Ubuntu Aims For 200 Million Users In Four Years

dkd903 writes "Delivering the keynote at the Ubuntu Developer Summit at Budapest, Hungary, Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth has announced that Canonical's goal is to have 200 million Ubuntu users in four years. Canonical has not officially provided any data on how many Ubuntu users there currently are — in fact, the number is quite difficult to track. However, according to Prakash Advani, a partner manager for Central Asia at Canonical, there are an estimated 12 million Ubuntu users."

Comments

Well, they screwed up with 11

[Colin Smith]

aint gonna be drinking that koolaid.

gonna look for an alternative.

Re:Well, they screwed up with 11

[yog]

Yes, I am so mad at myself for upgrading to this latest release. Suddenly, wireless stopped working, and the new UI is horrific, and even after wasting hours of my time fixing all of this, there are these video artifacts that come and go, and the whole system just seems less stable than before. I suppose in a few months it'll be fine again, but this is getting old.

Why, oh, why, can't Canonical just leave the UI alone? I don't want the window controls like "x" moved from the top right to the top left! I don't want to have to learn a whole new (and buggy) application launcher paradigm! Just work on adding more device support and making Linux more stable, more reliable, and more portable than ever before. We need more webcam support, more USB sound card support, more video drivers--there's plenty of work to be done under the hood. The UI takes care of itself--as people get more used to it, as more and more usage tips and FAQs appear on the internet, it gets easier.

Re:Well, they screwed up with 11

[muuh-gnu]

Shuttleworth is obviously attempting to leverage Ubuntus existing popularity to somehow branch off the main Linux species. Like when a queen bee leaves one colony and takes a large number of worker bees in order to form her own hive. He doesnt want to be associated with Gnome any more, and wants his own distinctive look and feel, no matter whether he alienates a number of existing Gnome users. Its a gamble, he is speculating that a large enough number will follow his lead and switch to Unity, and then keep pushing, hyping and defending it like loyal Apple users do. He wants Unity to bring the (Linux based) desktop where Android brought the (Linux based) phone.

The problem with that, at least from my perspective, is that Shuttleworth is at war with options. In a recent blog post, he made the bizarre statement that in his view, every option you can set differently, divides users who set it differently, so they can't talk to each other any more. So his goal seems to be to allow as few different settable options as possible, i.e. a massive Gleichschaltung in order to build a strongly focused brand. He thinks that iOs like interfaces will be the future of the mass market, and wants to get there better sooner than later.

I dont know where he plans to get his 200 Million users from, but I doubt many of them will originate from Ubuntus current user base. It is a massive farewell to the 90's Linux tinkerer and a hello to the 2011's Apple affictionado.

Re:Well, they screwed up with 11

[couchslug]

"gonna look for an alternative."

http://www.debian.org/

User Experience

[literaldeluxe]

If Canonical wants Ubuntu's user base to grow substantially, they need to integrate usability testing into its design cycle. That's not the only thing that matters, but there's just no way to beat Microsoft or Apple's software without improving the user experience.

Re:User Experience

[lennier]

If Canonical wants Ubuntu's user base to grow substantially, they need to integrate usability testing into its design cycle.

Better still and even cheaper, they could take advantage of their existing usability testing focus group called "the entire Ubuntu installed base". When thousands of their dedicated users cry out in horror and spam Launchpad with bug reports each time they introduce a new UI stuffup, perhaps they could, I don't know, this is kinda radical but hear me out, they could try listening to the users.

But no. The users are always wrong and Mark Shuttleworth is always right because he flew in space.

Been a Ubuntu user since Hoary, loved it when they fought GNOME over the "spatial browser" idiocy, but with each new release that breaks things I'm really wanting an alternative.

Re:One right here!

[x*yy*x]

I personally find this good solution. You get the stability of Ubuntu, eye-candy of Mac and the security of Windows.

Good luck with that...

