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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."
I always thought they used their NTP-servers to count installations...
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 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.
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!
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.
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.
If you set a password for root, then you can su to all your hearts content.
Every heard of sudo -i ?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Sounds like you don't like the "rough and tumble".
Sure, I have clients in that space. They are served by Redhat Enterprise Linux. With a support contract. If they feel frisky, they may go with CentOS. What are the important new features in RHEL (according to one of those customers)? Not the window manager. Gnome is fine (it's default), but, honestly, they don't care... Kernel crash handling and SystemTap, on the other hand, are to drool over.
Ubuntu? Fedora? Those distributions are for people who like it a little rough.
I went to your website. Seems that you are a bit young to be in the belt AND suspenders set, but you never can tell...
Now you DO seem to be obsessing over the desktop. KDE, GNOME, PulseAudio, ALSA, OpenOffice, Totem, Amarok, etc. May I suggest that you just pick, and go with something workable? Otherwise, you will never have a stable desktop to work with. Or, use Mac or Windows. Just pick!
For guidance, here is what I use.
Fedora Core 8 base (hardened). XFCE GUI. Thunar file manager. FireFox 3.03. OpenOffice 3.1, Amarok 1.4, ALSA for audio, Evolution (whatever version comes with Fedora 8) for email, contacts and calendar. Multisync (whatever version comes with Fedora 8) for Blackberry sync. Smplayer (mplayer) for A/V.
And, no, its not perfect. Let me give you my laundry list:
Evolution won't call on Multisync. It is insisting that the only mobile device it likes is a Palm. Mplayer won't play the audio on .3gp videos taken on my Blackberry. Evince (PDF viewer) that I prefer blows when displaying bitmapped PDF documents.
Nothing critical, making it a very useful desktop (for me). How did I get this together? Usually, I set a deadline for a decision -- and then just make it. I don't hop between stuff. So, I code audio to ALSA. Well... not exactly. I don't care much about high quality sound, so I usually just heave out ulaw to /dev/audio. Works for me; if I need anything fancier I'll revisit, but for 90% of my needs? It's ok. For other stuff, it's the same. About the only "regret" I have is that I seem to be locked into Evolution, but, it works, and it seems stable enough.
So, it works, I'm happy enough, and I don't have to obsess over what other people use, or what could be better.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
Maybe Lubuntu can get an endorsement from Astroglide
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.
And, if they had installed some phone-home pingy-thing, they'd be pilloried in the town square by people screaming about that when it came to light, and they'd be decried as violating people's privacy. Geeks on Slashdot frothing at the mouth and wielding torches, cats living with dogs, that kinda stuff.
(And, before I get modded flamebait ... that's also half of the amusement of being here. =)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Based on estimates, I have had meaningful relationships with many, many hot ladies.
*Estimates based on downloads.
crazy dynamite monkey
Number of computer users is certainly noticeably different from the number of computers in use.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Sure, if your attackers will never try to crack any of your users' passwords...
Palm trees and 8
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
Nope, I use all of that, well, not xfce, but I use or have used most of that. What I say in my blog is simply that the community nowadays seems to be all about competition, whereas I think that we should promote the standardization of these competitors. When I mention Firefox, OpenOffice and all the others, I am criticizing those who constantly bash these applications just because they are, in /their/ words, "Incomplete", "Bloated", "not match for proprietary-counterpart-X". This is what I believe must be done. We need to pick one piece of Software and standardize it. Note that I am not saying that we should drop the others -- Not at all! But if, and only if, we want to attract users, we first have to create something that they can universally recognize and interact with. Something that isn't buggy. Something that has been extensively tested on various distros. If we attract users with this standardization (keeping the other options out there, of course), we can then start the reverse process, by slowly going back to the less-standardized world because, at that point, these users will have learned how to actually use Linux/Unix and will be able to cope with the change. By doing so, we will firstly partially give up our chance to have multi options (be it whatever option, I didn't take many sides in my article), but after that, we'll get it back with even more users that can help the community stop criticizing the others.
;)
I may not have made that clear, though. Do you speak Portuguese? Or did you simply think that that article was: "KDE is good; gnome is bad", "Pulseaudio sucks", "OSS is superior"? If you did, sorry, that was not my point -- it was the exact opposite.
As a side note, I am running Ubuntu 9.10 with OpenBox, fbpanel, PCManFM (and Nautilus), as well as nm-applet and my own little widgets and 'services' that make this a good experience. However, I had been using Gnome until I decided to switch.
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
Didn't you know that 87% of all statistics are completely made up?
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Okay, in retrospect I really should have gone with a car metaphor rather than mentioning a microsoft product or a console of any type. Left myself open to at least three populations of fanboys there.
