Dare To Be Different: Ubuntu’s Popularity Is Not Declining

By Benjamin Humphrey, Published November 27, 2011

Like a domino effect of mis-information, this week has been chock full of reports by tech news sites that Ubuntu’s market share is declining, being surpassed by the Ubuntu spin-off and close cousin Linux Mint.

The source of this dramatic revelation is none other than DistroWatch, the site that all Ubuntu haters love to quote, and all Ubuntu lovers love to hate.

Scanning the Internet recently for the word “Ubuntu” points us to a bunch of bogus articles written by the regular offenders (The Register, ZDNet, PCWorld) with damning titles such as “Ubuntu savaged by rivals infected with fondleslab fever” or “Ubuntu shows DistroWatch decline as Mint Soars.”

Many of these articles suggest that the backlash over the Unity desktop is to blame, as swarms of Ubuntu users flock to alternatives. This is complete nonsense, and these sites are just attempting to ride the Unity controversy train for another couple of stops for more page hits. Don’t join them.

Seeing as Canonical themselves aren’t pulling any punches (they rarely do) to refute the bogus claims perpetuated by these “tech sites” (which are really just hives of uninformed morons re-posting anything they see on ZDNet with a dramatic title that’s sure to attract a bunch of views, and hence ad clicks), I figured it was time for OMG! Ubuntu! to step in and clear the air with some hard facts.

You know it’s a sad day in tech journalism when we have to take the high ground and tell everyone not to panic. So here goes.

DistroWatch is not an accurate measurement of Linux distribution popularity. In fact it’s not an accurate measurement of anything. The only thing Distrowatch statistics tell you is how vain the fanboys are of any particular distribution. It measures page views to each distributions’s information page. For example, when you visit distrowatch.com/arch, that adds a little bit to Arch’s relative popularity on Distrowatch. (As a side note, I want you to all go ahead and click on that link. Let’s see if we can make Arch the most popular Linux distribution in the world, and as a little treat, we may even get Steven J. Vaughan-Nicols to write an inflammatory article about it).

As a distribution becomes more mainstream like Ubuntu has, the number of views to the Ubuntu DistroWatch page will not increase in proportion to the actual number of users the distribution has. This is simply because regular people using their computer don’t go and visit DistroWatch. In all likelihood, they probably haven’t even heard of DistroWatch. Ubuntu also doesn’t make a conscious effort to direct their user base to the Ubuntu DistroWatch page by posting the link all over their forums, documentation, blogs, press releases, and more.

One of the most hilarious claims is that Ubuntu’s market share has actually been declining ever since Mark Shuttleworth founded it in 2004. And according to this chart, it is. However the (only) important piece of information on this chart is where the numbers come from: DistroWatch.

Hopefully you all now agree that DistroWatch is a useless website for quoting relative Linx distribution popularity once they reach mainstream usage.

So how do we see the relative popularity of distributions?

Well, it’s actually pretty difficult. Probably the best idea would be to take a look at the distribution’s page on Facebook. Here you can see that Ubuntu has over 500,000 “fans” whereas Linux Mint has 14,000. Similar trends exist on Google+ or Twitter. Even Google Trends shows Ubuntu clearly ahead.

DistroWatch also publish hits to their home page (distrowatch.com, rather than distrowatch.com/yourdistrohere) which show Ubuntu significantly ahead of other distributions.

Update: J Johan Edwards points to Wikimedia’s statistics in the comments, further reiterating Ubuntu’s apparent popularity.

You could also ask Google for their Gmail statistics, or google.com, but unfortunately the user agent strings for Linux computers make it quite difficult to easily distinguish between individual distributions.

But at the end of the day, you’re always going to get people posting “damning” graphs and statistics showing that what everyone thought was the most popular distribution actually isn’t, and then your little world gets turned upside down at the thought. It’s not just confined to Linux distributions – we see this all the time with smartphone market share. It’s a common tactic employed by journalists on the web – they use the shock factor to their advantage, hopefully prompting you to share the article with your friends due to the shear revelation and disbelief caused. Pretty graphs simply attempt to add some truth to their claim.

Don’t get me wrong: DistroWatch isn’t at fault here. Nowhere do they claim that their method of measurement is accurate, representative, or useful. The folk at fault are those who abstract out the statistics and pretend that they are in fact an accurate representation of relative market share, misleading their readers.

My advice: Ignore any article that quotes DistroWatch as “fact”. For a general solution, avoid ZDNet and The Register, and your average daily hyperbole intake will be significantly reduced.

Now, can we get on and get some stuff done instead of bickering over useless metrics?

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  • Anonymous

    I always have this argument with my friends who use fedora and mint as opposed to ubuntu, but they are useless fanboys who seem to think distrowatch is the be-all-end-all of linux statistics.

    • Mladen Mijatov

      Well Mint is Ubuntu with all the bad things removed. You know some people like customizing their work environment. If you like your choices made for you, then please do continue to say what you’ve been told to say. :)

      • Anonymous

        I never meant to sound like I was saying Ubuntu was better, I was only expressing that I find it stupid that some Linux users see distrowatch as a 100% reliable source for a distros userbase, my secondary laptop runs off mint, and I enjoy using it, I use Ubuntu for the ease of use in the many simple tasks I use it for, like school and work. I’m sorry you took it as trashing any other distro as that was never my intent. I’m a Linux user, not a user of any specific distro.

    • José Antonio

      I use fedora because as much as I try, I’m never able to make my screen brightness keys to work in Ubuntu, but if it wasn’t by that I would consider to switch.

      PS – Yes I already tried to change the kernel parameters for backlight but like that it’s even worst :/

      • Anonymous

        Stick with Fedora.

        • José Antonio

          yeah for the time being I’m not considering to switch specially because I haven’t got much time left after college.

  • http://twitter.com/jokerdino Barneedhar

    I love to hate and hate to love Distrowatch!

    • Subhadip Ghosh

      That was cool :D

    • Anonymous

      Look at me, I have no friends.

  • Subhadip Ghosh

    I have been telling people the same. Distrowatch is bullshit, it doesn’t measure anything. And probably Mint guys bribed them to put Mint on top of their chart. Seriously how funny it is when people tell Mint has ore users than Ubuntu. Seriously, 20 million Mint user???

  • http://twitter.com/JavaNut13 Will

    I think it’s because Ubuntu has Unity; Mint doesn’t..

    • Anonymous

      Did you read the post at all?

      • Dimitris Papageorgiou

        hahahhahahahaa

      • Anonymous

        1. No, he actually didn’t
        2. He did and he doesn’t care
        3. He had already thought of the comment when he had not, and by golly he was going to post it even after he had

        One of those three usually hits the mark.

  • http://twitter.com/hchizari hassan chizari

    Today, UBUNTU is a full alternative solution for windows users and it’s even much more better and much more stable. Among different Linux distributions, I personally tested many of them and still I would like to give them a try after release. However, for sure, UBUNTU is the only Linux distribution which would like to create different feeling and I say it was successful. 

  • Amber Deep
    • http://twitter.com/ZacharyJuang Zachary Juang

      I’m proud that even Taiwan is on the list. I use to think Taiwanese were a mass of windows lovers, but turns out that we are more openminded after all.

    • Anonymous

      Russia is on top? Time to break the news: Ubuntu is for communists!

      • Satchit Bhogle

        Russia is Communist? Time to break the news: We’re living in pre-1991!

        • Akshat Jain

          In Soviet Russia, Unity hates you.

        • http://profiles.google.com/animaletdesequia Dàrent Animaulet

          I’m communist. But not russian :(

          • http://profiles.google.com/herophuong93 Phương Hero

            me 2

          • Евгений Карусельский

            I’m russian communist )

        • http://twitter.com/di0nysys Andrew Smith

          Russia’s ‘communism’ was never true communism.

      • Андрей Миронов

        Russia is more capitalistic state than socialistic United States.

        • Anonymous

          In case it wasn’t clear: I was being sarcastic. If reporters conclude that Ubuntu is declining because of Distrowatch statistics, they might as well conclude that Ubuntu is used by communists because the highest number of searches come from Russia (and yes, I know it’s not a communist state anymore).

      • http://twitter.com/AndreyKauf Cherepanov Andrey

        Don’t say ’bout thing you not know well…

      • Anonymous

        when will OMG be published in russian ?

    • Anonymous

      So according to Google trends Ubuntu is IN FACT declining. 
      thanks for confirming what everyone is saying.

      • Satchit Bhogle

        But not losing ground to Fedora, Mint or any other release, which is the premise of these journalists.

        • Anonymous
        • Anonymous

          The biggest effect on the decline was the release of Windows 7 sadly. Now because Windows is not such an easy target we are going after each other for 1% of the market. 

          • http://www.facebook.com/hein.hanssen Hein Hanssen

            True. Windows 7 gives us a hard time; it’s rather stable for a Redmond OS. That it’s resource hungry as ever doesn’t seem to affect the usage of W7; people just keep buying new hardware with the newest version of Windows, just out of ingorance: they have no idea that with Linux they could prolong the useful lifetime of their hardware and save a lot of bucks.

            And the hardware industry loves Windows  for obvious reasons and is very much willing to preinstall it.

          • http://twitter.com/amblestondack Ambleston Dack

            The fact that 99.9% of all PCS sold has Windows pre-installed says it all really.

            Recently one of my customers wanted a OS less laptop it was cheaper to buy a Windows 7 box and then install Linux. Dell wanted almost £500 for a laptop with FreeDOS.

            I say good luck to Mint at being number 1. Soon the vultures and haters will turn its attention to it and start bitching and bemoaning about it as much as it did Ubuntu.

            Face it haters are gonna hate, no matter what.

            Me, I’ll stick with Ubuntu. I use GnomeShell now as there is a weird bug that affects my install of Unity that doesn’t apply the theme and icons to Nautilus, but GnomeShell does.

            As for Humphrey’s article, sure its slanted in favour of Ubuntu, but this is an Ubuntu site. A few years back for a short while PCLinuxOS was more popular than Ubuntu on Distrowatch, but that turned out to be PCLinuxOS embedding links to its page on Distrowatch. Distrowatch metrics can be fudged.

            Just my few pennies worth….

          • Anonymous

            100% true, sir.

    • http://twitter.com/nitinab Nitin Abhishek

      If you clicked this link above, many of you would have noticed that ubuntu gets a spike in search volume corresponding to every release event semiannually, but so does fedora, and its almost in sync too. I was wondering if those two were correlated in some way, maybe unhappy ubuntuers looking for an alternative after an upgrade, but it turns out that fedora has semi annual release cycle too. Meh.

      • Johannes Turner

        Actually Ubuntu is a Debian – Devirate…

        • Anonymous

          Devirate?

          • http://twitter.com/di0nysys Andrew Smith

            derivative*

    • Anonymous
    • Anonymous

      Yeah, Russian loves Ubuntu.

  • http://alaukik.myopenid.com/ Alaukik

    DIstrowatch also publishes statistics of the OS used to visit distrowatch .

    http://distrowatch.com/awstats/awstats.DistroWatch.com.osdetail.html

    • http://twitter.com/humphreybc Benjamin Humphrey

      Thanks, I couldn’t find that link to stick in the article originally. Added it now.

      • Dimitris Papageorgiou

        mate u are right in any way! i use linux since 2003, who goes to distrowatch anyway?

    • Dimitris Papageorgiou

      yes but i couldn’t believe that graph either because i think ubuntu’s climax was when they launched 10.04 and surpassed no  other on the 10.10 the perfect 10 campaign

    • Anonymous

      The only useful information i gathered from that link is that there are apparently still 2 people using web TV. How is that service still alive?!?!?!

    • Akshat Jain

      Still inaccurate, both firefox and chrome report their OS as ‘Linux’ and not ‘Ubuntu’

      • http://alaukik.myopenid.com/ Alaukik
        • Akshat Jain

          Huh? I am talking about Chrome, not Chromium. It doesn’t show anything but Linux x86_64 for me.

      • Anonymous

        Mom hates me.

        • Akshat Jain

          Is a ban what you wanted?

          • Anonymous

            Not really but thanks anyway.

            P.S. ban me again, I dare you.

          • Akshat Jain

            Sure

  • Subhadip Ghosh

    Are you guys taking the visiting Arch linux page on Distro watch thing seriously???

    • http://yourethemannowdog.com Shasta McShasta

      Heck, if the small fraction of OMG readers that will visit that page is enough to sway Arch to the top, it would actually make a pretty solid point about the relevancy to Distrowatch.

      • Dimitris Papageorgiou

        small fractions? alexa shows that as many users visit other websites for information on all other distros that number of users visit OMG!ubuntu! for ubuntu information! 12000 for all the other distros, 12000 for ubuntu information.. i don’t see anywhere near “small” here

        • http://yourethemannowdog.com Shasta McShasta

          I think you misinterpreted me.  I didn’t refer to the size of OMG!’s reader base at all (as it is, it’s pretty impressive!).  In my comment I assumed that less than a majority of readers would click the link to visit the Arch page.  That’s what I meant.

    • http://twitter.com/litedot Lite

      Arch linux be easy fast and stable :) 

    • Anonymous

      We all just *love* arch ;P

      but seriously, I’ve noticed that I’m hating arch without ever using it … must be those meme spam comments

      • Miggs

        Me too. I actually used it for a few months but I passed to Debian when my spare time ran over. 
        The distro’s fine but the fanboys are so self important.

      • http://profiles.google.com/lilianftp Moraru Lilian

        There are a lot of people that know nothing about IT and they want to feel like hackers(even if the hackers themselves are not douchy like this guys), they thing Arch makes them look cool :)

      • Akshat Jain

        Arch is a great distro but its fanboys are dumb morons.

    • http://profiles.google.com/lilianftp Moraru Lilian

      Yes, for the heck of it. Just let’s do it…

    • Anonymous

      I went ahead and clicked it. Let’s see how the power of the OMG!Ubuntu site is!

  • Anonymous

    Ok, first off this article reads like it was written by an irate 12 year old ubuntu fanboy that forgot his Ritalin. Seriously, this article needs to be scrapped and rewritten once you are through with your little hissy fit.

    Second. Your idea of disproving the distrowatch stats is to point at other stats that are equally as unreliable??? 

    I agree with what you’re saying at the end of the day but this entire article just reads like a whiny little fanboy thats angry. Journalism at its worst IMO.

    • Anonymous

      Distrowatch is not, nor never was to be, a source for stats.

      I started using linux in 2008 and if we are talking about the same distrowatch, then all it is is a nifty catalog of linux distributions … nothing more, nothing less.

      • Anonymous

        Not saying it is a reliable source for stats but making the argument that its wrong on this by pointing at another sites stats that mean just about as much is just silly.

        • Sashin Ranasinghe

          But they are probably a better indicator than distrowatch. Since its very easy to raise a page hit again, but to raise the Ubuntu fans on facebook you’d need to make another account.

          • Anonymous

            not really. Plenty of people post things on Facebook that they had no intention of doing. You could just as easily write malware for Facebook which would cause people to like Ubuntu.

        • Anonymous

          Wowzers. I’m just gonna say, he links to the Ubuntu fan page for both Ubuntu and Linux Mint. Fanboyism or Anger-about-being-proven-wrong-driven-need-to-copy-and-paste-links-too-quickly-and-forgetting-to-change-the-destination?

    • http://sanchezluis.netau.net/blog/ Luis Sanchez

      Amen, bro.

    • https://launchpad.net/~j-johan-edwards J Johan Edwards

      > Second. Your idea of disproving the distrowatch stats is to point at other stats that are equally as unreliable???

      Let me guess. You like Linux Mint, and want to believe the statistics. Fair enough. People on this site are cheerleaders as well.

      There’s one issue though; DistroWatch figures are statistical nonsense. They’re even dumber than the Linux Counter project. DistroWatch figures are subject to heavy sampling bias (their audience), sampling errors (religious page viewing), and—worse than anything—do not even measure what they claim to measure. It’s an interest measurement purporting to be a usage measurement.

