Ubuntu Continues to Grab Market Share

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."

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/June/os.php

[Anonymous Coward]

Still kickin' 0% !! Way to go, Linux !!

http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/June/os.php [thecounter.com]

OS Stats
Fri Jun 1 00:01:02 2007 - Sat Jun 30 23:58:00 2007 30.0 Days

1. Windows XP 54432747 (81%)
2. Win 2000 3862599 (5%)
3. Mac 2666623 (4%)
4. Win NT 2511918 (3%)
5. Win 98 1571989 (2%)
6. Unknown 999498 (1%)
7. Linux 344807 (0%)
8. Win 3.x 78191 (0%)
9. WebTV 41986 (0%)
10. Unix 23485 (0%)
11. Win 95 19368 (0%)
12. OS/2 2064 (0%)
13. Windows ME 1773 (0%)
14. Windows Vista 81 (0%)
15. Amiga 52 (0%)

Re:http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2007/June/os.ph

[amrust]

That depends on where you look.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp [w3schools.com]

Maybe...

[jeevesbond]

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. :)

Re:Power users love extra work?

[Necreia]

"an Ubuntu" is proper, unless the u is pronounced as a y in a word like "you".

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/esl/esliart .html [purdue.edu]

Re:Power users love extra work?

[Aladrin]

Yes, 'an'.

http://www.ubuntu.com/aboutus/faq [ubuntu.com]

How do you pronounce Ubuntu?
Ubuntu, an African word from Zulu and Xhosa, is pronounced "oo-BOON-too".

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.

Re:My Opinion

[thsths]

> I switched from Mandrake to Ubuntu last year, so I can tell you what the difference is: Ubuntu works.

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 downhill.
Debian is technically usually excellent, but the "holly than the pope" attitude has scared more than a few users.

And Ubuntu is just like Debian without the attitude, or SuSE without the commercial issues.

There's no "one size fits all" distro

[bzipitidoo]

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:I just can't wait

[wolf08]

Unless I'm horribly mistaken, I'm pretty sure that Gutsy Gibbon is NOT a LTS release.

from https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-ann ounce/2007-April/000276.html [ubuntu.com]

"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

[kebes]

The next release will be interesting to see. Being a LTS version...

Small correction: The next release will be 7.10 (Gusty Gibbon, October 2007). However the next "Long Term Support" (LTS) release, according to this page [ubuntu.com], will be "Feisty+2", or the release after Gusty. This release will probably be in April 2008.

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.

Re:Why mutiple distros?

[norminator]

Maybe you should read through the other comments on this page to see how different people feel about Ubuntu and other distros. Personal preferences are all over the map. There's good and bad things about all distros. Usually a distro is started because existing drivers don't fill a particular need.

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 RedHat/Fedora, Suse, Slackware, and Gentoo. Now I've settled on Ubuntu, because it has the look and feel that I think a computer should have, and because it works for me. Other people I know prefer Fedora or Suse, and that's fine. I still use Gentoo at home on my Mythbox, and for me, it's alright for that purpose. But on my laptop I use Ubuntu. In the last week, I tried out Suse and Fedora one more time, and realized I still like Ubuntu the most. To each his own, but at least we're not all stuck with the same distro.

Re:My Opinion

[raluxs]

You can buy or you can download the free edition, I have been use the free versions since Mandrake 7.0 without any problems, have you tried the 2007 spring version?. It is awesome!.

Re:My Opinion

[ubuwalker31]

You're kidding right? Could you plug in a camera or scanner or a printer into a base install Mandrake 3 years ago and have them automatically detected? Did most video cards work right out of the box with non-prop drivers? Could you network with windows computers network shared drives out of the box?

Plus, Mandrake didn't have a shit brown theme 3 years ago...

Re:My Opinion

[zebslash]

Ridiculous. urpmi has its GUI (rpmdrake) which handles the updates the same way. New slashdotter verdict: you don't know what you're talking about and FUD.

Re:My Opinion

[jedidiah]

I was using Mandrake 5 years ago. I stopped using it when I finally got tired of RPM and wanted something comparable to apt-get. I tried retrofitting Mandrake. The frustration associated with that caused me to try Debian once again and then never look back.

apt-get and the repositories to go with it has always been the Debian "killer app".

Debian and Ubuntu releasing strategies

[timrichardson]

After trialling Ubuntu for some time on a second machine, two weeks ago I migrated from XP to Ubuntu. I've been using unix systems for a while but I like a few things about Ubuntu. The package management is certainly one of them. The distribution also seems really committed to open source. The migration is going great; the only thing for which I still use XP is Photoshop Elements, and that is in a vmware server session.
On my second machine I now run Debian.
A lot of people go on about the slow release cycle of Debian. I am starting to wonder about this. There are actually multiple release tracks of Debian, and "testing" could be renamed "Desktop continuous update release" quite honestly, I think. Feisty Fawn was released with an Open Office package in which Base did not really work, and a version of Gnome in which "file roller" uses a drag and drop interface not supported by Nautilus. This has not impressed me. As far as I know, neither problem has been fixed yet. Debian is the natural home of "apt" and maybe Debian understands it better, with the three release streams fully taking advantage of it. One would not have to wait six months for such problems to be fixed, I think.

So I really like Ubuntu, but I am starting to wonder if Debian may have the last laugh, at least on my machines.

Oh, and the kick for me to finally get XP off our main computer: I bought my wife a macbook. After 30 minutes with it, I was embarrassed to be still running XP.

Re:AMD64 support

[scharkalvin]

Debian and Ubuntu have compatibility binaries available to support running x86 binaries,
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.