The graphics and lack of exclusive devlopers... you really went that extra mile to make that the most ridiculous console post I've read on slashdot. I did mention I had a wii, right? Exclusive developers? If I were a shareholder of MS, that might upset me
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.
Wait, the next Halo will star the Green Power Ranger... and you WOULDN'T want that?!?
I'm prepared to say that you are some type of zombie if a combination of alien slaughter and power rangers doesn't interest you.
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.
I set the root password when I first installed Ubuntu. I recently installed on a new laptop and decided to go the sudo route. It was surprisingly easy to get used to and it forced me to think about permissions and groups more. I might update the root password at some point, but I applaud Ubuntu's decision to leave it unset by default.
Only if it knows the user names.
Just sayin'.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Sure, if your attackers will never try to crack any of your users' passwords...
A username could be anything, but root is always root. Disabling the root password means a cracker needs to take the additional step of identifying a valid user account to target. Not a particularly large step, perhaps, but a step nonetheless.
This comment is for entertainment purposes only. Any similarity to real insight or information is purely coincidental.
A username could be anything, but root is always root.
Pfff. I changed "root" to "admin". No one would ever expect that on my Linux box. Security through obscurity, baby.
Life is short; think quickly.
Let's see...
Right click and hit "properties".
Then click on the "permissions" tab.
There is a checkbox for "Execute" near the bottom.
You are dabbling with some "niche physics package" yet you can't manage to explore an alien GUI?
That sounds rather sad really.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Thats right, I just switched
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.
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.
Don't know if you've noticed, but if you type sudo su - and hit enter, you now have superuser access.
Actually, no. You can escalate your privileges to the superuser only if your account is configured to allow for that. You can easily configure every account on the machine to not be escalatable and just use one account for admin tasks. Secondly, you have to type in your password so, no, you don't just "hit enter".
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Disabling the root password means a cracker needs to take the additional step of identifying a valid user account to target.
Disabling the root password means now they only need to hijack a normal local user account, not root. You're effectively running as root, with all the security implications.
I tried Ubuntu, But I just can't.
I wanted to install my favorite niche physics package. I couldn't even figure out how to set the files to 777 through the GUI, I had to 'sudo chmod' them.
Oh and no 'su'? really? I mean 'sudo bash' isn't that hard but jeez I don't know if this is more secure, but it sure is harder to use. I think I'll install centos before going back to fedora.
you can tell ubuntu is getting pretty good when the trolls have to try this hard to criticize it.
or did I miss a whoosh somewhere?
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
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Too much work. I disabled gdm, then at login I "sudo -s" and "startx". Works great, makes the system as easy to administer as Win98, and it's not Windows so it's still secure!
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My Portuguese sucks. Hurts the Kerbesa (sp?). Anyway, the article lamented the CHOICE. My point was to simply put a stake in it. Pick something, and go with it. It's the same as the Windows vs. Mac decision. You pick one.
Gnome, KDE, pick one. Development may or may not occur on the other -- but after your choice, it doesn't matter. As long as your choice is good for you. "Future" may matter, but (perhaps surprisingly), not that much.
Current choices ARE stable enough to be used.
Now, I never simply recommend Linux (or Windows, or Mac). Instead, I say "Choose the platform you are comfortable with. If you have a reason to use Linux, then, ok, go with it. If you have a reason to go with another platform, go for that".
If a user CHOOSES something like Linux, and COMMITS to it, they are going to use it. Reasons for the choice? Let me give you a (real) example.
Some family friends were using a computer for email, mailing lists, ballet organization, web browsing. They were using Windows 98, and were reasonably happy. After all, it came with the computer (but was probably bootlegged), and it worked.
Fast forward 4 years. Their daughter started dating a "Web Designer". He thought it wholly offensive and very uncool that they should be using Windows 98. He put Windows XP on the machine. Better, right? Wrong... It now took 40 minutes to boot up to a usable desktop.
They asked me "what should we do"? I gave then some choices (1) a new(er) computer, (2) restore Windows 98, or (3) Linux. They decided to try Linux (a newer computer was not in the budget, and Windows 98 crashed a lot).
We (the family, with my assistance) chose a distribution, and some applications. They have been happy with the choice. After all, they committed to it. When they purchased a new computer (3 years later), they specified Linux, and their application choice.
They never vacillated between Gnome or KDE, Koffice or OpenOffice.org, ARTS or ESD. Because (after they committed), I assisted them in the base (workable) selection. Indeed, one of the reasons for using a (Linux, BSD, other) system is that the user has someone around who can assist this way. It's simply part of the network effect. I think that having a good deal of choice (as a technical person) is a good thing -- but the users don't need to see it.
I don't think it's a problem. But then, I don't really care what platform someone uses. I do care that they have chosen it for (reasonably) rational reasons.
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061