      If you believe DistroWatch figures can be used to order operating systems by popularity, you either don’t know their methodologies, or have disengaged your faculties of critical thinking.

      • Anonymous

        Try reading what i said… I AGREE with the article just wish it was written professionally. 

        You can assume whatever you like but you are reading into a lot without actually reading what i am saying.

        The point i was making is that pointing at distrowatch and explaining how its not reliable is one thing but doing that then pointing at something just as reliable to support an earlier claim is just silly.

        • http://profiles.google.com/daengbo Daniel Bo

          This is the Internet. People never read a comment before hitting “Reply.” It’s bad form.

          I hope I responded to the right comment. I can’t be arsed to check. ;)

      • Bobby Koestler

        DistroWatch just choses interest of those distros. If you have been on distrowatch you have probably wandered around looking for a better distro and almost every Ubuntu user is extremely open to new things and WANTS to try a new OS.

        • Bob Lavallee

          Such as myself. I’ve given 11.10 a fair shake. After 2 weeks on my system it’s high time to give Mint a try.

          Point: at the time of posting this, Distrowatch shows Mint receiving 7909 HPD while Ubuntu languishes at 2075 HPD.

          Point: Ubuntu’s #1 spot was established in 2005 and hasn’t been displaced since 2010.

          Point: over the last 12 months Mint is #1 (an Ubuntu derivative), Ubuntu #2 (a Debian derivative) and Debian #4 in Distrowatch’s HPD list.

          Point: Debian, Ubuntu & Mint are the same family — a family that are not hostile one to another!!

          So, why are we seeing the glass as “half full” here? I’m sure Mint’s popularity will help boost Ubuntu anyway.

    • Anonymous

      OK, first off this comment reads like it was written by an irate 12 year old who is nor a Mint or Ubuntu user, but none other than the an arch user.

      • Anonymous

        I dont care if he uses OS2 on a toaster thats how it looks.

        Imagine you send someone who knows nothing about linux here as a reference and they read this article. What would they think? This kind of crap is just as bad as the articles he is ranting about. 

        • http://twitter.com/di0nysys Andrew Smith

          irate elitism is bad for a community that dreams of mass adoption. No one wants to hear it, they just want a system that just works.

          • Anonymous

            “… that just works.” Yeah… agreed. Now don’t any Mac fanboys here go saying “MAC JUST WORKS!!!!” because it really doesn’t for me. Maybe you, but not me.

        • Anonymous

          I’m serious. This guy does not understand math. Take the derivative of the functions, and stop looking at source functions. What you see now is only a part of the story. The deltas are what count. If Linux Mint is growing faster than Ubuntu, then it will overtake Ubuntu given time. The fanboyism in this article refuses to acknowledge this. He links to all kinds of statistics about the NOW. I would be on Mint if I had time, but I don’t. And 12 just released what, yesterday? Get over yourself. People don’t switch their OS instantly, but change is happening, and it’s happening quickly. If I wrote an article like this author writes articles, I would say Linux is hopeless; that Windows will always win.

          • Sashin Ranasinghe

            But there’s no evidence to believe that it’s growing faster than Ubuntu. That notion is ridiculous considering the efforts Ubuntu put to work with OEMs and promote their product.

            Ubuntu is simply the best distro for the new or casual user. #someDegreeOfSubjectivity #iStandByMyOpinion

          • Christopher Lee

            Are you serious?  ”The deltas are what count?”  What part of /distro growth is not linear, quadratic, cubic, or exponential/ doesn’t make sense here?  Distro popularity rises and falls, and let m ebe blunt– /your comment is based on far, far more conjecture than any based on data from the “now.”/

            Article: Ubuntu is not in decline and has a lot of users now.

            Comment: Ubuntu may have more people now but snapshot growth curves say it’ll die!

            Get real.

      • http://claimid.com/el-bhm bhm

        I was teenager once. I had used similar approach to discredit someone. Once. I had seen how silly it had been I ceased to use it.

      • Yi Sun-sin

        U not liek Archers ?
        Problem ?

      • Anonymous

        I’d swear to Crom, every Ubuntoid who frequents this site seems to think a particular distro is Ubuntu’s “Arch” Enemy.  Get it? DO YA?!?!?!?!?!?

        P.S.: Yes, DistroWatch numbers are useless because they only count link hits; for that matter, most numbers regarding distro user bases are worthless, given that Linux installation media aren’t coded to activate only on a single machine, there aren’t any sales figures to refer to, and there’s no guarantee that anyone who downloads a Linux LiveCD is going to even install the OS. But now I’m just splitting hairs, right?

      • Richard Sequeira

        I use OS/2 on a daily basis, it runs many of the old software that was not ported to Windows.

    • Anonymous

      I agree. The article is entirely factual, but annoying to read. I felt like I was listening to someone complaining about how Gobots aren’t the same thing as Transformers. I mean, the author could have at least tried to be professional about it. Rather than having an extremely harsh tone and liberally cursing.

      • Anonymous

        Well, This is a blog isn’t it ? A news blog you may say.
        And I do believe that you are allowed to express yourself subjectively on your own blog.

        • Anonymous

          “And I do believe that you are allowed to express yourself subjectively on your own blog.”

          And that also means that readers can express themselves subjectively on your blog unless you block them ;)

          • Anonymous

            That is absolutely 100% correct!
            A bit hypocritical ain’t I? ;)

    • http://profiles.google.com/lilianftp Moraru Lilian

      I do agree that he should of not used curses… OMGUbuntu is not some blog… He could of proved his point without cursing.

    • Anonymous

      I LOVE PONIES AND RAINBOWS ♥♥♥

      • Anonymous

        Me too!

        • Anonymous

          nice username

      • Anonymous

        finally. the troll (who actually has the trollface as his “avatar”) gets trolled by a moderator. Full circle ;)

    • Anonymous

      I’m just gonna say, ZDNet is not an unreliable source, and it is my personal opinion that Mr. Humphrey here is a little upset that his favorite OS is losing traction. I mean really.

      For years people have pointed to the DistroWatch for Ubuntu as ‘Proof’ that Ubuntu was the most popular Linux, but now that the tide is reversed we can’t do the same thing?AND Ubuntu has been losing ground. The fact that Linux Mint is at the top of the DistroWatch page means that Linux Mint is gaining significantly, whether it has passed Ubuntu or not. So the trend is pointing towards Linux Mint taking over soon. My desktop is Ubuntu, but I’m very seriously considering switching to Mint just because of how awesome it is.

      • http://profiles.google.com/jbozman0 James Bozman

        The price of gold is going down…  The price of silver is going up… Therefore, the price of silver will be more than the price of gold soon. 

        • Anonymous

          so Windows cannot lose either, i take it?

          • http://profiles.google.com/jbozman0 James Bozman

            My comment was in response to your statement including ‘So the trend is pointing towards Linux Mint taking over soon.’

            If the trend continues, either one will come to pass, but you specifically said ‘soon’.

            So, in my estimation, Mint CAN surpass Ubuntu, if such trend continues, just not ‘soon’.  Likewise, Ubuntu and/or Linux in general CAN surpass Windows, just not  ‘soon’.

            Unless, of course, your approximation of soon is relative to all of modern history, rather than all of Linux history.

        • Anonymous

          not if the (in)decrease of prices switches for the two materials. BTW, I’m not really using the metaphor for Ubuntu and Mint here in this comment.

      • Akshat Jain

        …For years people have pointed to the DistroWatch for Ubuntu as ‘Proof’ that Ubuntu was the most popular Linux…
        {{Citation needed}}

        • Anonymous

          It’s been true for the years that I’ve used Ubuntu. I’ve seen it numerous places, but of course I’m not going to bother to bring up a source because if you had been involved in the community you would have seen it too.

          • Akshat Jain

            But that still doesn’t make distrowatch a useful metric.

          • Alfredo Croci

            No it doesn’t, and it doesn’t make Unity look any better either.

            There’s nothing wrong in liking Mint. I used it for a while (6 months, more or less), I am back to Ubuntu now. I also used OpenSuse and Fedora for a while. What’s wrong with that?
            What i mean is, I don’t mind if people like Unity as long as they don’t mind my disliking it. This doesn’t mean I will never use it. I am just giving it some time… I gave Windows some time (and I am not proud of myself for this), for god’s sake, I’ll give Unity some time :D

          • http://epiphanyproject.wordpress.com/ Timothy Matias

            It isn’t make it useless either. It’s exactly that: a metric. a factor determining popularity. As Mark Twain put it: There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. Obviously we should take any metric with a grain of salt. But that metric is still clearly worth something. Now if you are saying the distrowatch metric is overhyped, I think that’s something we can all agree on ;-)

          • Christopher Lee

            Okay, so now “the community” is a single monolithic entity that follows single monolithic trends?  Get real, there have always been people who have liked or disliked Distrowatch, and they tend to hang out on different parts of the web.

        • http://nspyraishn.wordpress.com Timothy Matias

          …For years people have pointed to the DistroWatch for Ubuntu as ‘Proof’ that Ubuntu was the most popular Linux…
          {{Citation needed}}

          What are you, a Wikipedia bureaucrat? and I know that I’m far from alone when I say that I have been tracking Ubuntu on distrowatch and citing its statistics as proof of Ubuntu’s popularity, for *the past 4 years*.

          I used to love Ubuntu with a passion, and have used it  lovingly and faithfully, until it started getting buggy as all hell. Then I started using Mint (which in addition to making Ubuntu easier, went to the trouble of making Ubuntu far more stable!), while still trying out the latest Ubuntu releases to see how they progressed.

          Then came Unity. OMG what a piece of useless garbage. People who are all over Unity with fanboyism have obviously not used it an a netbook– I can deal with the annoying interface, but when my mouse cursor is freezing up when the only Window open is Firefox– c’mon really? seriously?!?!

          Since Unity came out, the same statistics that I (and many other people– do you really need citations for something so common sense?) hailed as proof of the popularity of Ubuntu, I hail as the proof of the downfall of Ubuntu and the rise of Linux Mint, a far more worthy successor.

          I first started using Unity over a year ago, when it was still called “Ubuntu Netbook Edition”, and when I did, I predicted Ubuntu would be replaced by Mint on Distrowatch. Believe what you like, but Ubuntu is going down, not because of popularity issues, but because it’s a piece of garbage. Even Windows 7 runs smoother on my netbook– Unity’s the biggest insult Ubuntu could ever give itself.

          • Connor Bruce

            I agree. I can’t believe that I almost got used to the fact that sometimes after an ‘update’ I would no longer be able to suspend or hibernate my laptop (even though I could previously) and saw this as normal. I think that the decline in quality started around Intrepid and Jaunty, when aesthetics become more important.

            Once I found a release in which everything worked, I stuck with it (10.04) and now I am trapped.

          • http://twitter.com/Azthma Azthma

            That’s garbage thinking! I am sorry. What the heck do you want Canonical to do in every side. Desktop, security, speed, compatibility, hardware issues, kernel, ….etc  Counter attacking MIcrosoft, Apple, pushing Ubuntu all over the world through professional programs…..etc They’re doing their best to deliver what they can whenever they can… I have been using over 7 distros and Ubuntu remains the best for personal work and pro work. If you just take some of your time and read a little bit about the roadmap of Ubuntu and how things are working you’ll understand the strategy of Ubuntu and above all Canonical.

          • Christopher Lee

            The problem doesn’t lie with any one release so much as the users who will trumpet their personal experiences as the voice of the community.  And what they’ve seen “on the Internet” as “the law of the land.”

            Seriously, I have no trouble running Ubuntu on an old Acer Aspire One or on a (slightly) newer Toshiba Mini.  Both single cores, both with the standard 2GB of RAM.  No overclocking, just standard fare.

            Doesn’t mean it’ll work like that on all netbooks.  If I were to get up now and say Ubuntu 11.10 works great on netbooks, you all would be the first to boo me down as an edge case, non?

          • Akshat Jain

            Opinions are not facts. Still {{Citation needed}}

          • http://twitter.com/Azthma Azthma

            So why are you still spying on this webzine. Go drink some Mint tea.

          • http://epiphanyproject.wordpress.com/ Timothy Matias

            Don’t need to spy on it. It’s called DISQUS email notifications. I take it you haven’t heard of them?

        • http://twitter.com/Azthma Azthma

          Never used that in the last 5 years. Never knew about this DistroWatch thing. Statistics have been provided by other reliable sources.

          • http://epiphanyproject.wordpress.com/ Timothy Matias

            If you haven’t even been familiar with Distrowatch until recently, why even bother having an opinion on its accuracy? pffft! That makes you no better than the people who elected G.W. Bush because he had an Master’s in Business Administration.

          • Connor Bruce

            So what you are saying is that I should get used to using a hobbled laptop until Canonical have sufficiently ‘socked it’ to Microsoft et al? It’s been seven years; when will I be able to get some work done?

            It’s not the strategy or the philosophy that I have a problem with; I bought into that seven years ago. It is that for every step forward it seems that something has to be sacrificed; and we are not talking something frivolous. A roadmap indicates progression, forward movement; yet upgrading a fully functional and working laptop invariably led to spending days hunting around for graphics/suspend/hibernate workarounds and bug fixes. Not all of them successful. If there is no workaround then you are told – all should be resolved in the next release! So you jump into the next update not knowing if it will be fixed, or indeed what is going to break this time. I spent several releases with a laptop that either could not suspend, could not hibernate, or both. Meaning that everytime I wanted to get out/put my laptop into a bag, I had to shutdown/restart. Not exactly convenient. What happened to building on a solid foundation?

            At the end of the day I am a user, not a zealot, and there is only so much that I will put up with.

      • Bilal Akhtar

        For heaven sake read the article before commenting. Ben has already stated why DistroWatch stats are incorrect, because they measure page hits to individual distro pages, and NOT the number of Ubuntu/Mint/Fedora etc users going to the DistroWatch page.

        • Anonymous

          I know DistroWatch is useless. I’m not an idiot. But for years people have cited it as a source when saying Ubuntu is the most popular. It’s not fair for people to only cite a source as reliable when it favors them.

          • Bilal Akhtar

            I’ve been following the Ubuntu community closely since 2008. Never did I see Ubuntu officially quoting popularity on the basis of DistroWatch page hits.

          • Anonymous

            heh, since when has an official statement meant anything? I was talking about in the community. OMG! Ubuntu! is not an official spokesperson of Canonical. But all throughout the community it has been used for years as the North Star of distro popularity. Linux Mint hasn’t made an official declaration of victory based on DistroWatch either, last time I checked.

          • http://jeremy.bicha.net/ Jeremy Bicha

            @coder543:disqus Every Linux Mint monthly update includes the Distrowatch ranking. Here’s October’s: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1855

      • Anonymous

        “… but now that the tide is reversed we can’t do the same thing?” “AND Ubuntu has been losing ground.”

        You repeat the same thing here, so basically, what you’re saying here is “because is said so” or “because because”, as some people say – using a reason to prove another reason that means the same thing is useless. Now, to mimic @akshatj:disqus :

        “AND Ubuntu has been losing ground.”
        {{Citation needed}}

        • Anonymous

          Hmm… I would say a distro that is getting more hits per day on their website is also receiving more downloads per day. Even if the installed base is much smaller, it means the ground is shifting. As useless as DistroWatch may actually be, this is the one thing it tells accurately. It is a measure of the delta in the community, not a measure of static size. And if the HPD continues to grow on Linux Mint, then the delta will become larger.

          • http://jeremy.bicha.net/ Jeremy Bicha

            If you were comparing the number of visitors to ubuntu.com with linuxmint.com, you’d have a point…

            But on the other hand, even if there were twice as many Linux Mint users as Ubuntu users, it doesn’t matter since Linux Mint is 95+% Ubuntu. Linux Mint users are still Ubuntu users. Ubuntu is far more than just Unity or Canonical.

          • Anonymous

            I understand that, and that’s why I have no problem with Ubuntu. My problem is with editors who post complete junk that is insulting and not tasteful at all. Like this article. They act like they are afraid of Mint, when there is nothing to fear. They should be supportive or silent, but they’ve been on a bashathon for too long.

