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Ubuntu One Hits the Million Users Mark
dkd903 writes "Roberta Nilerud of Canonical has announced that their cloud storage service – Ubuntu One – has hit the one million users mark. Ubuntu One is a cloud storage service from Canonical that is very tightly integrated into Ubuntu. Although Ubuntu One is installed by default in Ubuntu, it is also available on Windows and Android."
I hope you enjoy being a drop in the cloud, sheeple. Real men use something that no one uses yet OR that no one uses anymore.
It's not clear what proportion of Ubuntu users actually use Ubuntu One. We have three PCs at home running Ubuntu (four users), and have never registered with Ubuntu One, and are unlikely to do so.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
I'm more curious how many are paid.
I pay for a 20pack and the mobile. it leaves a little to be desired (I'd really like to see a plugin for a music player to play out of the could, so on my computers with small HDs I can play from the cloud, but sync and play local on others). But it is quite funtional on my phone.
It's also not as cheap as Amazon's solution, but it is open and accessible (note, they recently included a free 20GB for the $3.99/month music service, so it may be cheapest).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
So neither the article or the summary actually link to the main product at hand. Convenient.
Here: https://one.ubuntu.com/
it is also available on Windows and Android
Perhaps, but I've got a few computers all running different Linux distributions (as is common amongst Linux geeks), and as long as they can't sync, Ubuntu One will have to wait.
Jesus had a UNIX beard.
Well then I guess they're over the initial investment, about time they implement more payment options for those who don't have a CC. Stupid thing is, I can pay for U1MS with Paypal, but I can't store more then 2GiB of mp3s in there because that requires a CC. And at the same time there's nothing stopping you from buying 5GiB+ of music (except it's a bit expensive to do that, but certainly feasible with ~â250). Makes no sense, especially since the store (where you buy pressed CDs and tshirts) has always accepted PayPal.
Way to go, canonical. See you when you have at least Moneybookers.
package installed != using the service
Mac OS X is a full Unix operating system, complete with rsync. Is it possible we could get support for the Mac too?
Funny, I use Ubuntu as my desktop (technically my laptop) for almost a month now since Windows Vista became too much of a pain, but I have yet to bother with the Ubuntu One service. Maybe I'll click that icon now, and try it out. I'm actually not even sure what it is exactly.
I've been using Linux since the 90s. Not even all that long ago, Linux used to be such that if you had a configuration issue or a missing driver or were running into some bug, you could Google it and get some reasonable information. Now, if I do a search for issue $foo, annoying forums full of not very knowledgeable Ubuntu users clog the intertubes discussing $foo and a few dozen similar-sounding but very obviously unrelated issues [the obvious unrelatedness not seeming to dawn on people or keep them from "me too" posts], and due to the stupidity of the participants these threads inevitably lead nowhere. When I have a real Linux issue (as in, one that can't be solved by RTFM or some trivial amount of digging), I get a million idiots typing at a million X displays and no useful information.
That may sound a bit extreme and I'm sorry if I offended anyone, but I am still very cynical of these new Ubuntu users and their net contribution to the community of users... Remember when Linux used to be cool? I want that back. Send all those lame people to use a Mac or some such and let the serious people get their work done.
a) My primary use for ubuntu one is to buy music from the ubuntu one music store. Its handy to haver everything you bought available on all laptops.
b) a second important function, which i dont use (i dont like my contact data in the cloud) is the synchronization with a mobile phone. There is no working built-in way in ubuntu which allows this.
c) for some time the service was very slow and syncronization was unpredictable, so i dont use it for serious stuff right now.
d) I would like a better integration in the desktop for start/pause sync for single folder or everything (if i am on my mobile AP i do not like to sync everything).
e) it lacks storage encryption (unless you use encfs on the top, and encfs has issues itself)
http://www.bestmadeco.com/collections/axes
Just out of curiosity , what issues have you encounters with encfs ? Been using it for years without problems so far.
The number of downloads is never an indication on how many actual users are using a product.
A lot of people download crap, just to see what it is. In the case of Linux, a lot of people download the OS, then give up soon after installation (if they manage to install, because many installers don't work on 1st run) when NOTHING WORKS out of the box. Others download and can't even figure out what to do with the downloaded files.
