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Ubuntu Continues to Grab Market Share
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Jul 11, 2007 10:12 AM
from the i-blame-someone dept.
from the i-blame-someone dept.
slasher writes "MadPenguin.org discusses the future of Ubuntu and confirms Ubuntu's growing market share in the Linux market. Author Matt Hartley writes, "Now, for the biggest question: do high numbers mean that Ubuntu is the best distribution out there? Some will argue that this is an impossible point to make, as each person has different needs from their distribution. But for the sake of this article, we will be considering the average user, not the Slackware crowd, who is obviously much more comfortable within a command line environment than mainstream users."
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But I Thought That Was Pointless? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm so confused, I don't even know what to believe anymore!
My experience (Score:5, Interesting)
A more important question. (Score:3, Insightful)
I've had a much easier time getting my boss to look at it because when I install it, it just works..
All the distributions are like that these days, despite Bill Gate's best efforts.
What you noticed though raises the more important issue. It's not if Ubuntu is gaining share from other distributions, it's if Ubuntu is gaining users from non free software. Once the user goes free they lose their M$ bad habits and blinders and then can move to other distributions without problems.
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My Opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
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Simple: Ubuntu has a charismatic millionaire behind it. That's really all there is to it. Marketing is everything.
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Re:My Opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
Also installing programs was always so easy with XP and a pain with most linux distros.
Now with Ubuntu, I've for the VERY FIRST TIME ran into a distro that is in many respects better than XP! I'm astounded by how much better the usability is.
Not only that, but it's the first distro that's totally agreeable to the "don't click that, computer will explode" -crowd.
Parent
Re:My Opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm posting this from a Mandriva install that shares a drive with a Gentoo install and used to be where I had an OpenBSD install. The other disk has CentOS on it and probably will have OpenSUSE shortly. I try new distros and new releases of old distros on a regular basis. I'll probably try Ubuntu again in a couple months.
Mandrake tried to do what Ubuntu does, but it tried to do it years and years before Ubuntu existed. It did a decent job of starting on the path toward a newbie friendly desktop Linux distribution. Unfortunately, it has had times where the entire system was unstable, where the hardware either didn't work as expected or didn't work at all. I don't recommend Mandriva because I don't trust it to stay as stable as it appears to be in it's current incarnation and also because I know that people have an easier time finding other users with similar questions and issues if they use Ubuntu.
I think that Ubuntu sits where it does in terms of popularity because it came on the scene at the right time with the right goal, make it easy and got the interest because it was new and shiny. It isn't at the top because it is necessarily better in terms of software or functionality, but it is the best in terms of community for the new Linux user right now and that is what sets it apart.
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Re:My Opinion (Score:5, Funny)
Uhh, no, it has to do with being called "Feisty Fawn". I mean, what's hotter than Bambi being naughty?
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Dude (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:My Opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a load of horse hockey.
I started out using Mandrake, back in '98 or so. I wanted a distro that "just worked" and it was fine in that respect...until it wasn't. Once I was comfortable enough with linux I used Gentoo for a few years. Then it started crashing and burning, even on the "stable" configuration. After that, Ubuntu was the choice for a distro that "just worked," and it's served that purpose for me for the last few years. Marketing had nothing to do with my decision to use Ubuntu. Zippo. It has value on it's technical merits alone. Just because it's publicized and wrapped in a pretty package does not mean it's value is decreased. Marketing and technical merit are not mutually exclusive.
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Re:My Opinion (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, no. For a lot of us, Ubuntu has Debian behind it. It's like the pretty, desktop-oriented version of Debian for people who want relatively recent software without running "unstable". Should Ubuntu cease to exist today, I'll point my sources.list to debian.org and crossgrade back to the parent system.
I like Gentoo and Slackware and FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but Ubuntu is what I use when I want a Debian system with a little bit of polish. It really hit the sweet spot for a lot of people.
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Re:My Opinion (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm foregoing modding you (it would have been +1 Insightful) in order to reply.
I used to be a Mandrake "subscriber." I paid my yearly dollars, because Mandrake was really the best distro out there that I had tried. Even when Fedora came around, I gave that a whirl and it wasn't up to the Mandrake level in my opinion.