          • Christopher Lee

            I’m starting to think that you’re the person who doesn’t have a firm grasp on statistics.  To say “the delta” matters more than “the static size” is logic that has lead to the current housing crisis in the United States, among many other things.

            Let’s reiterate a basic rule of statistics: /you cannot extrapolate a trend based on limited data./  If the Linux Mint page has suddenly received a surge of hits– what does that mean, exactly?  Not that much.

            As the article points out, if OMGUbuntu! decided to troll Arch Linux it would be pushed up and magically appear as if it had become mainstream.

            Plus Jeremy’s comment is correct– Distrowatch isn’t going to measure the hits that probably matter more, a.k.a. linuxmint.com and ubuntu.com.  Because as a new Ubuntu user, are you really going to go to Distrowatch, or just search for variants of Linux– and likely find Ubuntu or Mint’s sites?

            I’m not trying to be insulting, but you’re parroting this “delta” claim based on very flawed mathematical reasoning.  Take the derivative of a logarithmic function and for a little while, it looks pretty damn good.

      • http://twitter.com/Azthma Azthma

        I’ll be in chagrge in the newt months of bringing Linux to a large IT structure, more than 1000 machines. And you know what? It’s gonna be Ubuntu. A deep study was performed before that decision and one of the facts, is that Ubuntu represents the best choice in every side  and besides its growing adoption (It’s in the first place followed by Fedora). 

        Mint Tea remains a a copy of Ubuntu that integrates Gnome instead of Unity. It is just Ubuntu with Gnome Shell but with green theme……. And I am almost sure that by the release of Unity 6 and other stuff, youll switch back to Ubuntu. 

        • http://epiphanyproject.wordpress.com/ Timothy Matias

          I feel really sorry for your IT structure in that case. At this point, even Microsoft Windows 7 would be a better choice than Ubuntu, though I myself am surprised that things have gotten that bad ;-(

    • http://nosheep.org.ua Алексей Раю

      Ubuntu is declining. This is my observation as well as Distrowatch stats. It has neglected the user for a few releases in a row now. Result IS predictable, and has been voiced more than once now.

      • Bilal Akhtar

        As a matter of fact, it isn’t. Number of Ubuntu downloads is actually *growing*, as mentioned by Mark in his UDS keynote.

        • Akshat Jain

          I don’t believe that until Mark tells how he came up with that.

          • Aidan Sheridan

            well, if you won’t beleive that, then take a look at google trends? the visits to ubuntu.com are actually increasing rapidly, and are well above any other popular distribution’s website

          • Anonymous

            Well…in google trends Ubuntu is falling after the sping of 2009

          • Christopher Lee

            Funny Bill, because Linux Mint has “too few hits to be displayed…”

        • Anonymous

          But if Linux Mint is experiencing higher download growth (delta) then Ubuntu is losing ground. The downloads for Ubuntu growing means nothing. The Linux community as a whole is growing, it is to be expected.

          • https://launchpad.net/~fader fader

            Where do you see that Mint is experiencing higher download growth than Ubuntu?  The only numbers being talked about here are hits on the distrowatch page, not downloads from the distros’ sites.

          • Anonymous

            If no one goes to Ubuntu’s website, no one downloads Ubuntu. Plain & Simple. It’s not a direct correlation, but there is a strong correlation between people going to a website and people interacting with it.

          • Bilal Akhtar

            (this is a reply to @coder543:disqus ’s comment)

            Me: Hey Mike, you seem to be hating Windows. Download Ubuntu, its free, you’ll like it a lot.

            Mike: From where should I download it?

            Me: Go to ubuntu.com

            —————————

            DistroWatch has a very specific audience. Newbies don’t go to it to download Ubuntu. They either Google “Ubuntu” and arrive at ubuntu.com, or they straightaway go to Ubuntu.com. DistroWatch fits no where in the spectrum. 

            DW measures page hits to distrowatch.com/ubuntu and distrowatch.com/mint, etc, not page hits to ubuntu.com or linuxmint.com . How can you then claim DW stats are right?

          • https://launchpad.net/~fader fader

            [Reply nesting limit reached, apparently]

            Please reread the information about what is being measured here.

            What is NOT being measured: hits to either linuxmint.com or ubuntu.com

            What IS being measured: hits to distrowatch.com.

            Do you believe that most people who download Ubuntu go to DistroWatch to do it?  Or do you think they go to ubuntu.com?

          • Anonymous

            Nonetheless, distrowatch receives enough hits every month that it should be a representative sample of what is happening elsewhere… although there is a remote possibility that it is completely unrelated. However, Mint 12 is unlike any Mint before it, and has attracted my attention. I’ve never liked Mint before. If *I* like it now, think how many other people are in love with it. I’m tough to please with other Linux distros, but I’m certain many other people out there are not as hard to please.

          • https://launchpad.net/~fader fader

            distrowatch.com receives roughly as many hits per day on average as omgubuntu.co.uk.  Which means as many people are coming to an Ubuntu-related news blog as go to DistroWatch to read about all distros *in total*.

            Compare that to ubuntu.com and you will see that the Ubuntu site receives far more daily hits than either.  I don’t think Ubuntu’s downloads are being affected in any measurable way by DistroWatch.

            Just because you like Mint does not mean other people do not like Ubuntu.

          • Bilal Akhtar

            The issue is, DW measures hits to distrowatch.com/mint, etc. If you use Ubuntu and go to the Mint page on DW, then you’ve “hit” the Mint page according to DistroWatch. It doesn’t record which operating systems visit the distrowatch main page, instead, it just records that “3000 people visited the Ubuntu page in the last week”

            And, newbies don’t usually go to DW. Heck, they don’t even know what it is!

            How is that an accurate measure of users downloading a particular distro?

          • Anonymous

            Newbies don’t go to DW?!? what are you talking about? Half of the page views for DW are from Windows!! Most newbs who are confused by the number of ‘Linuxes’ out there will find DW and use it to determine where to go next.

          • Anonymous

            I went to distrowatch when I was a newbie. Now 6 years later I still visit DW

          • Christopher Lee

            Or…more people are using Linux in general, and Linux Mint AND Ubuntu are gaining more downloads proportionally.

            Seriously, read your own comment:
            “… if Linux Mint is experiencing higher download growth (delta) then Ubuntu is losing ground….”
            “The Linux community as a whole is growing, it is to be expected.”

            Way to shoot yourself in the foot.

        • http://corrytonapple.myopenid.com/ Corrytonapple

          So if the Linux Mint team says that their downloads are growing over Ubuntu then it is true?  

          You know…. just because they said so…..

    • Akshat Jain

      You are annoying.

      • Anonymous

        rofl

    • http://www.iheartubuntu.com iheartubuntu.com

      You guys are harsh BH did a fine job. Why visit if you are just going on the attack? 

    • http://twitter.com/di0nysys Andrew Smith

      I really like what OMG does but I agree they need some wisdom and maturity on the team to provide guidance.

      • http://ghettocottage.com Endle Winters

        I can not really agree with that sentiment. I read OMGUbuntu because it is NOT written or guided by stodgy old geezers. If it was it would be  incredibly boring. There are tons of online magazines that already fit that bill.
        I think the reality is that OMGUbuntu is interesting because the viewpoint is fresh and honest. Probably because that authors actually use what they are writing about.

        • Chad Germann

          A middle ground would be nice perhaps with a little less unity Fanaticism** (Webd8 is a good example of a Solid Ubuntu Blog)

          **XFCE and KDE are all used on Ubuntu official spins and Some Ubuntu users Like the Gnome Shell Seeing them reflected on this blog more would be nice)

          it would be nice to see more articles about Ubuntu derivatives as there are some Awesome ones out there (Bhodhilinux anyone?)

          • http://jeremy.bicha.net/ Jeremy Bicha

            This site does report about GNOME Shell. I’m guessing that KDE/XFCE etc. users proportionally don’t submit articles or news items.

    • http://www.tux-crazy.com Tux Crazy

      Other stats are not equally as unreliable.

      • Anonymous

        Not if they actually use a download count instead of page counts, which can easily be generated faster than downloads by bots.

        • Anonymous

          are we accusing Linux Mint of dishonesty via bots?

          • Anonymous

            no, it seems that you have misinterpreted my statements. Because any part can have bots, it is an unreliable and inaccurate source.

    • Anonymous

      Oh for fuck’s sake. They are being idiots, there’s no point disguising the fact. This isn’t a politician who has to call opponents out on “untruths” when they’re blatantly and unashamedly lying through their teeth. This is a blog, albeit a popular one, yet one that should thrive on opinion and freedom from editorial policy.

      This article is actually one of the finer examples of journalism here: While tons of articles merely chronicle releases by this-and-this project (not to be negative about it, it’s a very useful service), this piece actually serves to shed light on shoddy journalism in the Linux Distro ecosystem. And no, it doesn’t sound like a whiny fanboy, it sounds like someone fed up with cheap journalistic cop-outs and viral idiocy. Which is quite a noble sentiment, in my mind. The veracity of this article vindicates any tone.

      As for your complaint, good sir: Your comment is equally as irate as the article (so is mine, but I’m not claiming a moral high ground on that issue). You’re being a hypersensitive hypocrite. People swear, swearing is a good thing. Please stop trying to prevent humanity being injected into journalism, you’re thereby fostering bland and uncontroversial idiocy.

    • Anonymous

      Not completely agreed on that, but I can agree that I generally dislike reading articles posted by Benjamin (the author of this article) on this site, as I find them generally lacking in depth and/or thought.

    • Anonymous

      “ Second. Your idea of disproving the distrowatch stats is to point at other stats that are equally as unreliable???”

      Well since when are Google’s statistics in any way unreliable. It appears to me that the world’s most influential company is building on the fact that what gets searched the most is also the most profitable (advertisingly or otherwise). So I would believe the Google Trends statistics first and nothing else. Maybe cummulate the data from google trends with yahoo and bing and boogle data but that’s about as close as you’ll get to accurate data without forcing every distro to register every install on a central server (although that’s not such a bad idea).

    • https://launchpad.net/~jebeld17 Jebeld17

      OOO, are you going to be blocked from posting comments again, like I was?

    • Anonymous

      Wow… overreact much? All he’s trying to say is that people should get things in perspective. And he’s absolutely right.

      • Anonymous

        He has edited it since i posted that comment. Th article was pretty bad.

        • Anonymous

          Heh, in which case I apologize!

    • http://twitter.com/CORN_ta CORN_ta

      I’d not go that far. But indeed this article is a big piece of mis-information complaining about another big piece of mis-information.
      I’d rate it as “Fanboy’s rant”.

  • http://thomasboxley.me Thomas Boxley

    These articles couldn’t be further from the truth. Ubuntu has more or less single handedly made Linux usable on the desktop. It receives far too much hate.

    • Anonymous

      Well said. Thank you. 

    • http://www.manishsinha.net Manish Sinha

      Writing code is not the only way to contribute. Hope you know that

      • Akshat Jain

        That guy was a troll.

      • http://twitter.com/di0nysys Andrew Smith

        I have sort of known this for a while, but if someone could tell me how, I’m all ears.

        There is documentation and such, and I know everyone is free to help, but in essence it is more like ‘you are free to try and gain access to a closed group.’

    • Bilal Akhtar

      Stop trolling for heaven sake. You’ve posted around 10 troll comments on just this article.

    • Chad Germann

      You are incorrect sir, Ubuntu came into being just as the GNOME et all were mature enough to make Linux easy for the laymen’s desktop.

      Ubuntu has shipped a vanilla Linux kernel and Up until recently a vanilla Gnome desktop that was contributed to by red hat more than any other distribution

      http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/8771/what-linux-distributions-contribute-the-most-development-to-the-gnome-project

      Ubuntu Did not make GNU/Linux Easy it made Debian easy.

  • Anonymous

    I agree that these articles have gone stupidly far, however the root of these articles has some merit. Personally, I HATE unity, I can’t seem to get anything done without unity getting in my way. It’s like the old office clippy. I don’t like gnome shell either, and windows 8 is going the same “tablet view on your workstation” user interface as well. It may be great for non-computer users, but for power users it is a shitty interface. If I wanted something simple I would use a mac, if I wanted something that didn’t work I would use windows. I use ubuntu 11.11, now I have something that is simple and doesn’t work. I’m waiting until the next LTS release to see if things improve, but if not I will be forced to switch distros. I just wish the developers would not have abandoned the power users.

  • http://twitter.com/ethana2 ethana2

    I still think we need to make sure all useragents carry very specific information regarding distributions.

    • Anonymous

      Something like adding a distro and version

      … like …ubuntu-oneiric-11.10 ?

      • Dimitris Papageorgiou

        that is not possible because as the article said even gmail can’t tell exactly the version of your distro cause there aren’t so many differences between distros to distinguish them

  • http://twitter.com/litedot Lite

    redhat > fedora core > fedora

    ubuntu > what’s next?

    lol welcome to freak way

  • http://twitter.com/aneeszaki Anees Zaki

    Does the timing of this article has something to do with the release of Linux Mint 12 ? ;)

    • Dimitris Papageorgiou

      no it has to do with all the other articles posted the last 2-3 days i’ve read too about ubuntu’s “decline” lol i use 10.04 and i intend to stick with it cause i love gnome2 and hate gnome3 and unity but i am not leaving ubuntu as my main distro!

      • Mladen Mijatov

        So, get Mint with Mate (gnome2 fork) which will remain maintained and developed. Distribution based on latest Ubuntu but with your favorite desktop. :)

        So you get nice fonts, PPAs, all the packages and Ubuntu repositories and Gnome2 :D

      • Anonymous

        I like Unity, but dislike Gnome 3 at this point.

    • Anonymous

      Also note that Linux Mint’s popularity would go up during the run up to a release as more people get info on it.

  • Aidan Sheridan
    • Anonymous

      (not important, deleted)

  • Anonymous

    That’s pretty ridiculous. I haven’t had a reason to visit distrowatch in many years. Why would I bother going there when I know all I want to use is Ubuntu. Wouldn’t distrowatch be more a measurement of new comers trying out different distros than an actual current user base’s choices?

  • http://technotaku.com/ Xacur

    Another way to measure (I think).
    - DistroWatch.com is a site for many different Linux Distros, Alexa Ranking: 12,656.
    - OMGUbuntu.co.uk is a site about few distros and enourmously focused in Ubuntu, and I guess most visitors are Ubuntu users, Alexa Ranking: 12,266.
    Because when an Ubuntu user needs info comes here and doesn’t go to DistroWatch. At least I never visit that site.
    And I think that the rising in popularity of this site and other sites about Ubuntu has made that ubuntu user visitors in other Linux sites decrease.
    Oh, and they clearly say how they count the users, is one visit for IP
    for day, so if you visit their site 30 days a month “you voted” 30
    times, so that can mean that Mint users go there more frequently too. And it’s by no mean a way to check Distro popularity at all.
    Sorry for my bad English.

  • http://twitter.com/kingdomrev peter lambert

    personally i hate the unity desktop, having tried all the other distro’s i keep coming back to 10.10, for me that was the best

    • Anonymous

      Still that doesn’t mean it’s great. It’s good but a lot of things is far from OK. In the world of OSes it’s almost as flawed as Windows is. (for me)

  • Satchit Bhogle

    I’m letting the Distrowatch Arch page reload every 5s. Let’s see if we can’t artificially generate some popularity.

    • Anonymous

      That doesn’t work. Someone tried to do it for Gentoo before: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=41214

    • Anonymous

      It’s one count per IP address.

      • http://profiles.google.com/jbozman0 James Bozman

        tor is your friend

    • Akshat Jain

      Write a script that rotates IP every n seconds, then refresh every n seconds.

  • http://twitter.com/Jeunito Jeune Asuncion

    I don’t like Unity either but  there’s always the option to use the Classic interface like I do in 11.04. 

    • https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ActionParsnip ActionParsnip

      There is also the option of KDE, XFCE, LXDE and the many many other desktops. Gnome is not the only desktop

  • http://twitter.com/jnorambuena_ javier norambuena

    but why? why? why we keep this LITTLE fight? 
     hey, we all like GNU/Linux, and we all have the CHOICE to use wathever distro we like, or even more than one, or one with several desktops. so what’s the problem?