Sure, to people like me, downloading and installing Linux distros is a no brainer. But for the majority of the public, the OSS mode of "it is good enough for me" is not good enough. Ubuntu never works right out of the box. It requires lots of tweaks just to get basic things (like display and wireless ... if ever) working right. In fact, IMHO, Ubuntu is one of the worst Linux distros in the market.
to filter out irrelevant results using the quote marks feature, the plus and minus signs, and so forth and so on.
That's actually pretty interesting - As it says that about 50% of the users with the packages installed are using it.
Higher than I'd have imagined.
Performance/latency issues when exceeding a certain number (tried it on ubuntu 8.04-ubuntu 9.10) of enrypted files.
"Although Ubuntu One is installed by default in Ubuntu"
So... is that one million users, or one million people who saw it installed, had a reaction of "what does this thing do, I can't tell by the name?" and ran it - once - to find out.
I signed up for the Ubuntu One beta test as soon as it went public, so I've had an Ubuntu One account for quite a while, but I've never found any use for it.
At the time of its introduction, the only available use for Ubuntu One was file syncing between computers running Ubuntu. Later, you could sync your Tomboy notes and Evolution address books between computers running Ubuntu. I would guess that there are relatively few Ubuntu users with Ubuntu running on multiple personal computers. Even for the narrow purpose of file syncing, before Ubuntu One was released, Dropbox and other apps were available, for free, and were cross-platform solutions. (I've since switched from Dropbox to Spideroak, which works on all the computers I use, as well as my smart phone.)
More recently, Ubuntu One has added premium services -- mostly to do with syncing contacts and music to smart phones. Again, there are better, free, an alternatives for syncing music to my phone -- including running an audio streaming server on my computer -- and given that I'm using Gmail and an Android phone, and all my contacts are in Google Contacts already, there's no point in using a premium service to sync contacts indirectly. I had an email from the Free Software Foundation that noted that about 50% of subscribers to the FSF were subscribed with Gmail accounts; I would guess that the proportion of Ubuntu users who use Gmail is equal or greater.
A lot of Ubuntu supporters were excited about Ubuntu One as a way to secure ongoing financing for Ubuntu, but this project looks to me to be a dead end.
...drbd & overhead ethernet from house to shed with headless backup server. oh and backup server should have at least one built-in spider's nest, and the total cost of the installation should be... the cost of a reel of cat5 (from 15 years ago).
I'd love to use this service because I'm a huge Ubuntu fan, but the price just isn't competitive. $3 per month only gets you 20 GB.
For example, you can sign up for a Dreamhost shared hosting account, get unlimited TB of storage and bandwidth for $9 per month: Dreamhost hosting plans
You can throw a multitude of various front-ends on it with their "Easy Install" or whatever the name is, and have pretty much any files you want served to you where ever you want.
I have a lot more than 20 GB of data that I'd want to sync and back up.
From a pure price/features standpoint, rsync.net is roughly comparable in price but has a way better feature set (copied from their page): ... and tools like rsync, rdiff-backup, duplicity and Unison
- ssh, scp, sftp, ftp
- IPV6 connectivity and dedicated Gigabit connections available
- BackupAssist, Backup Exec, Imaging, System Restore, and Bare Metal
- Seamless integration with VMWare, Xen, Citrix and Hyper-V
- ssh key based automation and support for remote UNIX commands
- Multiple logins and custom access/permissions
- Encrypted filesystem support
If Ubuntu one were to change their pricing to be about $10-20 per TB, per month - I'd probably jump on board. I know, that's a pretty tough price point to meet, but others (like dreamhost) are able to do it.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
That's actually pretty interesting - As it says that about 50% of the users with the packages installed are using it.
Higher than I'd have imagined.
I very much doubt that 50% of Ubunto users actually use the so called cloud especially since the the report states 1 million users have subscribed. Basically that means only 2million people in the world are Ubunto users (what rubbish!). If you believe the shoddy reporting Journalists been saying for over 10 years, that is "Linux has only 1% of the PC market" then I suppose most ill informed people would believe that.
