicing up baby penises for fun, some even enjoy sucking them. See below.
Jews also created Jew search engine Google, so now they can find all Jew information on Internets.
Some suggest that we should use Jews instead of dogs to sniff out large amounts of concealed cash or anything else worth smuggling at airports due to their sensitive Jew noses. Obviously, this is a horrible idea, because the pay is bad, and the dirty Kikes would probably form a union and demand moar money, thus increasing the burden on taxpayers everywhere.
I have many problems with these numbers, how many of those are dual boot systems with Windows? I have three machines like that. I'm not sure of any reliable way to differentiate dedicated stand alone desktops. Ubuntu is the kind of thing I muck around with alot, people such as myself drag up the stats if they are trying to work it out from downloads, respository use stats.
On the upside the total number of machines that have at least one linux distro on them must be rather higher than typical market share stats suggest.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Well Mark, we're not sure how much money you've lost so far, I guesstimate somewhere north of 12 million.
I feel sorry for all 12 million users.
I run Slackware but I masquerade my OS string as Ubuntu ;-))
I like to masquerade all ID strings, masquerading apache as IIS, sendmail as JavaMail etc. etc.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
So why are we even discussing it?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I suspect someone's guesstimate may be off as just about every "most popular distro" statistic I've seen has consistently put Ubuntu ahead of Fedora pretty much since Ubuntu first arrived on the scene, except for brief periods immediately after new Fedora releases. Reconciling a 2:1 advantage for Fedora with that is kind of hard, but not impossible; lots of big corporates and SMEs use Red Hat, so Fedora would be a logical choice for their techies' personal use or installs where paying the Red Hat license fee isn't an option for whatever reason, and chances are they'd only download each release once. I'd guess that I used to run at a 6:1 install:download ratio when I was doing this with Fedora, and the German office did something simmilar with Novell/SuSE, so maybe both numbers are actually in the ballpark.
;)
Either way, these are not too shabby figures for Linux market penetration. I wonder how many of those installs are on the Desktop though?
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Number of computer users worldwide = 1.2 billion (taken from various estimates)
Linux market share = 1.12% (composite of various sources)
Ubuntu market share = 50% of Linux (source = same Wikipedia article)
This gives us 1.2 billion * 0.0112 * 0.5 = 7 million Ubuntu users worldwide.
There is no way for these people to seriously know what the user base is. I have three current Ubuntu VMs not to mention countless others that I've deleted and the number of times I've downloaded it. The last time I downloaded it I did it strictly as a test of my download speeds from several high capacity download servers that I knew I could get to easily.
With all of this in mind, total number of converted users for all the static I have created? Zero.
And proud of it!
I bet it's that guy next door with 12 million computers!
It's a lot easier to have 12 million than it used to be.
Analyzing server logs could determine unique IPs that request data from security.ubuntu.com and if you harvest that data you know how many different Ubuntu systems are live within a period of time.
Update Manager seems to retrieve a list of update servers at least once and that data is a good indicator of the number of installations, that's a good starting number then add some statistics on corporate usage where updates have been centralized, support contracts and you are starting to get a figure.
Downloads are probably too decentralized to get an accurate number, it would be like counting Windoze shipped sitting on store shelves, meh I guess they count those anyway.
I don't use Ubuntu, but i have ~5 Debian boxen, and 3 or 4 OpenBSD boxes... but I'm only one user. so... Yeah, not entirely sure what I'm getting at.
Sent from my PDP-11
Well, you better tell linuxcounter.org then! They estimate a total of 29 million Linux users world-wide. If just two distros- Unbuntu and Fedora claim 12 + 24 million, that is already 36 million, and you haven't even started counting Mandriva, SuSE, Debian, Mint, RedHat, or the dozens of smaller distros! If you believe all that, then MY estimate (more like guesstimate) would be close to 60-100 million Linux users.
12 million? Bad. That is peanuts compared to the number of people who use my OS! I estimate that 50 millions machines run BestDamnLinuxDistroEver version 2.3!