    As long as we use GNU/Linux, no matter what distro you choose.

    It’s like care bears vs little ponnies, it’s the same thing with different clothes

    • Mladen Mijatov

      It’s not GNU/Linux, it’s just Linux. Or perhaps you should start calling it GNU/BSD or GNU/Mac OS/X since they all use GNU parts of the code, most notably gcc. :)

  • http://twitter.com/KosmicGenesis Victor Pierre

    Yes, I’m not sure if we can fully trust the data from distrowatch, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I was one of the people really excited about unity when they annouced it. I didn’t like ubuntu desktop edition, but i had high hopes about this one. I have been using ubuntu for years now and when i found it, i could no longer satisfy myself wirh any other Distro.

    And god, I’ve tried to like unity…but it is so annoying to me. I’m stil, faithful, but i have been using gnome ever since (which is not so flawless on ubuntu anymore.)

    I do experiment with other distros every now and then, but I still hope that unity will evolve and feel as appealing to me as it is to some people.

    • Sashin Ranasinghe

      Meanwhile I’ve been loving every minute of using unity. I think it’s great. 

  • https://launchpad.net/~j-johan-edwards J Johan Edwards

    Wikimedia page requests for October 2011 [expanded from the 1:1000 sample]:

     * Linux Mint — 556,000
     * Linux Ubuntu — 16,924,000

    Also interesting to note that the difference is probably understated if anything. The default Ubuntu browser didn’t report “Ubuntu” in the user agent from Firefox 4-7. The Ubuntu figure comes from Chromium users et al.

    [ http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-10/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm ]

    *EDIT*: Scrap the “understated bit. It appears Mint didn’t patch itself into the Firefox user agent either, so assuming the ratio of non-default browser users is the same for Mint and Ubuntu, the relative comparison should be broadly correct.

    • Anonymous

      Hmm….. lest my reading skills be wavering, that also claims Mac OS X has only an 8% market share. I recall that number being 15%. This is an unreliable source of statistics to begin with, even if we over look the logical fallacy present all throughout this article and this comment.

      Ubuntu has a large static install base. Woopdeedo. Linux Mint has a high delta versus Ubuntu. Linux Mint is experience growth faster than Ubuntu, which is all that is needed for it to overtake Ubuntu. It’ll take time, but not everyone changes their OS the moment they fall in love with anther one. I want Linux Mint. I really do. But, I don’t have time to switch right now, and I don’t have much in the way of backups. You have no clue how many other people want Linux Mint 12, and there is no way to know. But, hits per day on the website would suggest the growth for Linux Mint 12′s downloads per day is en route to exceed Ubuntu’s. The sand is slipping through your fingers the tighter you grasp it. Holding onto every last fanboyish dream is dumb. I can provide numbers that Windows is taking up 80% of the market. It doesn’t make it any less horrid, and it doesn’t mean it’s growing faster than the other OSes.

      • Anonymous

        Mac OS X has 15% in the USA. I think that was a global stat..?

        • Anonymous

          I don’t recall it being 15% in the US, but the statistics were still an unrepresentative sampling. The main people who do anything with DistroWatch other than discover esoteric distros would be the Windows users browsing it who have no idea what they are looking for. You could even go so far as to say the Ubuntu percentage was so high because users were searching for another distro to suit their tastes… but I’m not going that far, which is why I say it is unrepresentative.

    • http://anotherandrew.com smiggs

      The interesting thing about the Wikimedia statistics is that the most popular version of Ubuntu is 10.04. We all know that as is coming to the end of it’s useful life very soon, so where will these users go? With Gnome 2 out the Window pretty much every distribution is starting from square one in terms of user experience. The Ubuntu name is clearly not enough to sway these people back to their way of thinking so they are researching other options which is why the most talked about distributions such as Linux Mint are getting hits on Distrowatch. Distrowatch statistics aren’t a study of usage but perhaps more a study of where the wind is blowing next, and that appears to be away from Ubuntu.

  • http://twitter.com/SepehrAryani Sepehr Aryani

    I started to hate MINT after all this crappy news. Without Ubuntu and Debian, mint is just a piece of shit. Ubuntu rules

  • Dimitris Papageorgiou

    ppl ppl common, give the man a break here, he already said that omgubuntu is not a place to find journalism, it’s a place to find usable info about ubuntu and that is one truth. distrowatch is not a site ubuntu users visit and that is another truth, third ubuntu’s top days were with 10.04 and the campaign of 10.10 the perfect 10 if anyone remembers and that it self scraps distrowatch graph! and now for my personal opinion, i know many people as i have a problem with unity and gnome3, so i stick with 10.04 and gnome2 until something else matures as such! i might have a problem with unity but i will never leave ubuntu!

  • http://travismccrea.com Travis McCrea

    This article makes me want to scream “U MAD BRO?!”

    Seriously, I recognize this is a blog and not an actual news website, but I would prefer to read at least semi-level headed posts. This was not a well thought out, educated response to some bad press for Ubuntu… this was a writer who appears to be emotionally impacted by the coverage and is lashing out against people who are speaking ill of what very well may be more than an operating system but slight obsession(?). 

    I love reading OMGUbuntu and I don’t want to seem like a dick… but I was turned off as soon as I read “bullshit” and kept getting more and more let down the further I read. The post lost it’s objectivity and thus I feel that the opinions put forth were bias to the point that I could not accept them as reliable information.

    In the end, the more press Ubuntu gets the better. You know the old saying… first they ignore us…

  • Ernest Johansmeier

    I tried Linux Mint 12 and it does not compare to Unity. The only reason that there are higher page hits on DistroWatch is because it had a new release. In the next couple of weeks it will go back to normal. Wait till 12.04 comes out and watch the page hits then.

  • Anonymous

    Wow. Dude, get over it.

    And just FYI, I used to like Ubuntu — even liked the page on Facebook. Since switching to Kubuntu, I haven’t unliked the Ubuntu page.  And anyway, with such a small number liking the Facebook group, we can hardly say that it is representative of the general population, can we; it only really represents a very specific sub-set of people: Ubuntu users, Facebook users, people who care enough to publish their like for Ubuntu on Facebook, and it could go on.

  • Anonymous

    I like ubuntu and i will stick with it . they change the theme of ubuntu and call it new distribution.

    • Ravi kumar

      you are right. ubuntu base theme colour is orange and linux mint just changed it to green. They just installed a bottom panel in gnome 3. So i prefer to use my ubuntu 11.10 with unity. Yeah unity sucks but gnome 3 is toooo bad and a crap of holy shit so I use unity!!!!

  • Anonymous

    You shouldn’t choose your software based solely on how popular it is, anyway. You should choose it based on its utility, and the power it gives you. If anyone tells you otherwise, he’s got a very shady idea of what makes good software.

    If the most popular things were always the best, we’d probably advocate everyone use Windows, eat fast food for every meal, not get checked for cancer, not ask questions, etc.

    Of course, that fear and uncertainty in your software choice isn’t what you guys are reacting to- it’s falsehoods that you’re reacting to.

    If a distro is good enough for public consumption and image, we shouldn’t care too much about which one it is, so long as it’s still libre software. I don’t use Ubuntu, since I think GNOME 3 is the best designed desktop environment out there at the moment, but I don’t deny that Unity is very good, regardless, and good enough to help people come to Linux. If people see us arguing over which of us is most popular, it doesn’t look very good so far as marketing goes.

    And well, I don’t know about you, but I would like to give a good impression to the people out there who would benefit greatly from discovering free software. I wouldn’t want anything to get in their way.

    • Anonymous

      Just a small comment. Unity uses gnome 3 as well. It’s just a different shell for it. I think you mean that you like Gnome Shell better then Unity (and with my workflow I agree fully).

      • Anonymous

        While I understand your comment and the reasons for it, as a fellow GNOME user, I’m going to have to stand for my position on this briefly.

        I think this talk of Unity being ‘based on GNOME 3 technologies’ is very deceptive and unnecessary. It’s like saying that Pantheon is based on GNOME 3. I was a member of the GNOME community before the Ubuntu community, and I don’t think I, nor any of the developers, have to adopt this terminology from some alternative DE’s users/developers, no matter how popular it is.

        GNOME-Shell is part of GNOME 3, and without the other components GNOME-Shell isn’t as useful or noteworthy. However, if Ubuntu won’t even package certain GNOME applications (Sushi, Documents), I think the developers don’t have the right to tell anyone upstream how to describe their use of GNOME 3 components.

        Haha, sorry, I know I sound pretty irate, and perhaps a bit overreactive, but I really do think we’d do better to admit to the dichotomy between Unity and GNOME 3. When I tell new users about GNOME, I’m not going to bother with explaining about all the other environments that use GNOME components (especially if you count GTK as a GNOME component). I mean, having to call it ‘GNOME’ is embarrassing enough. XD

        • Anonymous

          I actually agree with you on that. It’s very confusing to say “I’m using Gnome 3 with Gnome Shell, Ubuntu on the other hand also uses Gnome 3 but instead with their own Unity thing they have”. Lxde also uses gtk3, but don’t call it Gnome 3 with Lxde components. We should calling the two separate entities, because they are!

          o/

          • Anonymous

            Hah, yeah. It kinda’ reminds me of the whole GNU/Linux thing. It’s almost easier to say I’m a GNOME user than to say I’m a Linux user in that situation.

            It would be interesting to have a term that says, “I use a free software kernel, and probably free software all the way up the line,” but in a lot less words. Then we wouldn’t have to argue semantics all day. I guess ‘I use libre software’ would work if libre were an English word. I use liberty software? I use freedom software? Hm.. reminds me of freedom fries. XD

          • Anonymous

            That a word doesn’t exist (yet) in a given language, doesn’t mean it can be adopted into it. “Linux” didn’t mean anything before Linus Torvalds created it’s kernel. GNOME also has had (and still has) different meanings. We could even take an example from the Open Document Foundation, which also uses the word libre, even thou it isn’t an English word.

            So the phrase “I use libre software!” could work. And heck I’ll even start to spread the word about it in my social networks =P

        • http://jeremy.bicha.net/ Jeremy Bicha
          • Anonymous

            I figured Debian did. It appears that GNOME-Documents is still unavailable on Oneiric.

            For some reason, I couldn’t install either packages within two or three days after installing 11.10, and I’d read that Sushi was removed because it didn’t work well with Unity (I believe it was on a mailinglist).

            Either way, I’m quite glad to see this cleared up. Makes me far less worried about referring GNOME-using buddies to Ubuntu, or people who would work better with GNOME. Thank you for enlightening me.

          • http://jeremy.bicha.net/ Jeremy Bicha

            If you want GNOME Documents on 11.10, try the GNOME 3 PPA: https://launchpad.net/~gnome3-team/+archive/gnome3/+packages?field.series_filter=oneiric

  • Philipp Smirnov

    And don’t forget that rising popularity of Mint is good for ubuntu. I am pretty sure that someone will port this “old” gnome 3 style to ubuntu that will be better for everyone.                     

    • Stephen Gantenbein

      They are extensions for the Gnome Shell extension system. No need to port. They can be installed on any system with Gnome Shell.

  • http://twitter.com/Sandeep_Kumar_P Sandeep Pilakhnawal

    What I can see is that Ubutnu’s popularity has decreased with time. There is a very good progress in Linux Mint’s popularity and no change in Fedora’s popularity…just have a closer look at the graph above.

  • Alan Wolffs

    I would of liked this article more if it wasn’t so aggressive, almost making Ubuntu users come across as *****, I get the sentiment of the article and agree with it, this has be blown up out of proportion but there is no need to join in!!

  • Muhamad Asyraaf

    LinuxMint will never surpass Ubuntu. That’s the fact. It’s mainly because Ubuntu has its own identity (Unity) but LinuxMint merely copying Windows. They’ll never succeed. 

    • Anonymous

      Why does that ‘fact’ have 10 likes? Your logic is about as well-founded as the people who say Windows will always command the lion’s share of the market as a fact.

      • Anonymous

        Does Mint have cloud services? Support for enterprises? App store for commercial software? Music store?

        • Anonymous

          most certainly you have access to all such things except for enterprise support (which I’m sure you could even find that too if you tried hard enough). There is absolutely nothing stopping you from using Amazon’s MP3 store, dropbox, or Desura for Linux. You could even go so far as to use a number of other ones at the same time. *gasp*  but yes, trollengine, you have made a trolling comment successfully. I can’t say I’ve ever bought anything from the Ubuntu One Music Store, and I can’t say I trust Ubuntu One itself after it has deleted a number of important documents that had significant progress in them and I had to rewrite them late into the night. I also can’t say the commercial software access isn’t nice, it is nice, but we’ve lived for years without that and had no troubles. If Linux Mint grows as fast as it is now, it will have it’s own commercial offerings before long without a doubt.

    • Anonymous

      I think they lack everything that Canonical offers. You cannot even buy commercial software from Mint’s “app store” like you can from USC.

  • Anonymous

    Why are we acting like Windows users? Why do we need to prove that we have more user base than other distro. We have the same underlying principals. whether its RPM or DEB, they are just package managers.

    Ubuntu or Fedora, they are just configured versions of Linux and some custom made software. We as the whole Linux community should thrive, not just Ubuntu, Linux mint or Fedora. After all we are all the same (a community of Linux users). Our enemy is not other communities while it is paid licensed products. Linux mint is just like a little brother of Ubuntu, just like Kubuntu or Ubuntu Ultimate.

    • Anonymous

      Perhaps Steve Ballmer has paid all these little kids to spread FUD from the inside.

    • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

      I absolutely agree with that. But please don’t make it sound as if Fedora and Ubuntu are just different package managers. It is a great disservice to Fedora. They have different values. It’s 100% free, with no proprietary drivers, no restricted codecs, no Flash, etc. People who expect these things will get a bad impression of Fedora, and they don’t deserve that. They deserve attention for what they are, and not for what they’re not. It’s a great distro, but it’s unfair to compare it to Ubuntu.

  • Anonymous

    The most disappointing thing is to see how much people care about Ubuntu’s popularity (or “market share”) as if it was any other commercial product, while it’s an open-source distro. Also, isn’t it a kind of fanboyism from the author of the article to speak so emotionally ? Why should we even care of all that ? However, what we should care about, is how usable/practical/customizable Ubuntu is. And it’s undeniable that there is actually some issues about that, that even fanboys have to admit.

    • Anonymous

      The problem here is that someone is making false claims that make something we all care about look poor. The claims particularly reference Unity as a cause. Which although having critics has lovers who see potential in it’s ability to be better than other options. I agree that Unity has seen a drop in Ubuntu users but not such an extreme one. 

  • http://twitter.com/dantdickson oh you know

    All I want to say is fuck the haters. I love Ubuntu and Unity. On top of the fact that if it wasn’t for Ubuntu I would have never switch to linux, fedora opensuse et. al. never worked well enough for me.

  • Anonymous

    Why make so much fuss about it?
    For sure, distrowatch stats don’t mean anything.
    But, hey, anyway, isn’t Linux Mint just the same Ubuntu?
    Even if it was? Isn’t it all Linux after all? Distro-fighting makes me vomit.

    With 11.10 release, Unity and Gnome 3 have failed for me, so I just switched to KDE, which is now much more stable, pleasant and feature-full.

    • Mladen Mijatov

      I sersiously don’t know… but people like arguing. :) 

    • Anonymous

      The fact that there are 100 distros doing the same thing makes me vomit. People just don’t get it. Linux will eventually die because of this. 

  • Anonymous

    Just a small update about the article. It doesn’t use the distrowatch.com/subpage for it’s pagehits. It uses the distributions homepage for that. But that still doesn’t make it that much more accurate. Because how many of you would go to (just) ubuntu.com

    Also it count one pagehit per ip per day, so you can’t easily cheat the number. (Yes, I’ll provide a link to confirm my claim: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity )

  • Guest

    Ha-ha-ha, the Canonical propaganda army strikes again. Shuttleworth must be really upset.