If you would like better statistics about PC Linux use try here . Simply put, there are between 10 and 20 million Fedora users world wide and I would assume there are between 3 and 6 Ubunto users for every Fedora user and I have not taken into account the other distros which could double or even triple that figure again. It must be noted that I am being extremely conservative in my figures which if you work it out results in active Linux PC usage between 50 and 100 million world wide which is much much more than the 1% we keep hearing from the media.
Getting back on topic for one million Ubunto users subscribing to the "cloud" I would assume only 1 in 40 would actually subscribe which is more in-line with what would be world wide usage of Ubunto. Stating 50% is definitely wrong. Of course with shoddy technical Journalism reporting today if you say something enough times then people will eventually believe you and this suits certain monopolies.
There ain't no such thing as proprietary standards only proprietary formats. Standards are by definition open.
You talk about shoddy reporting and then pull numbers straight out of your ass? Good show, my man. Good show.
Never know when a vendor site is going to simply shutdown
In that case, you wouldn't be able to reactivate a game even if you could redownload it. And I doubt that you can legitimately back up those games that are exclusive to consoles.
I can pay for U1MS with Paypal, but I can't store more then 2GiB of mp3s in there because that requires a CC.
In which country do you live? A PayPal debit card may be available in your area, and it's accepted anywhere MasterCard is accepted.
it should be possible to port it.
It's always possible to port a free application that runs on a free operating system to a different platform: just run the free operating system in a virtual machine. But porting it to run within another operating environment requires porting all its dependencies. For one thing, it depends on gconf2, Perl, Python, D-Bus, Expat (via D-Bus), ncurses (via psmisc and D-Bus), SELinux (via D-Bus), init scripting (via D-Bus), APT (via python-apport), and many more. (Is there a way to show a package's entire dependency tree on one page?)
so for example my Documents folder is identical on my netbook and desktop, and sync'd whenever either is online.
I often use my netbook while commuting on public transit. What happens when you make changes to a file in the Documents folder on a netbook while not connected to the Internet, then make changes to the same file in the Documents folder on a desktop PC connected to the Internet, then connect the netbook to the Internet?
Eventually I can prune away the obviously irrelevant results, but then I end up with other people asking the same question in threads that have died years ago with no answer. Should I just register on Stack Overflow and Super User already?
Having done the linux thing for years (started with slackware in 96) i have to say I agree. FreeBSD is better in that respect (they generally don't break shit from release to release - linux on the other hand has previously swapped my DMZ and OUTSIDE nics when i upgraded the kernel due to different hardware detection order) but its still not exactly user friendly. Part of the problem with linux is no stable ABI for releasing binary only drivers. Yes. We get it. Open souce people would prefer to have source for drivers.
However, the alternative is less drivers available. Get the market share THEN demand open drivers. Trying to dictate to hardware vendors how they shall support your product when you have a miniscule market share is never going to get you anywhere.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Where do you get ten to twenty million?
I see 850000 in two months after a release. I will make the assumption that is clise to half the users, putting you at 1.6 million.
Additionally, ubuntu is unlikely to be more than double fedora IMO (based on my assumption that a /. User is a typical linux user, and the comments I see).
Also, I think ubuntu one is installed on all ubuntu installs (I could be wrong, but I remember a link on my clean install.
I personally like ubuntu one and think it's fair, the new phone app for files is great (I like that it uploaded all of my photos easily), and the cloud music is pretty good (I wish it would group songs with guest artists into their album though).
It's not the cheapest music cloud, but it's cheap enough for me, and it worked without a special upload, which I understand to be a requirement for amazon.
I hope that the 1000000 means they have enough paying customers to keep it going, at the price of 1.5 usb drives a month (the type without a wall outlet) it is a little steap for backup outside of important documents and music files for me, but it is a great way to get access to what I need effortlessly where I need it.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I'm guessing here but from what I see in the linux world ubuntu to fedora is more like 5/1 or even more...
-- no sig today
Fair enough, I use Linux as my primary OS as home, but am hardly a part of any community (I have one friend that does the same, and is in a similar situation), we both use Ubuntu, so I guess my actual in thw wild stat is 2:0 ubuntu:fedora.
I would honestly say my primary browsing device is either my work windows vista computer, or my android phone though.. it actually shocks me how low the phone numbers are for the web browser stats.
