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Ubuntu: Still Popular?

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

1. Ubuntu
2. Fedora
3. openSUSE
4. Mint
5. Debian
6. Mandriva
7. PCLinuxOS
8. Puppy
9. Sabayon
10. 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

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

Alexa Rankings

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

Posted in Articles, Fun, Linux, Tech | 20 Comments »

Find, Share and Install Ubuntu Apps on Facebook

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

Posted in Facebook, Fun, Linux, Ruby on Rails, Ubuntu | 3 Comments »

Synchronize Tomboy Notes with Dropbox

One of my absolute favorite online services of the past year is Dropbox. It’s a very easy to use service that integrates with your Linux, Mac and Windows desktops and allows you to sync files across computers (among other things). Think of it as a big USB flash drive in the sky.

Not only is it useful for storing daily documents and sharing files with friends, it can also be quite useful for keeping your application settings in sync across computers. One example is syncing Tomboy notes across computers. Tomboy is an extremly handly note taking application for Linux, but I always found it annoying that it was so hard to sync across machines. With Dropbox, it’s amazingly simple.

If you’re not already a Dropbox user, sign up at Dropbox. Once you have the software installed, you should have a folder in your home directory called “Dropbox”. All of the files in this directory will automatically be synced with Dropbox and with other computers where you install the application.

Now that Dropbox is installed, just create a folder called “tomboy” (or whatever you like) inside your “Dropbox” directory. Now in your Tomboy prefernces, click on the Synchronization tab and choose “Local Folder” and browse to your “tomboy” folder.

To syncronize your notes, simply click “Tools” and “Syncronize Notes” at the top of any Tomboy note … and that’s it!  Repeat these steps for all your other computers and you’ll have fully syncronized Tomboy Notes on all your machines. This also protects against accidentally loosing your notes if something happens to your computers, you’ll always have a copy saved at Dropbox.

Posted in Dropbox, Linux, Ubuntu | 7 Comments »

List of Pre-installed Linux Notebooks

I’ve started putting together a list of pre-installed Linux notebooks and netbooks that are currently available for sale in the US.  Please check out the page and let me know if there is anything I’m missing.

Pre-installed Linux Notebooks

Posted in Linux, notebooks | No Comments »

View your site in (almost) every browser with Browsershots

Ever wonder what your website looks like in different browsers?  Even though most of us would prefer that people didn’t use browsers like Internet Explorer 6, these old browsers are still widely used.  If you want to make sure that your site is not completely broken in these old browsers, try Browsershots.org.

Browsershots generates screenshots of your site in up to 56 different browsers.  You can easily test your design in such obscure browsers as Kazehakase, K-Meleon, and Galeon.  Of course all the standard browsers are there too, the most useful being older versions of IE and Firefox on Windows and several versions of Safari for Mac OS.  Give Browsershots.org a try, it’s free!

Note: While preparing this post, I found a bug in my design that causes problems with IE 7.
Microsoft …  Grrr.

Posted in CSS, Web Authoring | No Comments »