    “Update: J Johan Edwards points to Wikimedia’s statistics in the comments, further reiterating Ubuntu’s apparent popularity.”

    Great idea. Not so great to ignore the “OS breakdown per version”, where one can see that the majority of the Ubuntu traffic comes from pre-Unity versions. If you compare 9/2011 with 10/2011 you can even see a decline in the request numbers for 11.04. Now, you may say that this is an empty argument, as most people stay on LTS versions. Well, in my experience they don’t do that, but are rather eager to upgrade to the newest version.

    No, these Wikimedia stats are not proof, either. But they offer clues.

    It’s also interesting how butthurt you are, bickering about “useless metrics”. Well, what metrics would you prefer? Or more to the point: how does your cult leader, Mark Shuttleworth, want to measure that Ubuntu has indeed the 200 million users it strives for?

    • Anonymous

      You sound really bitter as well. Or maybe spiteful is the word? I hope everything is alright – life was probably mean to you.

      Although I agree that tagging this post as “Idiots” and “Morons” was not really a brilliant idea.

      • Guest

        Bitter? Spiteful? And you know that because …? The right word would be: amused. Yes, it’s probably a character flaw, being amused by fanboy infighting. But hasn’t everyone flaws?

        • Anonymous

          No. The research is flawed. 

    • Akshat Jain

      That is because both firefox and chrome report their OS as ‘Linux’ instead of ‘Ubuntu’.

    • Anonymous

      There’s no reliable metrics other than Canonical’s servers. They count the number of different IP-addresses fetching updates.

  • http://twitter.com/jeslin_mx Jeshua Lin Min Xuan

    Frankly, I don’t understand why this writer is so impassioned about this whole thing. Sure, page hits on a single site may not be a good metric of distro popularity, but other sites misrepresenting information does not make DistroWatch a useless pile of crap and render its effort of maintaining a database of distros, no matter how big or small, non-existent. At the same time, you can’t deny that there are people out there who dislike Unity for various reasons, be it in design, usability or standard compliance. These are people with real, legitimate opinions; are you going to assume they have all been bribed over by tech journals that are allegedly a piece of crap.
    tl;dr, I agree that Ubuntu has made fantastic contributions to the Linux community in usability, and that desktop shells are ultimately a matter of taste. However, this guy makes omgubuntu and perhaps even the rest of the Ubuntu community look like a bunch of mindless fanboys because he cannot forbear the slightest false claim made against his own Apple.

  • http://twitter.com/kent_stor Kent Storbakken

    Picking a side to this mundane argument and calling the other side “idiots”, is not going to help any. I know that it’s probably false and harming to Ubuntu but just let it blow over. You’re just making the whole thing more heated than it need be instead of ignoring them. We can all go back to peacefully coexisting if we stop giving into this discussion. Does it all really matter anyway?

  • Anonymous

    While accurate, it reeked of an unprofessional manner. Why did I have to read a rage fueled rant rather than a well written? I’m not bothered by the facts; I’m bothered by the tone.

    Edit: It also occurred to me that children sometimes come on here. I teach a ten year old Python and I know he comes on here. Why did OMG Ubuntu! let this guy write an article?

    • Satchit Bhogle

      So what if children come on here? The article uses no obscene language nor discusses adult topics. That you don’t like the tone of the article is another thing.

      • Guest

        No, but it clearly shows how upset fanboys can get. Therefore this article should have concluded with a warning to all kids: “Don’t become a fanboy (like me)!”

        • http://www.manishsinha.net Manish Sinha

          I guess Ben got upset at Ubuntu haters. 
          Fanboy >> Haters

      • Anonymous

        “This is complete bullshit, and these sites are just attempting to ride the Unity controversy train for another couple of stops for more page hits. Don’t join them.”

        “and your average daily bullshit intake will be significantly reduced.”

        “Now, can we get on and get some shit done instead of bickering over useless metrics?”

        “you’re always going to get morons posting “damning” graphs and statistics”

        I included the morons part because it violates the OMG! Ubuntu comments Code of Conduct (the cursing does the same as well).

        Here is the CoC: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/code-of-conduct/

        • Ian Hebson

          Indeed, the article from OMG Ubuntu does violate their own code of conduct. From the link:

          “Personal insults, flippant attacks and derogatory comments are not acceptable.”

          • Akshat Jain

            How is this a personal insult? Aside from SJVN being a moron (Which I agree with).

          • Anonymous

            calling everyone opposed to the author a moron is generally considered to be a personal insult. 

      • Anonymous

        I quoted the article but the cursing filter requires my comment to be approved by a moderator.

  • xpress razor

    I thought distrowatch uses download.ubuntu.com and other repositories (fedora, suse) actual download count. Say e.g softpedia (who directs to the original product sites and count them). So distrowatch does not have any matrics on who is using which Linux distribution. I have been using Linux since 2003 and Ubuntu since 2008. I have only visited distrowatch say 3 or four times.

  • http://bobby.com.ng bigbrovar

    If the articles you slight from zdnet reflect a sad day in journalism. Then your post make me weep for journalism. It’s a shame that you could even try to maintain the moral high ground which such an insulting post abusive, calling the people whose view you do not agree with morons is unacceptable. This is not just some private blog. This is omgubuntu a blog that has become the “engadget” of ubuntu and to some extent the linux world. Is this how you represent us? You should bury your head in shame and learn out to write an article in a professional and clean manner so that your views are not smeared by childish name calling. Learn to hold a civil discussion and articulate your views without calling people you oppose morons

    Some time ago ububtu’s community manager Bono Bacon initiated a project called open respective which was aimed at creating a atmosphere of respect across the linux and open source ecosystem. Your post shows more than anything why such an initiative was thought out.

    Many people come here to get from your views and get news about the ubuntu ecosystem you should try and lead by example because many here would pick from your attitude as they go propagate the linux message.

    On the issue at hand (which your immature rant has succeeded in burying)I don’t think ububtu’s popularity is decreasing. If anything distrowatch only shows the increasing popularity of linux mint especially among the traditional and vocal linux crowd. You should note that while inaccurate the distrowatch ranking was used by many ubuntu fans as an indication of the distros popularity as it maintained an unassailable 1st position for over 4 years and your current argument was used by many non ubuntu users in disputing ububtu’s perceived popularity.

    Linux mint hold the top chair now and as irrelevant and unreliable the distrowatch ranking is. It does say something about mint. The distrowatch has grown in popularity with people who would rather have the traditional desktop metaphor than unity or gnome shell (yeah such people still exist and many of them see mint as a refugee)

    Canonical hope that ubuntu gains close to 200 million users in the next 3 years. an Huge Majority of these new users are expected to come from the non linux crowd, from people who don’t even know or care what distrowatch is so canonical needs not bother about the latest distrowatch ranking. They want to be number one OS to challenge windows mac and android and not just be number one linux distro. This is why the company went with unity. The to be able to have a desktop shell they can tweak and make presentable to the non linux user. Whether unity would achieve this goal is a matter of time.

    One thing which can’t be disputed though is that fact that ubuntu still has the largest mind share in the mind of mainstream users as far as linux is concerned. Many of them see linux and ubuntu as one and the same.  I can not count how many times I have heard ububtu’s name come up in shows like twit, theverge and engadget and even the BBC. That Won’t change anytime soon. Still the raise of linux mint can be ignored it has a lot of buzz around it ATM. The last time a distro knocked ubuntu of the top spot of distro watch was 2007 that was pclinux os. I remembered then how almost every thread on digg ended with how awesome Pclinux was and how its so much better than ubuntu.. Fast forward and pclinux seems to have lost the spark. Time will tell if linuxmint could pull a reddit on ubuntu’s digg or whether it would go down the way of pclinux before it. Either way mint, ubuntu, pclinux are all linux and open source project.. It makes no matter to me which is most popular on distrowatch. Whichever of them can crack the desktop market and get up to 7% of that market. Now that would be something. Currently the linux market share is a tiny one percent and this makes it irrelevant which of the Millions of distros is number one of that 1%

    • Anonymous

      Click like if you are as retarded as me.

      • Anonymous

        @V45:disqus , you just got counter-trolled.

    • Anonymous

      Cool story, bro.

    • https://launchpad.net/~mpt mpt

      I think I would enjoy this alternate universe, where the Ubuntu community manager is called Bono Bacon, his latest jazz album is called Open Respective, Linux Mint has a lot of buzz, and OMG Ubuntu is an exemplar of high-class journalism.

      • http://bobby.com.ng bigbrovar

        So I made some typos in my post (aggressive auto correct on android) but then the central message is clear for anyone to grasp.

        And yeah whether you choose to believe it or not Linux Mint has a lot of Buzz going for it ATM does should not mean it has surpassed Ubuntu in popularity. It just means its gotten more attention than it usually does.
         

    • Bilal Akhtar

      Did you even read the article before commenting?

      Ben has clearly mentioned WHY ubuntu is still at the top, and why its popularity is NOT declining.

      He has clearly mentioned why DistroWatch stats are wrong, just because they measure a completely different thing. They measure hits on the individual distro pages (e.g. distrowatch.com/ubuntu, distrowatch.com/mint, etc). If I use Ubuntu (or Windows for that matter) and go to distrowatch.com/mint, it will register a hit for Mint. If I just go to distrowatch.com and leave, no hits will be registered.

      Ubuntu users don’t go to the Ubuntu page on DistroWatch just to register the fact that they are using Ubuntu.

      Google Trends, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, WikiMedia hits stats (which are fair because they actually record which operating system the user is using), etc all point to just one thing: Ubuntu is still at the top and is not losing popularity.

      • http://bobby.com.ng bigbrovar

        I think I should be the one asking if you read my comments. I was not disputing the finding of OP. Rather I quite agree with him (again read my comment) What I didn’t like was the name calling. Calling the people who you don’t agree with Morons is never acceptable and highly unprofessional. I really don’t know the culture in this blog. But I was applying the general standard of civility and decency, standards which this post falls short on. Calling people whom you accuse of dragging the standard of Journalism idiots for not agree with you views is becoming the very thing which you criticize.

  • http://www.plutoneld.se Martin Karlsson

    Even though I myself “educate” people in not trusting Distrowatch HPD ranking as an accurate measure, I think you’re not helping anything with the tone you set in this article (“bogus articles” and “complete bullshit”). I’ve read the articles you link to, and while the titles are questionable the content is much more in line with what you’re writing, ie “You can’t really trust Distrowatch HPD”. I almost think you only read the titles…

    Now, if we look at the statistics there seems that at least the first part of the claim is accurate, ie “Ubuntus [Linux] market share is declining” (the second part is wrong, that it’s surpassed by it’s cousin Mint). Even your own poll a couple of weeks ago seems to indicate that a majority of the Ubuntu users doesn’t like Unity the most, and if that’s the case it’s hardly far-fetched to assume they look into other distros. Looking at Google Trends it’s very clear that it is declining, but then again maybe some of that can be explained with that not as many needs to google “ubuntu” anymore :)

    In any case, your title to this article may be as wrong as the titles you are criticizing. “Popularity” is of course not a hard measurement, but I think you’ll be very hard to find statistics that shows that Ubuntus market share is the same or even climbing (note that I’m saying market share, and not users).

    I was very surprised of the conclusions drawn from that poll a week ago. While I don’t have any other such statistics to compare with, I don’t know how many Ubuntu users tend to change DE. And maybe even some Kubuntu and Xubuntu users answered the poll like they where using Ubuntu (I’m not saying it’s wrong) so the numbers got a bit skewed. However, if less then 50% use the DEFAULT DE, I can hardly consider that to be a “whopping” success and “strong result”. Not when Gnome Shell almost got a third of the votes.

    I think you’re wrong to criticize others for bad journalism when both this article and the one about the poll, is showing some of the same mistakes. Sure, this is an Ubuntu site so you don’t need to be as unbiased as other sites, but some critique and looking at things from different angles would be refreshing nevertheless. I think in the long run it would only make our favorite distro stronger.

  • Akshat Jain
  • Srinivas G

    Infact, the popularity is “increasing”! Yes, Anti-Ubuntu folks may find this hard to believe but it is true. People really are talking interest in the Unity interface. There maybe bugs and shit (as with any other distro) but it “looks” (and works) beautiful. And this is exactly what newbies want! People look at my laptop and say, “Wow, how did you do this?”. I say, “I installed Ubuntu – that is how it is done.” I’ve used a hundred distros (Yes, Arch as well – Vanilla Arch, CTK Arch, Archbang, Kahel OS, to name a few) and always kept coming back to Ubuntu. Now, I’ve retired from distro-hopping; Will learn development and contribute to the project that makes me feel at home.

  • Anonymous

    “Now, can we get on and get some shit done instead of bickering over useless metrics?”
    Was there any other result expected from this article besides bickering ?

  • Jonah Brown

    The fact that countries are moving over to Linux and using ubuntu as a base for their systems shows what Mark S. has done, created a great product line.
    check out this link http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.focus.com%2Ffyi%2F50-places-linux-running-you-might-not-expect%2F&ei=KP7RTsPcDonXiQKQ4qHdCw&usg=AFQjCNEGcGLNi7e9B9IqIT1S8BROoDWtwQ&sig2=O8Ct-C8yysq_zoqZe9tARw

    Linux Mint is based off of Ubuntu and has created a bigger mess in my opinon. No one talks about how their(LM) system is set up to use affliated search engines so that they get money per click and it warns you if you try to change it.

     And ppl we furious over the Ubuntu Store move.

    The new MGSE system sounds like a food additive. Because they are supporting Mate they will have to figure out how much further they can use Ubuntu as a base.

    Unity took almost 3 releases to get to a relatively stable usage. LM has it hands full with it’s tasks and I am curious to how they will have a LTS release when 12.04 comes out.

    I think what is core is keeping momentum and make Ubuntu even better. Write great apps, create themes and get the word out. That is what will keep the gravy train going.

    BTW I have used LM and used to promote it till they kept getting behind in their release dates.

    • Mladen Mijatov

      Applications will continue working on other distributions regardless of Ubuntu’s success. An if you left Mint because “they kept getting behind in their release dates” it’s very stupid of you. You practically said, I would take half-baked release on time instead of tested and completed one when it’s ready. 

      And by the way, Unity doesn’t have themes, they just take background for top panel and make the background transparent black or whatever.

      In the end the great thing is, everyone will use whatever they feel like using. 

  • http://profiles.google.com/lilianftp Moraru Lilian

    We are not that stupid, we know by our self that DistroWatch counts page views on the distro… When I go on DistroWatch I usually open distro pages to see what is the newest software they r delivering and I never check Ubuntu’s because I already know all about Ubuntu, I don’t need to ever check their page… I remember checking Mint almost every time when I was going on DistroWatch…

  • Anonymous

    Shuttleworth could clear this up by posting the methodology/data he uses to estimate the number of Ubuntu users.

    • Mladen Mijatov

      Probably something like this: 
      Apple said they are counting their install base like this. So we guess we should do that as well but only with random imaginary numbers. 

      Bad jokes aside, I asked Jono Bacon on one occasion if he knows the total number of Ubuntu installations. He said that he doesn’t and that it’s impossible to know… so unless they put some code to report back to Canonical Mark is just talking bullshit better knows as PR.

  • http://nicholasferber.myopenid.com/ nicholas

    Why not enable something like an ‘I am alive’ ping. Then at least we can get an accurate reading. Of course this could be optional.

    • Mladen Mijatov

      Which wouldn’t be all that accurate as well. And then there are the cases where people don’t have internet, or change IP address all the time. So you’d have to create some sort of ID based of hardware which then turns that “simple” ping into spyware…

      :D

  • Stephen Gantenbein

    Ubuntu users loved to quote DistroWatch when Ubuntu was top.

    • Akshat Jain

      Morons as well.

      • Bilal Akhtar

        11th comment from you removed. Stop using that language and calling Ubuntu developers ******.

        • Anonymous

          You are only allowed to use language like that if you author the article.