Also surprising to me is that iphone users appear to browse the web twice as much per phone as android users (looking at browser share vs phone os share).
I personally think browser access to a website is a valid metric, and has the benifit of counting dual boot machines as a percentage of each (including boot camp).
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Having done the linux thing for years (started with slackware in 96) i have to say I agree. FreeBSD is better in that respect (they generally don't break shit from release to release - linux on the other hand has previously swapped my DMZ and OUTSIDE nics when i upgraded the kernel due to different hardware detection order) but its still not exactly user friendly. Part of the problem with linux is no stable ABI for releasing binary only drivers. Yes. We get it. Open souce people would prefer to have source for drivers.
However, the alternative is less drivers available. Get the market share THEN demand open drivers. Trying to dictate to hardware vendors how they shall support your product when you have a miniscule market share is never going to get you anywhere.
FreeBSD doesn't break from release to release because they don't actually do anything between releases. Someone crosses a "T" or dots an "i" and they bump the version. They are in a race to reach version 20 by the end of the decade. Worse yet, FreeBSD doesn't actually have any drivers. They attempt to use those designed for Linux, but that is about it. After more than five years they still have no working support for "N" protocol wireless devices. "PATHETIC" to say the least. They have so totally screwed up their platform that they cannot reliable install LaTex, now TeX Live on their system. It requires a Computer Science Master's degree to get even some basic programming working correctly on that platform.
FreeBSD users are in lockstep with the other open-sore community in their refusal to blame themselves for their own misfortune and rather adhere to the "blame everyone else," specifically Microsoft" for their failures rhetoric.
Pigskin-Referee
Linux: Yesterday's technology, tomorrow
Ubuntu's default install ISO will boot from the CD. You don't need windows, or any other OS.
using the approximation of one megabyte of data per minute of audio, a month of continuous audio is roughly 42 GB of bandwidth, out of a 250 GB limit on bandwidth per month.
If you listen to four hours a day, that'd still be 7 GB/mo. On which devices did you listen? A lot of mobile devices have cellular data plans limited to 5 GB/mo.
NIce troll. You know, except for stuff like ZFS, Dtrace, and other "not invented here" stuff that the linux crowd refuse to embrace to maintain some semblance of compatibility with the rest of the world. But yes, they suffer from many of the same problems, though to a lesser degree, as linux. Given that the desktop is not the target environment for FreeBSD, the lack of wireless N is of little consequence. Couldn't care less if my firewall has wireless N or not, however i do care that it can sit there and process packets in a reliable manner without needing to be patched every 5 minutes (2 security updates for FreeBSD this year in total) or breaking in strange and mysterious ways when I *do* patch it, like Linux.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I have been using FreeBSD as a hobbyist tool since 2000. I am presently running Apache22 along with Postfix + Dovecot in conjunction with SQL back-ends, etcetera. FreeBSD claims to be a fully serviceable OS for both "server" and "individual" user use. Obviously, it is not.
Now, your requirements are are far more fundamental than many other users of FreeBSD. A simple perusal of their mailing list will prove that fact. FreeBSD has gotten to the point that they issue a new major version number every 18 months (+/-) regardless of what actual improvements have been made to the OS. There is not a dimes worth of difference from version 6 to versions 8.2. They have crossed a few "t's" and dotted an "i" or two, and that is about it. Every time FreeBSD issues an improvement which in reality is just playing catchup with the rest of the industry, they bump the major version number.
Now, you may not have any use fro "wireless" or its associated devices; however, you are not in the majority of users either. What type of moron would install an OS on a modern laptop that did not fully support modern wireless protocols. The fact that the protocol (N) is over 5 years old and FreeBSD still does not support it says a lot about FreeBSD and it relative worth in the modern market place.
I am glad that you find FreeBSD useful in your relatively limited environment. For many of use, that is not so.
Pigskin-Referee
Linux: Yesterday's technology, tomorrow
It comes back to using the correct tool for the job. Forget what the media release says, use what works. If you're after a laptop OS FreeBSD is not it. Linux is not really there either. Windows has its problems as well. The only laptop I've seen that actually reliably works as advertised with suspend/restore/etc in a reliable manner is a Mac.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.