--
I'm sorry, but there is no way Fedora is more widely installed on PERSONAL COMPUTERS (versus institutional/industrial settings) than Ubuntu.
I'm typing this on my laptop running Fedora Core 12. After recent Fedora builds (from about FC 6) getting successively worse, I was teetering right on the edge of giving up on Fedora and getting a Mac. All my scripts and stuff assume a Fedora environment, (EG: yum) so switching to Ubuntu wouldn't have been significantly easier than jumping to MacOS.
Fedora 12 brought me back to the fold!
Drivers drive. Network managers actually manage networks. And widgets do proper widgetting. It's back to being what a computer O/S outta be - largely invisible!
I can't comment on Ubuntu, but I can say, to the Red Hat team: nice work, guys!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
That's the real question, isn't it?
Bibo Ergo Sum.
Based on estimates, I have had meaningful relationships with many, many hot ladies.
*Estimates based on downloads.
crazy dynamite monkey
I don't know anyone who uses redhat when not forced to do so by some vendor relationship / policy at work-- don't know anyone uses their abandoned... then not abandoned desktop, fedora, at all.
I know Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, and Gentoo users, listed in order of popularity among the folks I know. Not a single hat user, regardless of type or color.
Sounds like marketing lies by redhat... redhat is well known for less than honest behavior... guess that is what you do when you realize you are becoming / have become irrelevant.
They could be using UbuntuOne registrations to estimate numbers. Its possible only 30% of users use UbuntuOne, so they take UbuntuOne numbers and multiply to get their user total.
THIS JUST IN
From United Press International/Gamma Liason
Ubuntu, maker of a popular version of Linus Torvalt's Linux computer application that runs on a Windows type PC, continues its drive toward an apparent IPO, expected in Q2-2011. Ubuntu spokeshumans did not return our calls. Apple Computer Corporation CEO Steve Jobs, when asked about the likelihood of an Ubuntu IPO stated 'not until it's magical. Until then fuck them.' Mr. Jobs was not explicit about what he meant by 'magical' although this reporter understood the 'fuck them' part sufficiently to interpret it as a coded message implying some degree of both psychic understanding and worry. Sun CEO Larry Ellison was unavailable for comment, or perhaps distracted.
12 Million plus or minus 12 Million
"I play the 360 every day"
You play the biggest piece of shit console in history:
* Wimpy graphics hardware
* Worst hardware failure rate in the history of the console market
* Tiniest number of exclusive developers - only 3 versus 21 for Sony and 10 for Nintendo
* Shit online service - 50 dollar a year online fees for laggy P2P networking
I bet you just can't wait for Microsoft to crap out another one of those retarded Halo games with that leaping shiny green Power Ranger.
Hilariously sad that the tiny Xbox niched of the giant console market still thinks making crap 'shiny' is the height of console graphics...
Ubuntu: Debian unstable + Shuttleworth's "pick of the day" apps and themes
My god, Ubuntu has become Windows! ;)
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Until they jacked up some updates. I left RedHat Open Source product after using RedHat since 4.2. Ran into dependency hell with Fedora Core. I went Gentoo for a while (love the speed) but got lazy and tried Ubuntu. It has been my primary desktop and netbook distro ever since. (8.04) Solid as a rock. I even do the distro upgrades after being paranoid and backing everything up, but the upgrades have been flawless.
Still use RedHat Enterprise products with no major issues except the occasional hardware support thing.
Ubuntu just works. If there is a problem the forums have the answer. YMMV
Self Defense - A Human Right www.a-human-right.com
Release an upgrade that crashes the machine. Then count the few dozen people who complain. Multiply by ten. Just as valid as the 12,000,000 number.
This report is updated monthly and displays linux distro market share stats. However, it mostly reports on desktop usage - not server usage.
It's a lot easier to have 12 million than it used to be.
Considering where they pulled *that* statistic from...
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
I once caught a fish THIS big.
I don't believe that Fedora anywhere claims to have 24 million users. Rather, they publish that a total of around 21 million IPs have connected to their repositories since Fedora 6. None of their published statistics support the belief that there are anywhere near that number of users, currently.