It is true that Mandrake pioneered most of the user-friendliness that Ubuntu now capitalizes upon. However, in my time with Mandrake there was always something that didn't work right. It changed from release to release, but it was always something. Like they had 98% of everything nailed down, but that one thing just bugged me to death, because it would be something like, oh, printing. I frequently built custom kernels under Mandrake in order to get things to work, and even then there were often a few things that were broken beyond my ability to repair. Now when Ubuntu came around, I installed on a test machine (I do this often with new releases of distros I'm not using just to see how they fare). I was so happy -- there was nothing that didn't work, straight out of the box. No fiddling, no custom kernels. They had closed that last 2% of functionality. It was almost zero configuration for printing and wireless networking, two things that historically have been a problem.
So yes, Mandrake was (and is) a leader in making an easy-to-use desktop distribution. But Ubuntu blew the doors off with its "it just works" quality. That's why people love it, and that's why it's on all my desktops to this day.
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Re:My Opinion (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, it won't be going on any laptops, because it still sucks. I recently gave Feisty Fawn a try on a T40, T43, and
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Plus, Mandrake didn't have a shit brown theme 3 years ago...
What does Ubuntu have that Mandrake doesn't? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's more that Mandriva has something Ubuntu doesn't, something that drives people away. RPM-based distributions are not popular with users. That's because in spite of band-aids like Yum, the user experience for RPM still sucks.
Lots of people have been saying so for years, but the denial in the RPM camp is amazing.
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apt-get and the repositories to go with it has always been the Debian "killer app".
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I have not tried Mandrake, but I still like your point. Ubuntu just does what the users want, and it does it properly. It is not so much that Ubuntu is perfect, but it does not have a strong argument going against it. Every other distribution seems to have that:
RedHat is very expensive, or Fedore is very incomplete.
SuSE used to be a good choice, but since Novell is trying to "improve" it, it is going do
Is it the best distribution? (Score:5, Insightful)
Power users love extra work? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Power users love extra work? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.ubuntu.com/aboutus/faq [ubuntu.com]
Before a vowel sound, you use 'an' instead of 'a'.
Anyhow, doesn't matter cuz Kubuntu is better.
I used Debian (long ago) and then more recently Slackware. When Kubuntu Dapper came out, I switched to that and never looked back. It had everything that Slackware did, but the ease of 'apt-get install x' for almost all the software I wanted. Slackware worked well and all, but any time I wanted to install something, I was expected to configure and make it, or download a slackware package from some third-party site that had stuff that worked about 2/3 of the time. (My definition of not-working includes compiles that leave out options that are pretty necessary as well as just plain broken.)
2 versions later, I can't imagine using another OS as my primary OS. There are drawbacks, like proprietary drivers for the major video cards, and lacking the fancy interface of certain fruit-oriented OS's, but I'm more efficient on Kubuntu than any other OS I've used.
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Average user? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe... (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe I'm missing something about this article, but it's very short, makes no real points and doesn't back up its claims. How can we ever know which distro is the most used? Distrowatch? Their methods [distrowatch.com] are hardly reliable!
Sadly it seems this article has been written to get people arguing on social networking sites instead of bringing anything new to the table. Yes, I know: I must be new here. :)
Yes, the best distribution. (Score:5, Insightful)
So even if Ubuntu isn't ideal for all Linux users, it has the opportunity to greatly increase the Linux user population, bringing more and wider-ranged development to the OS, which will benefit us all regardless of our distro of choice.
My take on Ubuntu and its derivatives (Score:3, Insightful)
No doubt, the (*)Ubuntus are great distros. One thing continues to baffle my mind in the general Linux world:
Why won't the fonts look beautiful by default?
Why, after all these years Linux has existed, do we have to seek help from Microsoft with its fonts in order to have a desktop that is a pleasure to look at?
Why is it that there is still debate as to whether wizzard like setps would be good for the desktop or the server? On this point, a wizzard like setup routine to handle an application like the Apache web server would make things easier for a lot of folks.
What makes me mad is that those who have the skills do do the needful, still refuse to see what seems to be obvious. Time will tell.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Why won't the fonts look beautiful by default?
Because good fonts are expensive. If you want beautiful fonts then I suggest you head on over to Adobe, or Monotype or ITC and buy some. For sans-serif Cronos Pro [adobe.com], Gill Sans [monotypefonts.com] and Optima [adobe.com] are all excellent. For serif fonts there's always the classics like Caslon [adobe.com], Garamond [itcfonts.com], or New Baskerville [itcfonts.com]. Of course some of those cost a fair amount of money for the complete font set, but you'll end up with far more beautiful fonts than Windows fonts give you. If you're not actually willing to pay for nice typefaces then yo
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What skills would those be? I have the knowledge necessary to host all of my own services (DNS, e-mail, etc) and the one thing that requires almost zero effort on my part is Apache. Why would it be different for someone else? You're making it sound like there's so much to do other than start the daemon.
