Starry Hope » Fun

Ubuntu: Still Popular?

Jim — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 12:35:37 +0000

Back in November of 2007, we wrote an article about the popularity of Ubuntu. At the time, it appeared that Ubuntu was the most popular Linux distribution according to many different web metrics. Of course, there’s no way to say for sure which distro is the most popular and to know exactly how many people use Ubuntu. That being said, we thought it would be interesting to take a fresh look at Ubuntu’s popularity. Is Ubuntu gaining in popularity? Is it being used by more people? Are more people searching and talking about Ubuntu?

So, how many users does Ubuntu have? It’s really hard to tell. In October, 2007, Canonical claimed that there were over 6 million users of Ubuntu. Then in October, 2008, in an interview with IneternetNews.com a Canonical spokesman claimed that

“In terms of numbers we’re very confident this is an 8 million plus user base of active users. That is a hard thing to count and there are lots of issues about methodology for counting but I have seen nothing that sheds doubts on that.”

With this in mind, lets look at some indicators and statistics from around the web to see just how popular Ubuntu really is. Has it gained in popularity since 2007, or has another distro come in to take Ubuntu’s place?

Note: this article is in no way a scientific study of Ubuntu’s popularity, it is just a collection of interesting stats from around the net. Have fun with it!

1. DistroWatch.com

Like last time around, we’ll start things out with distrowatch.com. While not the best indicator of a distro’s popularity, it is a traditionally accepted measure of popularity in the Linux community. When we wrote our original article back in November of 2007, PCLinuxOS topped the distrowatch list, but that apparently didn’t last for long, as Ubuntu is once again back on top (and overall yearly stats at distrowatch.com show Ubuntu in the number one position from 2005-present).

DistroWatch.com’s most popular linux distributions for the past 6 months

Ubuntu
Fedora
openSUSE
Mint
Debian
Mandriva
PCLinuxOS
Puppy
Sabayon
CentOS

This is the list that we’ll use going forward to compare the top distros.

2. Website popularity

There are several companies that specialize in ranking websites. None of these sites are perfect and many people discount them all together. We thought it would be interesting to see how some of the top Linux distribution websites stack up in these net rankings. Here are current rankings for the top 10 distros (from the Distrowatch list). The November 2007 results are included in parenthesis.

Netcraft Rankings

www.ubuntu.com: 694 (up from 1,649)
www.OpenSUSE.org: 1,823 (up from 4,622)
www.debian.org: 1,938 (down from 1,719)
fedoraproject.org: 2,164 (up from 4,314)
www.centos.org: 3,054 (not on the list in 2007)
www.linuxmint.com: 3,150 (way up from 41,331)
www.mandriva.com: 10,049 (down from 7,691)
www.pclinuxos.com: 10,479 (up from 11,144)
www.puppylinux.org: 14,196 (not on the list in 2007)
www.sabayonlinux.org: 36,494 (down from 28,549)

Alexa Rankings

www.ubuntu.com: 2,327 (up from 2,445)
www.debian.org: 4,475 (down from 3,499)
www.OpenSUSE.org: 10,889 (down from 7,878)
fedoraproject.org: 12,992 (down from 11,127)
www.centos.org: 16,198 (not on the list in 2007)
www.linuxmint.com: 29,146 (up from 69,753)
www.mandriva.com: 30,945 (down from 18,497)
www.puppylinux.org: 62,103 (not on the list in 2007)
www.pclinuxos.com: 80,114 (down from 57,390)
www.sabayonlinux.org: 120,109 (down from 72,331)

So, it seems that Ubuntu is, according to these sites, the most visited of the distros from distrowatch’s top 10. It’s also interesting to note that Linux Mint’s rankings have dramatically improved since 2007. Perhaps Mint’s popularity has something to do with their focus on being user friendly (and not brown)?

Blogging Trends

Sites like Technorati and BlogPulse allow you to track how often people are blogging about a certain topic. We compared Ubuntu’s blog buzz to other top Linux distros and found that people are writing about Ubuntu far more than any other Linux distro.