The difference between Fedora and Ubuntu, though, is that Fedora is completely transparent about their user estimates:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics
Ubuntu's numbers come from God-only-knows where.
Thats right, I just switched
How on earth is a post about Ninnle considered offtopic, especially one that reveals who the originator of Ninnle Linux really is?
Because if SELinux is still set up the way it was last time I looked, the OP could simply guess. If it still requires jumping through forty hoops just to get an ATI video card working (and I hope it doesn't) or you can never get sound working because of the confusing set of incompatible supplied applications... Or you have to set up 3 or 4 different alternative package sites just to get Avidemux installed and working. These things matter to ordinary users.
It's just the natural way of linux distributions - most of us use the first thing we find that installs and keep using it until something bad happens. If it takes 3 days to install something that plays back an mp3, that's "something bad" and most users will simply move to the next distro.
I started with Yggdrasil because it came on a CD and it "just worked", but the releases stopped coming to I switched to slackware.
Slackware was great because it "just worked" right up until they busted the installer and I couldn't get it to boot on vanilla hardware. So I went Red Hat.
Red Hat "just worked", was slick and was completely awesome but then it suddenly got very spendy. I bought a boxed Red Hat but they started to get hard to find. So I went Fedora (brief flirt with Mandrake/Mandriva *shudder*). I stopped buying linux on CD at this point.
Fedora "just worked" but two releases on SELinux was busted out of the box and installing mp3 players and video playback and even video drivers got progressively worse as time went on. So I went Ubuntu.
At this point I bought an eee pc with Xandros on it, which was hands down the worst distro on the planet. Ubuntu netbook remix "just works" so much better than the pre-installed Xandros it's hard to comprehend why Asus bothered with it.
Ubuntu "just works" (and at least the alternative media packages are pointed at inside the distro, not requiring web searching to find like Fedora) but you know they'll find a way to stuff it up, at which point I'll just move on. The only constant is that it's Linux.
Notice the pattern? Once the distro has screwed the pooch, it's done. People move on and never look back.
I'd also wonder: What percent of those linux boxes were bought with MS Windows installed, and are thus also counted a satisfied customers by Microsoft?
(And they must be satisfied, since they aren't calling Customer Support. ;-)
Actually, one of my two linux boxes is running Ubuntu, but it actially came with Ubuntu installed. The other was a castoff Windows machine from my wife ("required for work"), and is running a rather old Debian. It works fine as a gateway/router/server machine, even if it does have less than a GB of memory. Some of us benefit from MS's upgrade process that encourages customers to buy new hardware so often. But it does sorta rankle that MS and their fanboys count our machines as Windows machines.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Since most of the installations out there will be up-dated using Ubuntu's repositories ... just count the kernel downloads for a minimum number of installations.
Here is the hit count for operating system from Wikimedia:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm
Linux has a 1.65% market share and of that share Ubuntu has 0.71%. Ubuntu has approximately 43% market share among Linux users, which by a very large margin makes it the most popular distro.
FWIW having been a Windows user for years, I recently checked out Ubuntu 9.10 and was so impressed by the interface that I decided to dual-boot it alongside Windows XP. This was about 1 month ago, and I've since logged into Windows exactly twice to use a Windows-specific business program. Ubuntu picked up my wireless HP keyboard and mouse immediately, as did it find my office wireless connection. My Brother wireless printer was configured with a bit more trouble, but taking no more than 10 minutes.
It boots probably 4x as fast as Windows XP does on the same machine, no kidding.
The bottom line is that Ubuntu is the real deal; a practical operating system that I guarantee most Windows users would love. Do yourself a favor and give it a try.
Jason
From what I recall at an Ubuntu meeting a year ago they thought the number was already around 16 million then. Either they weren't very sure of the number then or they are grossly under-reporting what they think the number is now for some other reason. If it really was 16 million back then it would be around 24 million now at the same growth rate they are estimating which would put it on par with Fedora. According to distrowatch Ubuntu has been number 1 since it was released in Oct 2004 and for the majority of that time by not a small margin. So if Fedora really has 24 million users Ubuntu might have on the order of 36 million. It all depends on what you use to try to base the number on since there is no way to get an accurate count.