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This Just In: Ubuntu is Not Dying (Score:5, Funny)
One more encouraging sign hit the already triumphant Ubuntu community when MadPenguin confirmed that Ubuntu market share has risen yet again, now up to to some number that would actually make this parody much easier to write had been cited in the fucking article.
Coming with a hotlink to a recent MadPenguin.org article which plainly states that Microsoft Does't Care About Destroying Linux, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. It's simply a matter of numbers, despite it being a sore spot with Fedora and SuSe users who've failed to get over it.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict Ubuntu's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Ubuntu has won the hearts of common users. In fact there won't be any future at all without Ubuntu because Ubuntu is not dying. Things are looking very good for Ubuntu. As many of us are already aware, Ubuntu continues to gain market share. Take a cold, hard look around.
Debian is the most endangered of them all, had a much slower development cycle than many of us would amit. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Fedora communicy relations issues only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Ubuntu is not dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
If there were any in TFA, I'd have talked about the number of users Ubuntu has, made a few wisecracks about Theo and FreeBSD, and compared the number of Ubuntu vs FreeBSD articles on Slashdot, divided by the number of modpoints used. So let's just skip that bit and call it as done. Throw me a frickin' bone here, I haven't even had my morning coffee yet.
All major surveys show that Ubuntu has steadily risen in market share. Ubuntu is very healthy and its long term survival prospects are very good. If Ubuntu is to triumph at all it will be over Vista itself. Ubuntu continues to grow. Nothing short of a disaster could kill it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Ubuntu is alive.
Most useless article ever? (Score:3, Interesting)
How much did they pay slashdot for the traffic being generated?
I've Switched (Score:3, Interesting)
Other than those minor things, it has just worked.
I use our main PC as a studio PC. It has a M-Audio 1010LT card which worked, but it took me some time to get the recording issues sorted out. JACK has a slight learning curve as did Ardour, but no more so than Adobe Audition did on XP. I've been rather pleased with the free available software for studio use.
I've even used GIMP a few times to edit some photos. While I had to hunt around a bit looking for the feature I wanted, I haven't run into anything it can't do that I need. Photoshop was always overkill for me anyway.
My experiment at home to run Ubuntu on our laptop has turned into a complete conversion and I'm not looking back. I talk it up to anyone who'll listen.
Why I use Ubuntu (Score:5, Insightful)
#1: No nonsense software manager. Ubuntu's Add/remove programs system just works. No dependency nightmare, rarely the need for command line, no need to compile/mock around with make files (although I'm comfortable with the process) but if there is the need, the option is there. Don't need to signup to get updates, it just works.
- All of my hardware works. ATI card, LCD (minimum tweak needed to get native res), ipod, firewire card, cellphone through USB, digi cams, cd/dvd writers, etc, etc.
- Relative cutting edge and stable software versions, I don't remember the last time I had x/gnome crash on me.
- Great software selection through their reps.
- Sane directory structure/menus setup.
- Excellent community support / forums.
- Ease of installation (although most distros offered this as well)
Never been happier with a Linux desktop.
Why I chose Ubuntu (Score:3, Interesting)
There's no "one size fits all" distro (Score:4, Informative)
Obviously. And Ubuntu is no exception to that. On old PCs that have less than 256M RAM, you can't use the standard Ubuntu live/install CD. Laptops have always been a little behind desktops, making it even harder to find a suitable distro for an old laptop. If one of the brags of Linux is that old hardware isn't left out in the cold, many of the distros make that untrue by building for Pentium IIs at a minimum. Embedded is even harder-- there are few enough options that you can be pretty much stuck heavily modifying and compiling some sort of Gentoo style distro, or even making up a distro yourself. A 386 with 4M of RAM isn't a usable computer anymore, but it's not because it can't do useful work, it's because software has become so much more demanding. I used to surf the Internet on just such a 386, with Netscape 3 running in X.
