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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.
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 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.
Don't worry - the job market is supposed to turn around any day now.
#DeleteChrome
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.
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.
Maybe Lubuntu can get an endorsement from Astroglide
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
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?
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.
Network managers actually manage networks.
That's huge. I love Ubuntu on my eee 1005, but the default Gnome network manager is a piece of shit. It's a piece of shit on an older laptop I have too...it works sometimes, if you shake the laptop right and the stars align properly.
I installed wicd on my netbook which is great except it forgets ssid's of hidden networks. Apparently this has been fixed in the latest wicd, but the changes have not propagated to Ubuntu yet. I have a script that logs me on to my home network...but that sucks and means I can't recommend Ubuntu to anyone who wants to put Linux on an old computer.
This is basic stuff; I'm surprised given Ubuntu's track record that it's not perfect by now.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
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.
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.
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.
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