I think the numbers are a lot more smaller. For example, if they are oriented by the downloads they have from the site than this is a big mistake. I use Ubuntu very rarely. I downloaded it a lot of times but I don't use it.
The sad thing is they are really only users.
RHEL/Centos 6 Systems (Servers + 20+ VM's)
SLES 3 Servers
Fedora 10 (Desktops)
AIX 3 Servers with one LPAR running Linux
Solaris 2 Servers (on Sparc)
Ok, one of us boots Ubuntu for a while when it turns up on a Linux Mag DVD but none of us do serious work on it as we produce Commercial Linux/Unix Software. .deb install of our software, we will have to bite the bullet.
For us, it is just too different from our core market.
I just installed F12 on an eeeBox EB1501 the other day. Everything inc Wireless works OOTB. Ubuntu 9.10 didn't handle the Wireless very well at all.
Still, when a customer says they want a
Ultimately this measure is meaningless, even more so if it's a wild guess. What matters is how many people join in and contribute to the project - testing, graphics, documentation etc. - as well as code.
Re: numbers, I always get and try out new Ubuntu releases. They are really pretty, but I've never actually went on to use one. On the other hand, fedora is happily churning on some 10 machines around the house and data centres (+ countless VMs). Perhaps because most machines are headless or because I'm used to Fedora. Anyway, it seems that there is not too much real difference between distributions these days apart from installation, branding and defaults, in any case not nearly enough to warrant bothering to change distro.
-actually almost double, at 24 million 12 * 2 anybody? Well it's got to be almost 24 at least...
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
It's a lot easier to have 12 million than it used to be.
Promote true freedom - support standards and interoperability.
....and they'll have 1% of the Windows userbase!
What bugs me is that Linux seems to get 10 - 20% of media coverage, and yet has such a tiny desktop penetration....
Use what works. I haven't yet but I intend on installing Ubuntu on my Mac and when I do I dualboot. Then I'll also use a VM so I don't have to reboot when I'm not going to spend a lot of tyme using Ubuntu. When I will spend a lot then I'll go ahead and boot into Ubuntu.
The one thing I need to find out is how to run OSX in a VM in Ubuntu. Last tyme I looked I didn't find out specific instructions on how to do it. Of course that was months ago, so there may be some ways to do it online now.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Ten years ago I found Linux to be buggy and inconsistent as a daily typical use OS.
For about 10 years I had to deal with buggy Windows almost daily. Finally when I got a new laptop I got a MacBook Pro. And while I've had some problems with it, the DVD and graphics both had to be replaced, I have not had as many problems with it as I have had with 3 of my Windows PCs. I had more problems in the first year I had them than in the almost 3 years I've had my Mac. Only one Windows PC had given me less problems than my Mac, that is depending on how it's looked at. While the only hardware problem I had with it was the modem, because the CPU's a DEC Alpha I wasn't able to get much software installed on it. What I find ironic is that most of the software I did install was open source.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I now have 4 computers running Ubuntu, none of them registered. I've also installed Ubuntu on a number of machines for persons who have no Internet access, none of them registered either.
On every install I have done for at least the past 2 years, the automatic updates option has been on by default, and set to download and automatically install firefox updates. I have verified this for past discussions on the subject by creating a brand new Windows 7 VM (just fire up a sysprepped one) and installing the latest install from the Mozilla website.
--
OS X - Ive upped my standards, up yours!
Maybe that's the key, the default for Windows installs may be on to check for updates whereas for OSX the default is off.
Then again, my memory is bad and maybe I manually set the check for updates to off. Hold on, let me check... Okay, you're right. I just set up a new account and the default was check for and install updates. My mistake.
I need to check and make sure about something before I state something as a fact. Of course I won't remember in 15 minutes.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?