    • Anonymous

      True Stephen. And I don’t remember these kinds of juvenile rants from users of Fedora, Mint, and OpenSUSE when Ubuntu was on top at that site.

  • https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ActionParsnip ActionParsnip

    If you wget the distrowatch/ubuntu page does it count as a hit and increase ubuntu’s ranking?

  • http://www.facebook.com/hein.hanssen Hein Hanssen

    I think there is a bigger problem as well: Linux (apart from Android) is declining. True or not: anyone who’s got numbers?

    • Mladen Mijatov

      Am not worried about that at all. As long as there are developers using and working with Linux, it will stay alive… Considering that Linux has majority in server market and complete dominance in super computer market we are secured in terms of future.

      Another indicator of Linux _NOT_ declining is the fact that Microsoft, as seen in one presentation, considers Linux to be a bigger threat than Apple. Maybe because Linux is free and if it starts getting any market share people would start improving and spreading it like crazy…

      Fear not! :D We are here to stay.

  • http://profiles.google.com/herophuong93 Phương Hero

    I agree with the fact that ubuntu declining popularity is not true but this article needs to be more neutral as every professional article needs to be.

  • Luís Miranda

    Ubuntu is the best! I use Linux for 11 years. Some days ago i tried Fedora! What a crap! I’ve returned to Ubuntu in a blink of an eye! 

  • http://maccus.myopenid.com/ Sadilo

    All these stats really show that Windows is still king of the OS’es. Linux is for the tech crowd. Ubuntu on the tablet is already surpassed by Android. Thus no need to focus on Unity anymore as it’s not a serious contender, It’s just way too late. That gives you the freedom to use ANY of the big distros on your desktop because they’re all good enough. Personally I don’t care about Linux popularity, Linux works great on my systems and thats all that matters.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_C2C372F2T3GW75NVFZXNLP6NWE Sai Ranjan Kalchar
  • satish mishra

    I don’t care what people and their article says but i don’t like unity and never will but it doesn’t mean i am going to leave Ubuntu i can easily install gnome shell and extensions. 

  • Anonymous

    Tags in this post:

    “idiots”
    “morons”
    “zdnet is a piece of crap”

    Do you think this promotes Ubuntu’s code of conduct propely, or give mature impression of the Ubuntu community?

    Shame on you.

    • Anonymous

      Actually, I agree with “zdnet is a piece of crap” and said so just the other week (not for this reason), but was more descriptive than the word “crap”, but it had the same meaning.

    • http://www.manishsinha.net Manish Sinha

      I agree that these words should not be used, but it does fit properly for them

      • Anonymous

        I understand your point. But if other authors behave like a morons, idiots etc how can someone differentiate non-moron and moron if non-moron is acting like a moron (writing in style of moron). From third person it looks like both of them are morons.

        I think OMG! Ubuntu! should stop using a moron like language and personal attacks. I don’t what to be part of moron community, do you? I think not.

        I think this article needs a serious rewrite – just posting the facts and leave the feelings out.

  • http://claimid.com/el-bhm bhm

    At first I thought, Benji forgot that he posts for the site.
    I’d rather find out he intended to post in the comments. Comments with ongoing rage fest. Even there I find such texts distasteful. Let alone article on the main page.

    Pulling punches like this, doesn’t help anyone but “the offenders”. Maybe for better. Maybe they manipulate numbers. Yet, I have yet to see editorial filled and tagged with insults from them. Toward anyone.

    Yes, maybe you get traffic with this article. For what price?

    • Anonymous

      I agree with the article. Yes, I sense I little anger, but I agree, and is warranted. One blogger writes something that is flawed, then many other bloggers just regurgitate the same thing, so it spreads around. And anger is not only about this topic, is about so many other topics, and is an effective way of how lies get perpetrated as  truth. Writing like this is about swaying public opinion, and companies and governments use this method all the time.

  • Mladen Mijatov

    Angry much? If they kept Unity optional or at least had a decent fallback option everything would be fine as people would continue to use it. Am not sure if any of you saw Mint 12. Yes, it has Mate (Gnome2 fork) and nicely butchered Gnome-Shell. 

    Ubuntu probably has waaay more users than Mint but you need to take into consideration who is visiting DistroWatch. I guess it’s mostly long-time Linux users, developers and people trying to find a new distribution… and now whole bunch of regular users trying to see what the hype is all about.

    Mint being top on DistroWatch probably means that long time users and those that might be called power-users are migrating. That is never a good thing, simply because you need those people to report bugs, contribute with patches and translations. In my opinion, Canonical should have added Unity to backports so even if they do have problems with it, they can fix it. Not like with 11.04 version where you just had to restart compiz or relogin to “fix” your problems. If Mark S. want’s Mac OS clone so bad, they should do a much better job.

    Unity is far from being tablet friendly. I just keep wondering how they are going to make “hover” ability on touch screen so you can show the global menu, and then click on very small options. Yeah Mark, keep on dreaming.I _am_ currently using Ubuntu but with i3 session. It’s ugly but at least it’s usable. And _NO_ am not going to be different for the sake of being different no matter how much Canonical or the author of this article wanted that.

  • http://janvitus.posterous.com Janvitus

    Cool, demonizing/FUDing a GNU/Linux portal… Seems like a Microsoft Facts.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_JNU6DS73VUMJKCB6EHLKCYT6PI todd

    Mint is Ubuntu . Ubuntu is Debian . Debian is Linux . Windows7 is Vista .

    • https://login.ubuntu.com/+id/R4szkb7 Jo-Erlend Schinstad

      Fun fact about Windows 7; it’s version 6.x of Windows. Fun fact about Microsofts marketing department: they spend enormous amounts of money trying to spread the new slogan: «Life without walls», which obviously implies a life without Windows… :)

      • Guest

        Fun fact: it has been explained many times over by Microsoft that many developers actually relied (talk about poor coding) on the major Windows version number returned by the appropriate API function. Therefore it was decided that Windows 7 was to be NT 6.1. Case closed.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_JNU6DS73VUMJKCB6EHLKCYT6PI todd

    Bring on Gubuntu , yes i know you can install gnome shell on Ubuntu but what the heck !!! 

    • http://corrytonapple.myopenid.com/ Corrytonapple

      We need to start a spin then :P

  • Anonymous

    Nevermind the contradictions in your article (regular user don’t visit Distrowatch why not compare dw homepage stats?).

    Common sense is also a very good indicator of what the most popular distro is.
    - Ubuntu is and was by far the biggest linux distro
    - Ubuntu got a lot of heat for introducing Unity
    - It is very likely a significant amount of users tried other distros because of Unity hate
    - It is very likely they ended up with trying/sticking to Mint
    - Mint is getting a lot of good press since a long time and is therefore probably attracting new users at cost of other distros.

    Stop wining! Press has never been fair to anybody, Ubuntu gets lots of good press. This will storm will be over when people realize gnome2 is not going to live forever. Surely Kubuntu will be the new hit ;)

  • Anonymous

    I agree with you. I sense a little anger in this post, and I feel the same way, and have commented on those sites. I have been using Ubuntu for 5 years , and for the first 3 years I was visiting Distrowatch almost everyday, but, for the last 2 years, I have visited Distrowatch just once, thats right, once. Also, the type of users that Ubuntu is increasingly targeting are those type of users who have no interest in Distrowatch. I am interested Linux news but I never goto Distrowatch. Those blog posts are utter complete rubbish. Things like this happens all the time. The reasons are varied, but include: its designed to shape public opinion, encourage page clicks and referals etc. The truth or valid research don’t matter to these people, but most people being sheep, will just believe what they read and regurgitate what they hear, most don’t think for themselves.

    • Guest

      Oh, yes, but you do. There’s just one problem: when can you be 100% sure that something you believe in is actually the truth? Is there an absolute truth we can gain cognitive access to?

      I would claim that the articles on this very website, which calls itself “OMG! Ubuntu!”, are already biased to begin with. Why then should one trust this site to write the “truth” any more than another site? Is what we can read in this site’s “About Us” the “truth” or just: marketing? Every “accusation” you bring forth against other blogs — “its designed to shape public opinion, encourage page clicks and referals etc.” — can be equally applied to this site.

      You sit on an awfully high horse, blabbering on and on about “truth”. Sure, everything else is “false”, when you take what’s written here as the “truth”. You may not believe it, but Ohso Ltd. is a company.

  • Anonymous

    Ay, ay, calm down, calm down everyone! It’s not a matter of life and death, but it is true that The Register do seem to unfairly knock Ubuntu quite a bit. Please can someone at Ubuntu make it clearer about Linux and patents as this seems such a serious and complicated subject and maybe the reason that many companies and people would possible worry about using Linux at home but especially at work.  For example Bedrock Computer Tech vs Google, Microsoft vs Casio etc, plus a few of Red Hats customers. This would make me nervous about installing Ubuntu at the small company where i  work, even though i much prefer it to Windows.
     Maybe the guys here at OMG could write an article on this subject too please? 

  • Anonymous

    ubuntu, is the number one distro. all that you said in the article is true.

    but also logically:  let’s say i don’t like unity, ok fair enough.

    1)  i can use gnome shell. and it is still ubuntu.

    2)  i can use gnome shell extensions ( bottom panel, window list, mint menu) to make it just like mint. and it is still ubuntu.

    3)  i can use fallback mode and it is still ubuntu

    4) i can use kubuntu, lubuntu,xubuntu and it is still ubuntu.

    so no logic about people leaving ubuntu just because of unity. your gnome 2.x is gone. get over it. try to adapt, write extensions for gnome shell, suggest improvements in unity, and don’t be so negative.

    P.S and there is nothing wrong with distrowatch. they are doing the same thing for years. the problem is the interpretation of the results.

  • Anonymous

    When I look at the Linux Distros my friens and aquaintnces use I definitly see a decline in Ubuntu popularity since Unity was rolled out.
    On the other hand: a few dozen people aren’t a reliable source. for statistical data.
    But assuming these numbers hold true against the rest of the number of Linux users all I see is that maybe 15 to 20% jump the boat and choose Fedora or Debian. LInux Mint isn’t that often the go to distribution of choice

  • Anonymous

    Why does have anything have to be popular? Why does my neighboor must use my stupid os?

  • Paulo Bueno

    It’s hilarious! Spoiled brat article! “Distrowatch or ZDNet doesn’t mean anything” “See, Facebook has more Ubuntu fans than Mint’s”. I mean FACEBOOK!  Hahahahahaha…

    • Bilal Akhtar

      Wait, what?

      Ben has stated many many more sources than just Facebook. They are:

      Twitter
      Google+
      Google Trends
      Wikimedia

      ZDNet is just quoting one source: DistroWatch. And Ben has already mentioned why DistroWatch page hits are wrong. 

      Copy-pasted from my comment above:
      ”
      He has clearly mentioned why DistroWatch stats are wrong, just because they measure a completely different thing. They measure hits on the individual distro pages (e.g. distrowatch.com/ubuntu,distrowatch.com/mint, etc). If I use Ubuntu (or Windows for that matter) and go to distrowatch.com/mint, it will register a hit for Mint. If I just go to distrowatch.com and leave, no hits will be registered.

      Ubuntu users don’t go to the Ubuntu page on DistroWatch just to register the fact that they are using Ubuntu.

      Google Trends, Google+, Twitter, Facebook, WikiMedia hits stats (which are fair because they actually record which operating system the user is using), etc all point to just one thing: Ubuntu is still at the top and is not losing popularity.”

  • Anonymous

    why is there a activate ping inside the installer so Ubuntu knows that a distribution version is running. or just read the date of the update manager. So than you know. and really see the market share.

  • Alex Cook

    My personal reaction to all of this furore is – who cares? Who cares who uses what distro, or which distro is on top? As far as ‘market share’ goes, it doesn’t really matter. The delightful thing about open-source work is that the more something is used, the more it is ‘field-tested’, so to speak – so the more users a distro has, the better equipped it is to accommodate its audience. It is a self-regulatory system, kind-of like a free market, only it cuts out that horrible middle-man: money.

    Sure, Ubuntu’s popularity has taken a bit of a dive since Unity came onto the scene. And sure, by dint of simply not having Unity, Mint has taken a chunk of the user- and fan-base. But ultimately, the self-regulation of the system means that both distros benefit from each others’ work – with Mint being so highly derivative of Ubuntu, anything significant that pushes Mint forward can usually be applied to Ubuntu.

    So if anything, the only thing that matters is that our particular sub-system of Linux (the Ubuntu-derivative) is taking the lion’s share. Anything else is pure fanboyism, cheerleader mentality, or unabated ‘pride’. Be happy for Mint – it rides on the back of Ubuntu’s outstanding popularity, and pays its dues in the sugar-lumps of field-testing that its underlying Ubuntu framework undergoes every time a Mint user boots up.

  • http://twitter.com/zzecool zzecool

    Calm down guys ! Switching to Arch was always an option

  • http://maccus.myopenid.com/ Sadilo

    First we had an OS war Win/Lin. Now we have a civil war.

  • ronan sousa sales neto

    I really like ubuntu more and that what matters within each distro is a Linux kernel.

  • http://twitter.com/dc_ricardo Ricardo David

    Install Ubuntu Server. Install gnome-shell. Perfect!!!

  • Anonymous

    Great article. We need more articles like this from you Benjamin.

  • Anonymous

    done! i clicked on the link , lets make arch the most popular and get that article written !

    oh and when will we have an OMGarch ?

  • Connor Bruce

    Ubuntu and Linux in general is in decline. Ubuntu only really took off because Windows was still stuck in 2001 and Vista was such as disaster. The recent rise in popularity of Apple and the bizarre turn that saw Microsoft start to actually make good OS’s (Windows 7 and 8) coupled with the fact that what made Ubuntu such a good choice in the first place, ease of use, freedom and customisation, has been lost in recent releases, has seen off any real challenge from Linux.

    This is evident in the number of people still using 10.04 (like me) and 10.10, I don’t remember this many people sticking with an LTS before. Nor have I ever seen so much discussion of alternate DE’s and Ubuntu based alternative OS’s.

    • Anonymous

      I agree. I no longer recommend Ubuntu to my friends because Windows 7 is good enough or better and people who use is are quite OK (while they had huge problems with XP and Vista).

  • Brian Glenn

    Hey Benjamin more supporting information that might help you is that ubuntu is the number 1 distro on Dudalibre the We are more than 1% campaign 

  • http://profiles.google.com/colin.pyper colin pyper

    Watch this!

    • Anonymous

      Another thing I hate about Unity – the launcher works only with dark themes otherwise it’s too light (because it’s background colour is taken from your background). I had to search for black backgrounds on Google to find some that looks OK. There should be a way to simply change the colour.

  • Anonymous

    But, but, but… everyone knows that the Linux desktop market is controlled by Distrowatch stats and a small number of loud and whiny distro hoppers. LOL

  • http://wishabhilash.in Abhilash Nanda

    The moment I saw the word “MORON” it reminded me of the grossly infamous article about “Rant on geeks” and my first suspect as a writer was Benjamin Humpery. So I scrolled to top to see if I am true, and sadly I was.

    Benjamin every time you prove that you are just a small kid ranting on subjects you like. I would say this is a very sad day in journalism.

    And you pointing to Google Trend as a marker is also wrong as the word Ubuntu is not only specific to Ubuntu linux, where as Linux Mint is.

    • Anonymous

      Also there are no facts to show either way – we still don’t know if it’s declinging or raising. The only thing the article shows that it’s certainly not decling as fast as some media want us to believe.

  • Anonymous

    This article is pathetic. I like Ubuntu and use 11.10, but OMGUbuntu needs to find someone who can make a point without coming across as a whining brat. There are a lot of good writers around. No need to settle for this.

  • Hakim Amamou

    That’s False Ubuntu Always In The Top

  • Anonymous

    It’s funny to see all these “ex-Ubuntu users” still obessing over Ubuntu. LOL Shouldn’t you guys be on a Mint, Fedora, Arch specific sites/forums instead of trolling Ubuntu discussions?  Distro hoppers who frequent Distrowatch are quite fickle and not the users any distro trying to improve and grow its market share should be worrying about. As far as Mint goes, they are niche right now and will have to stop including proprietary codecs by default unless they want to have a big legal target on their backs and never stand a chance in the business desktop market. When, and if they do so, will see how these distro hopping distrowatchers react.

