Will Ubuntu Linux Hit 200 Million Users This Year?

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Will Ubuntu Linux Hit 200 Million Users This Year?

It's been four years and two weeks since Mark Shuttleworth expressed his goal of "200 million users of Ubuntu in 4 years." While Ubuntu's presence has continued to increase over the past four years, it doesn't look like that goal has been realized yet or will be by the end of the calendar year...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=2015-200-Million-Goal-Retro

[gens]

well, two days ago i installed xubuntu to replace winXP on a friends laptop
so that's +1

PS what the f does this have to do with gnome ?

[Michael]

well, two days ago i installed xubuntu to replace winXP on a friends laptop
so that's +1

PS what the f does this have to do with gnome ?

Just wrong category selection when at the time also thinking back about GNOME's 10x10 goal....

[gens]

Just wrong category selection when at the time also thinking back about GNOME's 10x10 goal....

idk why put market share as a goal at all
well, ubuntu at least has something to gain from it

[sarmad]

Is the Ubuntu phone already selling? Any idea how well is it doing?

[rmiller]

Phoronix: Will Ubuntu Linux Hit 200 Million Users This Year?

No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines

[Luke]

I suspect Unity on desktop/laptop installs by default is what slowed the growth of Ubuntu installs. Spring 2011 was when MS was just recovering from their Vista nightmare, something that had fueled a rapid growth of Linux desktops. The switch to heavy and unfamilar desktops suddenly reversed that comparison just as Windows 7 was becoming common. I still remember the boot speed race between Ubuntu Lucid with the then new upstart and plymouth vs Windows 7. To the above posters: this has a LOT to do with GNOME, someone claimed GNOME 3 halted the growth of Linux on the desktop as it was too different from what incoming Windows users were used to. The Ubuntu team was smart to recommend Lubuntu for replacing XP and not Unity, especially given that some of the old XP boxes have OpenGL issues that would force them into LLVMpipe with GNOME 3, Cinnamon, or Unity. In Spring 2011 MATE had not been forked yet or this whole mess would have been avoided! Ubuntu originally offered Unity on their netbook remix, aimed at saving screen space on what was then the fast growing mobile format. Unity and GNOME 3 should been developed only for small touch devices, using only compiled code and not JS for performance reasons in GNOME's case. For incoming users only familiar with smartphones and NOT familiar with any desktop, these interfaces could have developed into something perfect for their needs, Thus, we need both the new and the old style interfaces, for two different groups of users, not necessarily devices. MS somehow didn't catch this, their Windows 8 experiment failed to learn from GNOME 3 and Unity.

[k1l_]

Well, here it is again: The issue to count Linuxusers. Ubuntuusers in this case.

There are no Keys or no Accounts, so its really hard to get straight facts. Counting the 1% Share from Steam doesn help, imho. You could count the package usage from the repo-servers but some others will tell then, that its test-enviroments in vbox etc and not real installs. So its all about guessing.

My guessing is: yes, there are a lot more Ubuntu users then there was 5 years ago. But how much, hmmm, does it really matter?

[belal1]

I would think only canonical can state how many users they actually have, but then even then it wouldn't be completely accurate.

[rikkinho]

steam usage is not real. i never receive the survey and i use steam linux almost every day... some games don?t come to linux like the garbage call of duty or gta V(ppl have a dual boot only for this games) some ppl simply don?t like valve and steam eula, other are not gamers,and there is many more ubuntu machines today than 3/4 years ago the big problem is the marketing and the garbage IT techs in stores at least in europe, no information and monopoly by MS and apple, i?m from portugal a broken country who continues to spend millions for year with xp machines

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