I've been trying distro after distro, trying to find something lightweight and full featured not just because I have old computers, but also because I like fast response times. Slackware derivatives seem most promising, so have tried Zenwalk, Vector, and Slackware itself. Also tried Xubuntu. Next on my list of distros to try is KateOS.
Someone asked why Mandriva wasn't more popular. In 2 words, nagging and blinders. Mandriva by default points a lot of things to various nag messages, like the default browser homepage. Lot of the help functions launch a browser which, guess what? Loads up another part of the Mandriva web site with both a) nagging, and b) blinders, as in a search function that searches only Mandriva's stuff. Once you get tired of not finding answers there, you forget their help functions, and try your luck with a real search engine, or the Howtos from linux.org, or (gasp) the docs from the homepage of whatever generic app you're trying to use.
Re:http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/June/os.ph (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp [w3schools.com]
Re:http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/June/os.ph (Score:5, Funny)
If we just hang in there, we'll overtake them yet!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The correct way to say it is that the market share has increased to 200%.
See? 200 is way bigger than
Lies, damned-lies, statistics.
Re:Slackware crowd? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is kind of confusing to me that the excluded the 'Slackware crowd's preferences. If there exist Linux distros that the 'Slackware crowd' prefers (not rhetorical - I really am not aware of Linux user preferences), then isn't there scope for improving the user interface of these distros to make them more accessible to the common user and trump Ubuntu?
Being an Ubuntu user who is also part of the "Slackware crowd" (you insensitive clod!), I think there's also a danger in running too far with the notion that a particular distro suits a particular number of users. I am but one user with multiple tasks to perform; I don't have requirements - my tasks do. I use Slackware on my servers, because I have evaluated it to be the best tool for the jobs I need the platform to do. I use Ubuntu on my desktop workstations because I think it is the best tool for those jobs.
I understand the need for simplification when doing an article like this, and maybe that's why the author just wanted to start by moving pains-in-the-ass like me off the table and stick with ye-average-joes who have perhaps one PC that they use. It drastically limits the complexity of the issue; but it inexorably limits the relevance of the article at the same time.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
from https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-an
"Gutsy will not be an LTS (Long Term Support) release, but it will nonetheless see a lot of server work and be useful for fast-moving server deployments. "
Re:I just can't wait (Score:5, Informative)
I agree with everything you said, however. I use the LTS edition for servers that need to be stable, and use the latest version for desktops. The Long Term Support is long enough that you can be confident with it (and easily upgrade to the next LTS when it comes along). Upgrading Ubuntu (e.g. from Edgy to Feisty) has always been painless in my experience. (Yes, YMMV.)
I'm very pleased with the speed (and predictability) of the Ubuntu release schedule, and with the quality of what gets put out.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I forget - is it supposed to be Gusty or Gutsy Gibbon?
Maybe he starts out as Gutsy, but after the 'release', he's Gusty?
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Head over to DistroWatch [distrowatch.com] and read a little about some of the distros, you'll see what the unique purposes of most of them are. Ubuntu is a relatively new distribution, and before that I messed around with R
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
...the Canonical distros are nothing special. As a 24-7 sysadmin...
I believe your second sentence there identifies you as someone that is not in Ubuntu's primary target audience. I think most Ubuntu users, including myself, will openly admit that regular Ubuntu releases (long-term releases such as 6.06 are somewhat different) are not really intended for mission-critical servers. If I have to spend half an hour rebooting my Ubuntu system at home and fixing the Xorg config file, I'm probably annoyed, but nobody has lost millions of dollars. The same can't always be said fo
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It isn't Xorg/XF86 that are in question, it is the distro tools that configure them for you.
I have re-written quite a few xorg.conf files to deal with my dual-head display and have not yet come across a distro that handles it well enough to just use a GUI. I haven't tried Ubuntu on this setup but I can tell you that Mandriva, Slax and CentOS5 all do a decent job of setting up a basic config. I have to go in and reconfigure for every one of them but it beats the heck out of rebuilding from scratch for any o
Re:AMD64 support (Score:4, Informative)
but these are NOT installed by default. There are ways to run various x86 binaries on
both Debian and Ubuntu, and you can search the Ubuntu forums for this.
BTW, Gentoo is similar to Debian in being a 'true 64' bit, but in Gentoo the compatibility
libraries are found in a more logical directory tree structure. In all three distro's
a bit of shell script skulldugery is required to launch a 32 bit binary in a 64 bit world.
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tags (Score:5, Funny)
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