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."

My experience

[aldousd666]

I've had a much easier time getting my boss to look at it because when I install it, it just works... Also it's very nice play with dual boot for the skittish XP users is a good thing. They have it very well packaged, though that may be all it actually is, it's very nearly a deal closer with skeptics who hate command lines, but still should be learning linux for cost reasons. I have it on my host, and personally, I like it very much. (A quick vmware-server install allows for all of the windows one will ever need.)

Power users love extra work?

[Yath]

From the article:

RPM based distros are solid, but unfortunately, they lack hand-holding for beginners.

Will someone explain to me why, as a power user, I am expected to enjoy doing a lot of make-work whenever I install an OS?

This just in: it's an Ubuntu future.

AN Ubuntu future? You get a D+. This article contains nothing useful.

Re:My Opinion

[Bovarchist]

I have to agree with you. I installed Ubuntu 5.x and 6.x on my home system and never could get everything to work, even after a bit of tweaking. I installed Mandriva and everything worked immediately. What annoyed me most about Ubuntu was that the help files and man pages weren't included with the ISO and were only available online. I know space is precious in a single ISO, but they could at least include *something*.

Most useless article ever?

[hirschma]

Summary: Ubuntu is the biggest Linux distro because I say so. Discuss.

How much did they pay slashdot for the traffic being generated?

I've Switched

[J3M]

I've completely switched to Ubuntu at home. For the most part, it has been relatively painless. My wife has had a few printing issues. I had to spend some time getting the wireless to work in our Dell laptop and I had to tweak our ATI card settings in xorg.conf manually to get a good resolution.

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.

Re:My Opinion

[CastrTroy]

Maybe I just have different hardware or software needs, but for me, there is no 2% of stuff that doesn't work on Mandriva. For me, personally, it has always just worked. And considering only 2% isn't working, it's probably not that uncommon for people to not experience any problems with Mandriva. Also, Ubuntu might also have 2% of stuff not working, and you just haven't run into it. Like I said, the administration tools from Mandriva are much better, and maybe that's the "2%" of stuff that I don't like from Ubuntu. Also, saying that Ubuntu blew the doors off of Mandriva by filling in the last 2% is a little bit of an exaggeration. At most it is a minor improvemnt, and if you were already a happy Mandriva user, I don't think it would be worth switching over to Ubuntu.

Why I chose Ubuntu

[AntonDevious]

I've been in the computer industry for 20+ years. I've pretty much used every flavor of Unix and several different linux distros. Needless to say I'm in the "command line friendly" crowd. I enjoy tinkering with thing and yet I chose Ubuntu. My main job, day today needs solid email, web browsing and office apps world. So as long as I have a good text editor for code, and those apps, I'm happy. Fedora was too much work. I had to think about it as I'm trying to do my job. It was bloated, way too much stuff running, different tools trying to update/install software that didn't work together (update manager - yum - rpm), one could run while the other was running and hose your database, etc. I need to reinstall the OS and after 4 hours and 5 CD's of Fedora I was quite unhappy. So the next time I installed, it was one disk, 30 minutes, minimal bloat and I've never had my software package management fail to work together. With Ubuntu, I don't have to think about the OS and the apps. I can think about my work. And there is still plenty of tinker room with Ubuntu!

Re:My Opinion

[i8myh8]

Here's what Ubuntu has -- this coming from a Linux Geek who doesn't use Ubuntu:

It works. No monkeying around, no driver hunt or configuration issues, it works. I can pop Ubuntu in my Acer Aspire 5670 laptop and it loads the wireless, loads the ATI Video drivers, EVERYTHING and it gives me no grief. Fedora, Mandrive, Suse, etc.. all give you grief when you're installing the OS. Fedora 6 is the next best thing but getting the wireless to work is painful, and while *I* can accomplish it, I've spent a great deal of time in the console making things work. Ask someone who's barely computer literate to hack through getting their wireless to work on almost any distro and you'll wind up with a very frustrated person.

Take ten computers both laptop and desktops and take your favorite flavor of distro and try to install. You'll wind up with missing drivers, incomplete installs due to a bad base set of drivers, non-functioning notebook features.. it is a disaster.

I'm tested Ubuntu on a half dozen computers, all with different hardware, both laptops and desktops and it works. No other distro can say that. Did I mention I'm a Fedora fan?

