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Infographic: Ubuntu Linux Is Everywhere
prisoninmate writes: To celebrate the launch of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, due for release later this month, on April 21, Canonical put together an interesting infographic, showing the world how popular Ubuntu is. From the infographic, it looks like there are over 60 million Ubuntu images launched by Docker users, 14 million Vagrant images of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS from HashiCorp, 20 million launches of Ubuntu instances during 2015 in public and private clouds, as well as bare metal, and 2 million new Ubuntu Cloud instances launched in November 2015. Ubuntu is used on the International Space Station, on the servers of popular online services like Netflix, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, Dropbox, PayPal, Wikipedia, and Instagram, in Google, Tesla, George Hotz, and Uber cars. It is also employed at Bloomberg, Weta Digital and Walmart, at the Brigham Young University to control the Mars Rover, and it is even behind the largest supercomputer in the world.
I've been a computer programmer professionally for over 20 years - I've been using Ubuntu lately (8 years or so) because it's easy. I don't want to spend my time being a system administrator, I just want to work, and Ubuntu is pretty damn good at that, pathological case anecdotes aside. It's not perfect by any stretch, and I've had my problems, but by and large it's been plug and play.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I was actually a moderator for the Ubuntu forums for the first few years of Ubuntu (I had an @ubuntu.org e-mail address and everything). In those days, Ubuntu had a massive impact on the accessibility of Linux to the average computer user. I could genuinely recommend it to anyone I knew. But, when KDE/Gnome went off the fucking rails and Ubuntu went the direction of Unity, it was almost like a mini dark ages for the Linux desktop. Basically, all the traction, all the trust, all the familiarity was struck down from upon high by people wielding job descriptions like User Experience Engineer.
Yes, assholes wearing skinny jeans destroyed the Linux desktop. And Canonical didn't help the situation when it started shipping Amazon connected desktop searches. However, having said all that, I decided to try vanilla Ubuntu recently, and, frankly, it's not that bad. It's actually really nice. In fact, I had a moment of terror when I wondered if my drunken ramblings had directly influenced the interface because it mostly worked how I wanted it to work. A power user will need to tweak it a bit but, in general, Unity might fit a power users workflow better than it might seem at first glance.
Now, that's just desktop stuff. On a server/VM/container/whatever, Ubuntu is the go to flavor. Without hesitation. If you don't use it, people will give you the stink eye and ask you to justify why you didn't. It's easy to use, it works and it's so widely used that when you say "apt-get", no one will give you a funny look. In a sense, Ubuntu started out as Linux for Humans and ended up being Linux for the Cloud. I doubt that Canonical even expected that but, frankly, I'm very much OK with that situation and I wish them the best.
P.S. I still love you, Debian. You'll always have a place on my laptop.