BlogPulse

We took the top three distros from distrowatch and compared them on BlogPulse.

Technorati

Technorati shows very similar results when comparing Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Debian over the last 180 days.

As you can see, people are blogging about Ubuntu far more often than other distros. (We’d also like to note that a good amount of blog posts that contain the word “fedora” are about the hat and not the Linux distro).

Google Trends

Again we decided to look at Google Trends to see which distros people are searching for. Of course, there is a lot of room for error as someone could be searching for the philosophy of Ubuntu, for a new Fedora hat, or for The Red Hat Society.

First we compare our top 4 distros from above. You can clearly see that from the second half of 2006, there are far more searches for Ubuntu than for Debian, Fedora (including Fedora Core, and Red Hat searches) or openSUSE (including SUSE).

Next we compare Ubuntu to the rest of the top 10 distros combined (including variations of the distro names such as Red Hat). It seems that since mid 2007, Ubuntu is being searched for more often than all the other distros combined.

Here we compare Ubuntu to Linux, Unix, FreeBSD and Solaris. Clearly Linux has the lead, but Ubuntu gets really close around release dates. In 2007, we thought this trend would lead to “Ubuntu” overtaking “Linux” as a search term, but this clearly has not happened.

Finally, for some perspective, we compare Ubuntu, Linux, Mac, and Windows.

Twitter

Since our original article was published, searching Twitter trends has become an interesting way of finding out what people are talking about. We used Twist to compare the same top 4 distros. Here is a graph comparing tweets over the last 30 days. (Once again, a whole lot of the “fedora” tweets are about the hat, not the Linux distro).

And finally, we compare Ubuntu with Linux, Mac and Windows.

Conclusion

It appears that Ubuntu is still the most popular Linux distribution. According to some stats, it’s more popular now than ever. Of course, these stats don’t really tell us how many people actually use Ubuntu. They do, however, give an interesting insight into Ubuntu’s relative popularity on the internet. They also re-emphasize just how far Ubuntu (and Linux in general) have to go to catch up with Mac and Windows.

Remember, this was all just for fun, no need to get upset if you don’t like something you see here (or if we left out your favorite distro). Whatever your favorite OS is, the most important thing is that it works for you and that you can be productive using it. So, until next time, happy computing!

“In terms of numbers we’re very confident this is an 8 million plus user base of active users,” Chris Kenyon, director of business development at Canonical told InternetNews.com. “That is a hard thing to count and there are lots of issues about methodology for counting but I have seen nothing that sheds doubts on that.”

Find, Share and Install Ubuntu Apps on Facebook

Jim — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 12:48:46 +0000

Recently, I wanted to learn how to make Facebook applications using Ruby on Rails. For my first project, I decided to build a small application to let people find, share, install and promote Ubuntu software right from within Facebook. Determining which software we use can be a very social experience, often we’ll ask our friends what they recommend, so why not take this social aspect to the (currently) most popular social networking site?

Here is a quick video that I put together to show off some of the features of the Facebook app.

Give Apps for Ubuntu a try by visiting http://apps.facebook.com/ubuntuapps.

Youtube Link: Find, Share, and Install Ubuntu Apps on Facebook

Microsoft confirms that it has lost its mind – announces $10,000 table!

Jim — Wed, 30 May 2007 06:46:15 +0000

The internet is buzzing today with people raving about the new Microsoft Surface technology announcement. Hopefully people will soon get over the initial hype generated by the fantasy videos on Microsoft’s website and take a more practical look at this MS announcement. Come on people, multi-touch technology is nothing new! According to Wikipedia, “Multi-touch has at least a 25 year history, beginning in 1982, with pioneering work being done at the University of Toronto (multi-touch tablets) and Bell Labs (multi-touch screens).” Microsoft would like us all to think that they’ve just “innovated” the future, but in reality, they haven’t released a single multi-touch consumer device and will only (possibly) have these tables available for hotels and restaurants by the end of the year.