  • Anonymous

    There are enough regular readers on this website to  move the stats on DistroWatch back in favour of Ubuntu, thus proving its inefficiency in measuring distribution popularity. Every go to http://distrowatch.com/ubuntu and tell all your friends to go there while you are at it.

  • http://hector-macias.blogspot.com Hector Macias Ayala

    The only practical purpose of distrowatch is to know when a new version of a distro comes out, and what packages versions are included in it.

  • Anonymous

    Thumbs up if you clicked on the link to arch or ubuntu’s distrowatch page multiple times

  • seamus williams

    Most of the hatered for unity comes from other linux distros that dont have the resources or the vision that ubuntu has. 

    they also dont like that they have moved away from gnome shell which the others cant do without switching to kde or xfce ect. 

    Its just childish behavior from the linux community. Ask people what linux os you have heard of it will be ubuntu. out of all the distros availible ubuntu is the best for end users. because of its cloud intergration is software centre and its appearnce and how it feels to use.

  • http://twitter.com/lag1980 Luke Guildner

    Unity (on its own) is not the reason that the latest release (11.10) has me considering leaving Ubuntu.  With the latest release, two core things have been broken for me.  First, 11.10 has removed the ability to edit a theme without having to go in to a configuration file.  Not cool, when secondary highlighted test in Eclipse ends up as white on white.  And, sound settings has broken the ability to independently control external speakers vs headphones.  This is true on all my machines, a sony laptop, HP laptop and Dell desktop.  Unless these are fixed in 12.04 I will be unwilling to wade through bad builds waiting for Unity to reach stability.

  • Omer Akram

    Spaleta anyone?

  • ABIR SADIK

    wow this might be the worst article i have ever read in this website

  • http://profiles.google.com/wvoutlaw2002 T.H.E. Outlaw

    I honestly cannot stand DisinfoWatch. Sometimes I wonder if DistroWatch – I mean DisinfoWatch – was infiltrated by Microsoft agents hell-bent on fracturing the Linux community and causing infighting.

  • ABIR SADIK

    peace out ubuntu.

  • http://twitter.com/tancrackers John C

    The homepage hits statistic shows a whopping 38+% as an unspecified Linux distro. Doesn’t that invalidate the stats altogether? What if 20% of that is Mint let’s say? We would never know.

  • syncdram syncdram

    If Distrowatch is not relevant then one Must assume neither is omg ubuntu

  • Peter Szollosi

    Ironically: ‘Distowatch used to be punctual but now it’s all wrong’
    Seriously: This blog was good in the past. What happened with you, guys?

  • http://facebook.com/domcan2 1roxtar

    It’s ironic that bloggers that are critical of Ubuntu have to be treated as being “factual”, “objective” or exercising their right of free speech.  To contradict their views or showing favor to Ubuntu and Unity stamps us as being fan-boys, trolls, or dumbed-down idiots.  The article author shared his perspective and he gets labeled a “an irate 12 year old ubuntu fanboy that forgot his Ritalin”.  This is a website about Ubuntu by people who like Ubuntu.  I can accept people sharing their feelings against Ubuntu, but don’t belittle anyone who really likes Ubuntu (with Unity).  Regardless, of anyone’s opinion’s, I am running Ubuntu 11.10.  I have a fully functional desktop that doesn’t get in my way, is a thing of beauty and just works.  Ubuntu FTW!!!

  • Rakesh iyer

    i dont think ubuntu is losing popularity but linux mint is definitely gaining in popularity.
    and there’s a simple reason they offer a desktop which can play movies and mp3s out of the box, which helps people moving from other platforms to linux.
    linux mint isnt eating into ubuntu’s popularity but rather the popularity of other distros especially fedora and opensuse
    best option ubuntu has is if blogs like yours create a post on “how to install ubuntu” and have flash and media working by default cos you are definetly going to be in the 1st page results

  • Anonymous

    Passionate stuff.  Terrible post.  Two observations :

    1. The Ubuntu boys and girls sounds like Debian did when Ubuntu launched.  Ironic, given that Ubuntu is based off Debian and Mint is based off Ubuntu.

    2. Distrowatch stats are only a useful metric for either very young distros, or of completely unbiased/new users starting to use linux.  Debian doesn’t score highly because no-one uses Distrowatch to figure out that they need to use it.  It could be construed as a “good thing” that Ubuntu is declining on their stats, as Ubuntu now spreads becuase of a) existing users helping others install it, b) LoCos c) Word of mouth d) reputation.

    In summary, nothing to see here, carry on.

  • http://twitter.com/kotaweaver Kota Weaver

    I don’t dispute the claims that DistroWatch is not an accurate measure of a Linux distribution’s popularity, but I believe it does reflect the popularity within the more Linux-savvy community.

    Regardless, the real reason I wanted to post was because I was disgusted by the immature way that this article was written and the attacks on other sites that are quite frankly, very similar to this one.  I used to use Ubuntu a couple years ago, but now I use openSUSE/Arch, and felt a little offended by the provocative character of the article.

    Not sure if I want to continue reading OMGUbuntu after this…

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_GE4EYP3QOQ246PLG2Y2DOD2NIQ Dr. Fly

    Wow, leave it to Benjamin Humphrey to write the controversial articles pointing out the truth so bluntly. I haven’t seen so much irate activity over one article since the whole “neckbeards” incident.

    P.S. I’ve gladly contributed my 20+ clicks to the DistroWatch Arch link. That’s it, let’s make the Mint fans seem like they’re switching to Arch!

  • Dr. Insano

    This unprofessional entry made me unsubscribe from the omgubuntu RSS.

  • Juhani

    I’m sorry to see OMG Ubuntu’s article quality drop lately. This site is my #1 source for news articles about Ubuntu and Linux in general.

    I used to be Ubuntu user but moved on because I don’t think that Unity usability is not good enough and started to obstruct my work. I’m still checking out every Ubuntu release to see if the problems are fixed and I can come back. My approach to Linux has always been choice. In my case I choose to leave Ubuntu for now and use Mint as it seems to be better suited to my way of working right now. It’s not the first time I’ve changed my distro. It is probably 10th or so I’ve used for a longer period of time. I don’t understand the distro bashing here. What’s the point?

    I left Ubuntu for now and I hope I don’t have to leave OMG Ubuntu too. This website needs to step up it editorial control of articles.

    • http://corrytonapple.myopenid.com/ Corrytonapple

      Just wondering, what distro are you on now?

  • http://devonyoung.com Devon

    What?? People are measuring Linux distro usage by the hits to info pages at Distrowatch? That’s insane. Those pages have NOTHING to do with usage. In my case, I’ve been using Ubuntu since early July. My Dad’s been using it for about 6 weeks now. Neither of us have ever been to an Ubuntu info page at Distrowatch. Although, I have been to several other distro’s info pages at Distrowatch… to see if I might be interested in trying them. So if I understand this right, I just got logged as using several distro’s I haven’t even tried but only considered. LOL

  • http://corrytonapple.myopenid.com/ Corrytonapple

    To Start:  I am willing to use any Debian based OS, for as long as it just works.  I’m willing to configure stuff, and I enjoy screwing around with my system.
    Now, I do believe that distrowatch is not reliable as a source of information as far as how many users per distro go.  I cannot think of a true way to measure statistics for both OSes without some major con.  But I can say, I too believe Ubuntu is loosing its ground.  I used to use Ubuntu, I started when 10.04 just had come out.  10.04 was awesome, it just worked. 10.10  broke my system, made it so the computer (laptop) could never suspend.  Hibernate didn’t work either. 11.04 was alright, but it came from an upgrade from 10.04 > 10.10 > 11.04.  I did a fresh install of 11.10 on netinstall.  It was full of issues, and upon installing it two separate times with GNOME SHELL, within a week the system was grounded.  I went back to simplier times, to Debian Wheezy (Testing).  I did a netinstall of that, and had no issues.  I’ve been using it for two weeks now, no issues.  I’m customizing a lot, and support is crazy.  I didn’t have to change to anything new, and I’m loving it.  Ubuntu is loosing its users, admit slowly, because of them not listening to users.  They come out with new features, but not updates to grave bugs.  They don’t listen to what their users want, and they through Unity at an unstable time to their users.  People who didn’t like it, like me (Or didn’t even see it due to 3D drivers) just used GNOME 2 until they upgraded to GNOME 3 or went to a new DE.  I believe the media makes a big deal out of the Unity switch, when really it is nothing big.Also, this article may be a bit biased being that it is about “The Not Declining Population of Ubuntu” and is published to a site called “OMG UBUNTU”, no?

  • arnold taylor

    The Ultimate Edition distro on Distrowatch continues to move up, without a release in over a year. I attribute this to heavy sampling and fanboys.
    This is just and example how the hits are rigged on Distrowatch by fanboys.

  • Anonymous

    When I started my journey into the Linux world back in 2006, I came across Distrowatch.com and confirmed that Ubuntu was the top of the list distro at the moment. This led me to download it and I eventually stuck to it. So distrowatch is far from being useless, as you state in your article. I’m still sticking to Ubuntu, but the Maverick version. It’s been impossible to install any newer versions because the just won’t install on a laptop with Intel integrated video, which is a regression that has not been fixed in over a year. THESE are the problems that Canonical should try to fix, not a stupid desktop!!!

  • http://twitter.com/JRafaelRojasS Rafael Rojas

    I will not say that this looks written by an angry 12 year old ubuntu user, i will just so some quotes:

    “DistroWatch is not an accurate measurement of Linux distribution popularity. In fact it’s not an accurate measurement of anything.”

    Probably the best idea would be to take a look at the distribution’s page on Facebook. Here you can see that Ubuntu has over 500,000 “fans” whereas Linux Mint has 14,000. Similar trends exist on Google+ or Twitter. Even Google Trends shows Ubuntu clearly ahead.

    Now, speaking of an accurate way of measuring a distro popularity and yet taking facebook likes for granted? explain me that.

    Just to give some perspective:

    9GAG has 455,000 likes
    4CHAN more or less 100,000
    Justin Bieber 15 million.

    I mean i can post on facebook a lolcat and get 100+ likes, so does those random and thoughtless act of “facebook like” can be measured as “yes I use ubuntu”?

    BTW. I’m a Fedora user since 2006, and i clicked “i like” to the ubuntu facebook  page and i don’t use ubuntu, and i think i’m not the only one.

    Same with twitter, google plus and all the social networks, explain how Distrowatch is not reliable and facebook is?

  • Ney Walens Mesquita
  • http://claimid.com/case Case

    I disagree. My grandpa (not very techie) who was loving Ubuntu no longer uses it (went to Mint). I have a lot of friends in IT (hostgator and such) who are telling me that they and their co-workers are all switching to different distros (mainly debian + gnome2). I’m trying to stick in there but the lack of customizability is making it hard (not just with Unity but Gnome3 as well). I also see quite a few negative comments on IRC and Twitter. Sorry, but I think you’re to blinded by fanboyism to see the truth.

  • http://twitter.com/Jebril Pedo Bear

    The fact that people are using Distrowatch to back OS usage, is laughable. Seriously..the hell? 

  • http://www.facebook.com/hein.hanssen Hein Hanssen

    Whatever. Even negative news can be supportive as we know from Windows. There is at least buzz about Ubuntu and this makes people aware there’s something else out there apart from Windows and OSX.

    What we should do is unite and create more noise: we should let the world know that Ubuntu as a desktop OS is great and there is no need for paying extra for an operating system if you can get something as great as Ubuntu.

    And let us work not only at spreading the word, but also act in favor of Ubuntu and in stead of wining about Unity try to make it better: report bugs, take part in official discussions and start coding if you know how to.

  • http://xamili.thermokr.asia Κατσέας Σάββας

    To the author: 

    Pweety pwease. This isn’t the high quality content OMG! Ubuntu! is known for. It’s not that your logic is flawed or the information you provide incorrect — it’s the article’s tone that’s bothering me. I’d rather read your insights without the 13-year-old-boy drama. And that’s that.

  • Bas Dalenoord

    It seems you’re interpreting this chart wrong… it is about market share, whilst having less percentage, it can mean that Ubuntu actually gained users. This just means that other distros gained more users. I for one am actually an ex-Ubuntu user because of sluggishness and bad configuration possibilities… but that might be due to my high expectations… :D

  • Paltry pal

    Todays Ubuntu is a lot more buggier than what was ubuntu 10.10.
    Since unity has been included.. it has gone cpu and memory hogging.
    I was so happy with the performance uptill ububtu 10.10.

    Just because windows and mac are adding new advancement to UI doesnt mean that ubuntu starts developing and putting something that breaks the working of ubuntu.
    Its good that 6 month release cycle brings new changes in very short span,but it doesnt mean that just to make additions one adds buggier interfaces which are not mandatory.
    Look at the features incorporated nowadays.. only changing what default packages are included and what not(put banshee in .. oh no.. put banshee out put clamentine.. etc etc.)

    Ubuntu is ony changing aesthetics and no usability improvements since last two releases.

  • Baturay Palas

    Personally, I didn’t migrate to Linux Mint or any other distro but the Kubuntu. Thank you Mr. Shuttleworth and Unity developers, you inspired me to use KDE! 

  • Anonymous

    Distrowatch may not be the best metric, but I know one that could very likely be better: 

    http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2C+linux+mint

    It appears it’s been on a slow decline; dropping back to where it was in 2006, whilst Linux Mint only has the tiniest amount of popularity, with a spike beginning now

  • Yi Sun-sin

    Distrowatch is operated by a narrow-minded bigot.
    Proof :
    http://ubuntusatanic.org/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=63&page=1

    • Connor Bruce

      That’s neither narrow minded nor bigoted, but reasonable. If someone is idiotic enough to label their distro something they know others will find offensive, why on earth do they then complain when people do?

      • Yi Sun-sin

        Other ? Who are other ?
        Steve Ballmer found any linux distribution name offensive, you know.
        But it sure seems that the guy running DistroWatch give precedence to those finding Ubuntu Satanic Edition offensive over those who find Ubuntu Christian Edition or Ubuntu Muslim Edition offensive. Which is definitely bigotry.

        • Connor Bruce

          You’re getting confused. By your logic any extremism is OK and has to be accepted, as long as ‘someone’ thinks it is a good idea.

          Satanic Edition has nothing to do with religion. It is named for effect, so you cannot compare it with other religious editions. Besides which, democracy is quite simply majority rule – if the majority of people find something offensive – it is offensive, regardless of the opinions of the minority. One person’s opinion is quite simply, insignificant.

          The problem with the young these days is that they seem to think that having an opinion and free speech somehow empowers them to say whatever they wish and that other people should take notice and value their opinions – they are wrong. 

          The guy running distro watch made the right decision, otherwise where should he draw the line? Racist editions? Homophobic? Misandric? Misogynist? And who should decide other than him?

          I also think that the witch hunt on distro watch is frankly, out of order. You cannot blame distro watch for Ubuntu’s declining popularity, anymore than you can blame crime on the people printing the statistics.

          • Yi Sun-sin

            Extremism ? Which extremism ? Does Ubuntu Satanic look like a cradle of extremism ?
            Oh, yeah, you’re just going cliché. And I guess people using Christian Edition kills abortion doctor every week-end, not to mention what those using Muslim edition are doing, am I right ?
            Majority of people ? Which people ? Did I append to miss the vote ?
            If you honestly believe satanism has nothing to do with religion, I guess you have an awful lack of knowledge. And I guess you would be one of the very first people being offended by satanism for no religious principle.
            And the simple fact you are comparing satanism with racism, homophobia and misogyny clearly shows you are a bigot too.

            Once you’ve decided to put on a list of distribution, moral integrity binds you not to censor it based on your (or “the majority’s unspoken wish”) religious preference, but to include every distribution whose name is not against the law (which rules out racism, homophobia and misanthropy in any decent country), and to include a clear warning sign explaining that you disapprove any distro name it wants to.
            But so long for moral integrity, it’s not like it was ever stronger than bigotry.