Re:My Opinion

[Stinking Pig]

Ditto -- I let my Mandrake subscription lapse two years ago for the same reason. I switched to SuSE at the time, but I've been disappointed by it as well; everything's great 98% of the time, but then YaST2 will get confused and wipe out something critical (like your kernel, or your smb.conf). Debian or Ubuntu will probably go on my replacement servers when these SuSE systems die off.

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 T60. All three had major hardware issues -- only the T40 could suspend and resume properly, none of them could play video on a projector unless the projector was connected during a hard power off/power on, the T60 couldn't use AHCI for its SATA drives, the T43's wireless card wasn't recognized, the T60 could only join an open AP, not a WPA2 one... &c, &c, &c.

Re:My take on Ubuntu and its derivatives

[Coryoth]

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 you'll probably find that, relatively speaking, the Bitstream Vera fonts, which are provided with most distros these days, are actually quite nice. But in the end the reality is that if you want nice fonts you have to pay for them. If you have such refined sensibilities that you prefer Arial to Vera Sans, then you'll truly appreciate having Cronos or Optima instead, which are far far better than either of those, and the cost won't bother you.

Re:My experience

[iperkins]

Speaking of skittish users, I just took an old ME machine belonging to a friend, threw some RAM and a second HD into it and set up a dual boot to Feisty. He loves it and says it is so much more responsive, even if he can't pronounce Ubuntu yet. One user at a time, that's how you do it.

Re:Dual displays is "strong functionality"?

[ancientt]

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 of the dozens of distros I've tried that don't. Rebuilding is probably 30 minutes worth of work, but if that is representative of the average for tools in a distro, and I suspect it is, then you can use it as a quick rule of thumb.

If the dual head configuration is easy, then the distro is probably mature, if not then you will need command line expertise. For users who wonder what that means, if you don't know how to use vim then you shouldn't use a distro that doesn't handle dual head displays gracefully.

Re:Interesting

[morgan_greywolf]

Heh. Well, I am a sys admin as well and work with Linux daily. Here's the deal: While I don't use Ubuntu at work, I've never had any trouble plugging in anything like daisy chain of SCSI hard drives, etc., into a Redhat or SuSE box.

And, FWIW, the following worked flawlessly on my wife's computer with Ubuntu, without modifying any configurations:

• Canon LiDE 60 scanner
• Epson Stylus C88 printer
• Fuji Finepix digital camera
• several models of USB pen drives
• several models of USB external HDDs
• additional el-cheapo no-name digital camera (not USB storage compliant!)
• several models of webcam

Re:Interesting

[RobDude]

Well, if *your* wife can do it; I most certainly want to do it too!

Please tell me how to configure my Wireless USB Network Adaptor - it's a LinkSys WUSB300N Wireless-N.

Heck, I'll do you one better...since you and I both know you won't be able to tell me how to get it running in Ubuntu, with or without ndiswrap'in it, (and if you *can* tell me how - then please head over to the Ubuntu Forums and post it form everyone; I'll totally apologize for my ignorance) - why not just give me a link to *any* Wireless-N USB Adapater I can get at BestBuy.com - that will be autodetected/configured/natively supported by Ubuntu (any version you specify). None of this using a windows driver and adding an extra layer of processing and all that junk...just something I can buy, today, from Best Buy that connects via USB, and can handle Wireless-N speeds.

P.S. While I sound a little sarcastic, because I do think that hardware support still blows in Linux - I REALLY do want a wireless USB device that will work, natively, in Linux. I've asked on plenty of Linux forums. If you can link me something, I really am going to go and buy it - I'm sick having a 30 foot long cat-5 cable running down my hall.

windows "skin"

[mclarenfan]

I think ease-of-use is what made Ubuntu distro with mass-appeal. A friend of mine was using my laptop for a day, and asked me where I got the "skin" for windows from. I know he did not try to install anything, and used it primarily for browsing, but still it speaks volumes of Ubuntu's ease-of-use.

Re:good.

[Iron Condor]

What exactly was "good" about this?

Nothing was actually said, so how can this be "nuff said"?

Markets are measured in dollars. Something that is free has ZERO market share. Zip. Zilch. None. It might be popular with just about anybody, but a market share is a fraction of dollars thay you make out of a total number of dollars that are available to be made. If everybody goes Ubuntu tomorrow and MS and Apple go bankrupt then the market for OS will simply be zero dollars. And Ubuntu will still have zero market share as it is still making zero dollars.

Tech-nerds can be so touchy when non-techies misuse tech-jargon -- and yet they're incredibly happy to mis-use perfectly well-defined and well-understood terms like "market share"...