The other thing I just can’t understand is why a table? Multi-touch whiteboard? That’d be cool! Multi-touch refrigerator? Well, OK. Multi-touch phone? That’d be amazing (oh wait, someone is already doing that)! Multi-touch tablet PC? This sounds more reasonable. But no, MS decides to release a TABLE! Tables are things we work on, eat on and lay things on. I personally don’t want to have to clear off my table so I can transfer songs to my music player, or move my plate in order to pay my bill at the restaurant.

The rest of the technology world is focused on making computers smaller and easier to use. Apple is releasing its iPhone and putting the power of OS X in your pocket. And what is Microsoft doing? They’re getting ready to change the world with their $10,000 table! I think this about sums up the current situation in the computer industry. Microsoft has lost its mind.

Star Trek Inspirational Posters

Jim — Wed, 07 Mar 2007 19:06:05 +0000

Millions of geeks and nerds have been inspired by Star Trek over the years. Now there are inspirational Star Trek posters for your office! Here’s a few examples.

Give the gift of Star Trek this year!

See more posters here

No related posts.

New Browser Stats

Jim — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 06:18:38 +0000

Starry Hope Readers Are Smart

One of the smartest things you can do to protect yourself online these days is to simply not use Internet Explorer. The thing is so full of holes that using it is just asking for trouble. The December 17, 2006 stats release from W3 Counter shows world-wide usage of Internet Explorer still at 65%.

Here’s a quick look at Starry Hope’s browser stats. As you can see, only 7% of the visitors to this site (over the last year) have used Internet Explorer.

‘Tis The Season For … Ruby!

Jim — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 09:04:04 +0000

The guys over at Ruby Inside are putting together a
Ruby Advent Calendar. The Calendar features a new article about Ruby for each day of Advent.

Following the trend, Err the Blog has put together their own Advent Calendar that’s packed full of useful Rails tips (focusing mostly on ActiveSupport). There are some great gems in there!

Sick of DRM

Jim — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 11:58:18 +0000

I’m getting sick of DRM. I’m switching to Emusic. I mean, I love Apple’s stuff, but I want some freedom of choice in my life.

iTunes Killer Plays the Web on Windows Mac and Linux

Jim — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:54:32 +0000

Here’s a screencast from our friends over at puddlegum.net demonstrating some of the features of the cross-platform media player Songbird. Songbird is built on the XUL framework (like Firefox) and works on Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.
[QUICKTIME http://www.starryhope.com.nyud.net:8080/screencasts/Songbird-Screencast-Puddlegum_600.mov 600 485 true true]

Trying Emusic Again

Jim — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 10:29:39 +0000

Today, I decided to try the emusic service again. I’ve tried the service a couple of times before (apparently, I tried it for the first time in August 1999 according to my account information). In the past, I never found the service worth paying for, but all that has changed now.

With a quick search of the emusic site, I found some of my favorite groups. I also found a lot of songs that I’ve already purchased through Apple’s iTunes Music Store. The big difference with emusic is that the songs are in high quality mp3 format without any DRM! This means that I can play the songs on all of my mp3 players and computers without any problems. With Apple’s DRM, I can’t play my purchased music on Linux or on my iRiver player, and that really stinks!

Emusic was nice enough to give me a new free trial membership (apparently my other one was so long ago that it doesn’t count). I was able to get the brand new album from Dashboard Confessional, The Rocket Summer’s first album, and 5 single tracks from some other bands I want to check out … all for FREE! You just can’t beat that deal.

I think I’ll go ahead keep my account with emusic this time. 40 tracks for $9.99 a month is just a great deal, especially since emusic’s catalog of artists is so huge.

The tracks are also much higher quality than those offered through iTunes. Emusic uses variable bit rate mp3 files, and all the tracks I downloaded were encoded at rates above 160 kbps. It’s also easy to re-download any tracks that you’ve purchased in the past, something you can’t do with iTunes.

Emusic is a winner!

A Matter of Style

Jim — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 05:13:02 +0000

The pictures say it all.

New Browser Stats