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems as though more and more people are trying other distros, and with plenty of good reasons. When I began using Linux, Ubuntu was where I started. I ran it for many years. When they decided to integrate PulseAudio by default, I started considering other options. I now use Debian Squeeze and am happy with it, but for example:

The other day I built a USB stick with Ubuntu for troubleshooting purposes. While I was in the live system, I tried to listen to some music on my local hard drive. I was then subjected to occasional skipping/stuttering in the sound... in 2011... on a six-core machine... with EIGHT gigabytes of memory. There is no excuse for this. It never happens on my native Debian system, so don't blame the drivers. I then had to rip PulseAudio out of the live-USB that I had made and re-route everything to use ALSA just to get stable sound that would play continuously without issue.

Now they're completely changing the desktop environment too, with Unity and all. We just want a stable operating system where the devs concentrate on fixing *problems* and not changing a bunch of things just for the sake of change. I can only imagine how many games will stop working/have problems when they switch to Wayland.

In short, if your goals are to have 2 million users, you should probably try and keep existing users first.

The problem for me though is what to tell other newbies to Linux. My cousin just asked what flavor of Linux I recommend. Do I tell him to use Ubuntu and give him the impression that Linux can't play a music file without occasional stutters? Do I tell him to use Debian and have a slightly more difficult time setting things up, but a better system in the end?

Kubuntu or xubuntu

[Culture20]

That's a realistic goal for kubuntu or xubuntu, but not with Unity ubuntu.

Re:One right here!

[David Gerard]

Design is at the centre of Shuttleworth’s roadmap for Unity. “I woke up one day and thought, ‘Gosh, I’d really like to make using my universal general-purpose computer that I can do ANYTHING with feel like I’m using a locked-down three-year-old half-smart phone through the clunky mechanism some l33t h@xx0r used to jailbreak it, I can’t think of a better user experience.’ We’re not quite there yet, but this gets Unity a lot of the way.”

Re:One right here!

[geminidomino]

To this day, the only thing I find lacking is multimedia players (and I especially miss Winamp).

Which winamp? The newer versions with all that library management crap, or the old simple "player?" (I ask because I'm definitely a fan of the latter, as it doesn't feel the need to mess with my tree-based organization)

Audacious does the latter, and is almost a clone of the old winamp v2. I can't judge the former because I don't like them even when they do work "well," but I hear praise for Amarok a lot.

For videos, VLC lives on all my machines, Linux and Windows alike (but for some reason, it's a really CPU hog when simply trying to play MP3s, thus, audacious).

HTH

Re:Not bad.

[phantomlord]

Uh, Loki was publishing modern games... just to pick a few of the AAA titles,

Civ:CTP: published March 1999, Loki released it in May 1999
HOMM 3: published February 1999, Loki released it in December 1999
Quake 3: published December 2, 1999. Loki released it December 7, 1999
SMAC: published February 1999 with the expansion pack released in 2000. Loki released it with the expansion pack in July 2000.

Loki was releasing current AAA games, their problems were with the financial management of the company, paying large sums to get the rights to AAA titles to port, overestimates of how many people would pay for the games (and they were pirated heavily by people that bought the Windows version and felt entitled to the Linux version for free) and with that an oversupply of retail packages (which is why you can still find some Loki games new in the box), and by trying to grow too big too fast.

I happened to buy most of what Loki put out while they were still in business because I was glad to be freed from Windows even if it meant I had to wait a staggering 5 days or even a couple months to get the games on my platform of choice. Waiting a few weeks is the price I paid to get what I wanted, much like you can eat a steak raw or take the time to cook and season it to your taste.

In the wake of Loki, the "main" Linux porting house became LGP and, yeah, I'll agree, they put out overpriced older B or C title games. I think they overcompensated for Loki's failure with the AAA market and, based over casual observation of the last couple years and the continuous catastrophes they seem to inflict upon themselves by being too low budget, I'm not sure how much longer they'll be around either. That doesn't mean there isn't a market for Linux games, only the two big porting houses got it wrong. Meanwhile, some publishers are quite happy putting out their own ports, whether they're done in house or contracted out For a major studio looking solely at the business aspect, Linux sales might not be worth the effort, but for smaller studios and indie developers, a Linux port may end up giving them a substantial influx of cash.