            You are completely misleading, by the way, about my relation to Ubuntu. I’m an Arch user, and I don’t give a damn about Ubuntu’s rise or decline.

            Oh, and one more thing : people offended by satanism are much more likely to be offended by Ubuntu Gay Edition than by Ubuntu Homophobic edition. And that can also qualifies for the “majority’s unspoken opinion”, thanks to all those backward societies out there. Are you going to censor Ubuntu Gay Edition ?
            Darn bigots. They are everywhere. We need ideological cleansing^w^w better education.

          • Yi Sun-sin

            Wow, my last comment is still waiting for a moderator to approve it. I wonder which keyword had it blocked from direct publication…
            So, long story short :
            - Majority without any kind of vote or poll : lol.
            - Satanism has nothing to do with religion : lol.
            - Comparing satanism with homophobia, racism and misogyny : lol
            - Ubuntu satanic edition is extremism : lol
            - People that get offended by Ubuntu Satanic Edition tend to be much more offended by homosexuality than by homophobia. Actually most homophobic people are offended by Satanic edition. They also tend to kill doctors in the US, or to blow themselves up in Pakistan, and they are Legion. They are very easily offended indeed.
            - I’m an Archer, I really don’t have the slightest interest in Ubuntu’s decline or rise. Really.

          • Yi Sun-sin

            I think the word might have been abortion. Let’s try.
            Abortion, abortions, Christians killing abortion doctors !
            [edit]Wrong pick ! I need to think about it.[/edit]

          • Connor Bruce

            Yes, I know what you mean. I don’t think that any comment that I have ever had in moderation has ever appeared.

            You don’t need a poll on every issue, just a consensus or a modicum of common sense.

            Satanism has nothing to do with religion, it is an anti-religion; a rebellion against real religion. Those claiming to be following it are merely following a modern interpretation (much like the Wiccans and the Druids) besides there is no official recognised religion of Satanism.

            YOU may not equate Satanism with things like homophobia and misogyny, but of the 2.2 billion Christians and 1.5 billion Muslims on the planet I am sure a majority of them would find the latter two more palatable than the former.

            Of course Satanism is extremism, it was set up to be precisely that. Anything starkly contrary to the opinions of the majority is extremism. Again you are trying to fit the world into your viewpoint, rather than empathising with others, just because you don’t view it as extreme doesn’t mean it is not.

            There are extremists in everything, ‘Satanists’ have likewise been responsible for some pretty heinous acts. The question is what turns people to such extremes? My view is the modern penchant for forcing the opinions and lifestyles of every Tom, Dick and Harry, no matter how niche, onto the majority. There is a lot to be said for old fashioned values of normalcy and conformity.

            Incidentally I am not religious and likewise could not care less about the rise and fall of Christianity, Islam or Satanism.

            I don’t know the owner of the distro watch, nor his home nation or that of his servers, but it is easy from an ivory tower to make judgements. Satanism is illegal still in much of the world and adherents are still punished by death in parts of it.

          • Yi Sun-sin

            Consensus among which group ? Guess what : the very same thing can be accepted by next to everybody in Saudi Arabia, and provoke shock and horror in Amsterdam. Or the other way around. I bet DistroWatch owner did not make specific studies to learn more about religious sensitivity of people visiting his website…

            Protestantism also started as “a rebellion against the real religion”. And I tend to think anti-religion is pretty much linked to religion. Basically, what you are saying is that it is only okay to say good things about religion, but saying negatives things on them must be forbidden ?

            You are perfectly summing up why I consider many christians and muslims as bigots. I don’t know where you live, but in my country, brave people have been working very hard to fight against homophobia and misogyny. And almost every actions in those fights included offending religious bigots. Then if in your eyes there being many bigots means bigotry is something great that should be promoted, ok, but don’t get upset when I say it’s bigotry.

            I guess saying the Earth is round was extremism, then. Oh, wait, it was just scientific truth !

            I loled a lot about discovering that extremism is actually something new. I mean, if it’s due to a recent evolution, it MUST be something new, isn’t it ? Ahh, the good old days when mass killing for religious reason was not extremism ! And if we have a close look at the places and cultures spawning most extremism, we can clearly see it is the most liberal places, like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia, Irak, … There, every small group can force his opinion on the majority, and it’s never the other way around… oh, wait !

            By the way, I forgot to mention it : your assumption on my age in your previous comment was based on nothing, and therefore totally irrelevant. But you seem to have a strange fetish for anything old.

          • Yi Sun-sin

            Woaw, my post that was put on hold for moderation has appeared now !

    • http://twitter.com/care_ato psyxroskianapodos

      Not again with ubuntu satanic.Jesus…errr I mean Satan
      bah whatever.

      • Yi Sun-sin

        There us only one supreme being, and his name is… Chuck Norris. All bow to Him !

  • http://twitter.com/aigarius Aigars Mahinovs

    Minor nitpick: ‘not pulling any punches’ expression does not mean that they are not punching back, it means exactly the opposite – they are punching back with full force and are not ‘pulling’ back the hand that is punching make the blow softer.
    When you say ‘… Canonical themselves aren’t pulling any punches [...] to refute the bogus claims …’, then you are saying that Canonical are shouting loud and clear and everywhere in opposition to these claims with the harshest possible language. From the context I would say that you intended to write the exact opposite, but just mixed up the metaphor.

  • http://twitter.com/chrisinspaceVA Chris Hansford

    Who cares as long as people are using Linux?  In the spectrum of available OSs, Ubuntu and Mint are next door neighbors.  This is the kind of divisive in-fighting that keeps casual users away from Linux-on-the-desktop.

  • rbfx4x

    While I do dabble from time to time, I still end up with Ubuntu on my machines although I have Jolicloud on my Sony Vaio X because of the sad state of the GMA 500 drivers. I have an old HP laptop with mint on it at the moment.

  • http://profiles.google.com/mpnordland Micah Nordland

    I clicked the link, I use arch!

  • Ricardo Almeida

    Is Google Trends wrong too?

  • Anonymous

    It doesn’t matter what DistroWatch says. Ubuntu is the best operating system ever. Fact.

    Although I’m sure this article was written with the intention of winding people up.

  • Anonymous

    Almost everyone know ubuntu , come one i know guys that never tried to install anythin differnet on their pcs but they know ubuntu .

  • Anonymous

    Mint is Ubuntu is Debian is GNU+Linux.

    Your tribalism is pointless; meaningless. That goes for every single one of you.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_ZVPXKIQVGAXBSXOTTRKMCHSABM Andreas

    While wirting this, I am downloading Mint 12 via torrent. All I can say is: Hell, I never ever saw so many peers I could leach from! I guess the Mint image will be on my hd in less than a minute.

    Furthermore: I don’t care whether ubuntu or mint is no.1.  Everyone is free to chose what fints him/her the most (thats what free software is about, hm?)

    Unity is not made for me (I really tried, but I do not see how it could be useful to me), thats why I switch to mint. But that does not mean that I think ubuntu is not good or that people should discredit unity. It just me talking for myself.

  • Chris Kildegaard

    Here’s the thing…the writer is CORRECT. DistroWatch is merely a collection of numbers measuring nothing other than distribution PAGE HITS. Page hits cannot reliably measure the growth of a distribution, because not everyone who investigates a distro is using it, and people already using it don’t need to find out about it.

  • http://twitter.com/pedrogmanrique Pedro

    I am using ubuntu in my laptop(9.04), in my server (8.04) and in my desktop (11.10) but unity is a little heavy for my taste. I know that Win 7 its very heavy but allways my Ubuntu has been light. I like Ubuntu but Mark should search more performances in 3D games, video, etc and less innovation in SmartPhones Interfaces…

  • http://twitter.com/pedrogmanrique Pedro

    Sorry, i mean that Unity looks like a Smartphone interfaces, it is the actual fashion wave, but i am not agree that. Every thing in its place. For a touch screen is nice this kind of interface but for mouse pointer is better something more classic. Thank you.

  • http://pulse.yahoo.com/_YYYJTXRQUN3GCASI2RQEEPWL7U Matti

    It drives me absolutely pots that the greatest operating system around is unable to tell me how many copies of it is running in the world or by country, or even by city. This is not rocket science, this is programming.

    All this speculation could be avoided. There is no reason why Ubuntu could not send a virtual thumb print to a real-time counter at Canonical when a new version is installed or rather, when a newly installed version of Ubuntu first comes online.  Better still, do it monthly or quarterly to validate that the said machine is still running. 
    Mark, make it easy to be proud of us!

  • Arthur Moore

    I think it’s good that Mint’s popularity is growing, first it means more people are using Linux and Debian based is becoming the norm for Linux, and secondly, it also provides Ubuntu with some feedback on what users want.

  • isk sul

    wheres backtrack? LOL!

  • Jack Holt

    It’s strange that you should say that it’s nonsense to say that people are leaving Ubuntu for Linux Mint.  That’s exactly what I have done.  So add my name to the list of nonsensical people who just want the user interface to get out of our way and return to something that will allow us to get our work done.  Running Linux Mint 12 “Lisa” (at least as long as Unity is used in Ubuntu)

  • Chuck Talk

    The absolutely funny thing about Mint is that it appears to rely completely on Canonical to do the heavy lifting and then is always behind on the Ubuntu development. It never catches up and the real reason Mint appears to have an argument is that it will not be as easy to follow the Ubuntu distribution for their development. Just another reason never loaded Mint; not quite as up-to-date for my taste. YMMV though.

  • Nithin C

    I am an Ubuntu user from 2006. I used to suggest Ubuntu to friends from that time itself. But people used to complain that its interface is not even comparable with Windows. But after the introduction of Unity I found many people are Interested in Ubuntu. Ubuntu 11.10 with unity was hell and I switched back to classic desktop. Then came Ubuntu 11.10. Thinking that unity will be hell I installed Gnome and found that it has no similarity with old Gnome. The menu bar used to have 3 parts earlier but in new there are only two. I found it very difficult to use the classic desktop (which was made non-usable for me with the new changes). So finally I switched to Unity. For my surprise Unity was a very pleasant experience in 11.10. Now I am a fan of Ubuntu. I found many of my friends also using Unity now. I see many people getting interested in Ubuntu because of new interface. So I feel Ubuntu is gaining popularity rather than loosing.

  • http://twitter.com/WayneLl0yd Wayne Lloyd

    In my opinion the stats for Mint are purely a result of peoples fear of change, it appears a lot of people are switching to Mint to stay with something familiar “Windows” I switched myself until I got sick of Mints inconsistencies. I forced myself to use Unity and its actually very good and it seems to get better as it matures, I have seen mock-ups for Unity on all types of devices and it seems to make sense the direction its heading, just like it did with cloud integration that other OS’s are now only starting to use.

  • Anonymous

    What the author says is right. Distrowatch is not an accurate representation. net-a-holics and distro-hopers often visit distrowatch. The website also explains that the figures only show the link to that distro.

    To accurately know the actual usage is not possible by seeing distrowatch ranking or facebook or twitter. I can have both facebook and twitter a/c. So I will give 2 votes. After a month, I try Mint 12 and give it a like on facebook. Not even the number of downloads or CDs sold or distributed can accurately give the number of users. Some may copy CDs and give it to friends. Some share single CD to install. Not every user register at forums. In short accurate figure cannot be obtained from Online resources. 

    Best way to gain accurate statistics, IMO, is to have a registration from the OS. Like Ubuntu friendly. Just like windows programs and windows have an activation key. Since everything is free, so after every fresh install, if Ubuntu can automatically send statistics with all the data like version number and PC architect. This will give near accurate results, atleast much better than all these fuss. The point is will to Community accept this step, or is it too much privary intruding.

    To a certain point, I agree to the author and the negative remarks about Gnome 3 and Unity made me to visit distrowatch. So obviously, i will not look at Ubuntu, since I already have it installed. I am going to look for another distros and begin with *buntu derivatives.  It is natural that Ubuntu’s rating will stay or decline and hits of all other distros will increase. These negative comments made me to look for an alternative. Had Gnome 3 and Unity did not received negative comments, I would not have bothered to go for another distro. I have 10.04 and plan to upgrade to 12.04. As an end user, I do not tweak much than changing wallpapers :)

    Regarding switching from Windows to Linux, I was prepared to learn new things. There is also a learning curve if you upgrade from XP to Win 7. IF Gnome 3 and Unity are not good DEs than better shift to another distro, mostly Mint.

  • Anonymous

    Some how my comment vanished :(
    What the author says is right. Distrowatch is not an accurate representation. net-a-holics and distro-hopers often visit distrowatch. The website also explains that the figures only show the link to that distro.

    To accurately know the actual usage is not possible by seeing distrowatch ranking or facebook or twitter. I can have both facebook and twitter a/c. So I will give 2 votes. After a month, I try Mint 12 and give it a like on facebook. Not even the number of downloads or CDs sold or distributed can accurately give the number of users. Some may copy CDs and give it to friends. Some share single CD to install. Not every user register at forums. In short accurate figure cannot be obtained from Online resources. 

    Best way to gain accurate statistics, IMO, is to have a registration from the OS. Like Ubuntu friendly. Just like windows programs and windows have an activation key. Since everything is free, so after every fresh install, if Ubuntu can automatically send statistics with all the data like version number and PC architect. This will give near accurate results, atleast much better than all these fuss. The point is will to Community accept this step, or is it too much privary intruding.

    To a certain point, I agree to the author and the negative remarks about Gnome 3 and Unity made me to visit distrowatch. So obviously, i will not look at Ubuntu, since I already have it installed. I am going to look for another distros and begin with *buntu derivatives.  It is natural that Ubuntu’s rating will stay or decline and hits of all other distros will increase. These negative comments made me to look for an alternative. Had Gnome 3 and Unity did not received negative comments, I would not have bothered to go for another distro. I have 10.04 and plan to upgrade to 12.04. As an end user, I do not tweak much than changing wallpapers :)

    Regarding switching from Windows to Linux, I was prepared to learn new things. There is also a learning curve if you upgrade from XP to Win 7. IF Gnome 3 and Unity are not good DEs than better shift to another distro, mostly Mint.

  • Joshua Muzyka

    Hate to say it but I ditched Ubuntu for Linux Mint months ago because of Unity and faulty graphics drivers along with a slew of other issues I was having with Ubuntu (in the new versions). 

    I like Ubuntu and will try 11.10 now, but I work with my computer and needed a stable OS. Mint offered that.

  • Guest

    This blog stirred a lot of frustration and anger. People are arguing over stats, legitimacy of source claims, whether someone should like or dislike a distro, what’s good with one distro over another, and on and on. The very people who suggested the author of this blog acted like a child are acting like children. A mature adult could accept other’s opinions as purely their opinion.

    I am a proud Linux user. I use Ubuntu 10.04 on two machines, and 11.10 on a third machine. When I read something like the comments here, I am no longer proud to be part of the “Linux Community”.

    As far as unity is concerned, I agree that it is a bad execution of a good idea. Give ubuntu some time. They will work out the bugs and unify Unity.

  • http://twitter.com/Psygo Psygo

    I see a few errors (including the fact that he misspelled Linux). This indeed does sound like a whinny fanboy that has do no research.

  • http://twitter.com/Azthma Azthma

    Mint Linux team is doing what we call fake Buzz. 
    I just hate the fact of recompiling a distro and retheming the Desktop manager (Gnome Shell deriative) and say: Mint Linux rocks and it’s better than Ubuntu. Why, because soo many user whom have for years used to Gnome desktop, were shocked to see Unity emerge from nowhere and break their habits. 
    Now that Unity 5.0 is here, I noticed that most of users that use Gnome Shell are now tempted by Unity. 

    Mint Linux is a tendency that I describe as being an expression of sulking against Unity.  Stop sulking mint guys and focus on taking ubuntu to a great level where Microsoft would find no clue on how to reach it anymore…;

  • shubham maheshwari

    ubuntu the best

 
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