Kirkland: Over One Billion Ubuntu Users

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Kirkland: Over One Billion Ubuntu Users

In response to my article this past weekend about It Doesn't Look Like Ubuntu Reached Its Goal Of 200 Million Users This Year, Dustin Kirkland of Canonical's Ubuntu Product and Strategy team has come out to say that number should be over one billion...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Ubuntu-One-Billion

[stevenc]

By his reasoning then, I am a tampon user, because some of the companies I've dealt with this year had employees who used them.

[birdie]

Unless they jointly start working on the common Linux ecosystem (which currently doesn't exist in any form), there will never be more than 2% of Linux users on the desktop.

There's no Linux to speak of. There are many wildly different Linux compilations which cater only to their creators and no one else.

[bug77]

Is "I bet there are over a billion people..." his best argument?

[lvlark]

Why the hate? Michael and Dustin agree that it all comes down to how you count them. For to reach the 200M, you probably need to count in a different way than Mark Shuttleworth originally had in mind. Dustins post is a bit creative to reach such a high number, I'll give you that, but in doing so, he rightfully points out that Ubuntu has a huge reach.

[Rich Oliver]

Its funny, Canonical don't even attempt to hide their contempt for Linux desktop users. First there was Unity and then Mir. Canonical have further fragmented the Linux Desktop. If Ubuntu had captured 5 or 10% of the desktop then maybe it would be legitimate for them to produce their own GUI desktop, but they haven't. If Canonical were using their position as the leading Linux Desktop to expand the Linux user base it would be different. Canonical completely frittered away the Windows 8 opportunity.

Linux Desktop needs to serve both power users / developers and ordinary users. Ubuntu have totally misused their position of dominance.

[bug77]

Its funny, Canonical don't even attempt to hide their contempt for Linux desktop users. First there was Unity and then Mir. Canonical have further fragmented the Linux Desktop. If Ubuntu had captured 5 or 10% of the desktop then maybe it would be legitimate for them to produce their own GUI desktop, but they haven't. If Canonical were using their position as the leading Linux Desktop to expand the Linux user base it would be different. Canonical completely frittered away the Windows 8 opportunity.

Linux Desktop needs to serve both power users / developers and ordinary users. Ubuntu have totally misused their position of dominance.

While I don't like Unity and I haven't cared about Mir enough to check what it brings to the table, you have to understand Canonical is a private company and not a non-profit organization. As such, one of the things they have to do is differentiate. We can debate all day whether they really need to differentiate through a new desktop environment is the way to go, but it doesn't change the fact they'll still do what they (think they) have to do.

[DMJC]

As a long term user, I'd argue that the only major improvements to Linux in a desktop sense in the last 10 years have been: Open Source Video Drivers (minimal impact at the moment but shortly will have huge impact), network-manager (finally brought wireless/cabled/mobile networking under control), Pulseaudio (surround sound/multi-device management), Xfree86 to Xorg migration (fixed X11's major shortcomings). Pretty much all the other changes have been either agnostic, or negative. I definitely include into that the re-workings of systemd and other components which have not added to functionality (speeding up boot times by 3-35 seconds is irrelevant when most people sleep their battery powered machines now. Also the ill-will and infighting over the transition has hurt community cooperation.). Gnome's fragmentation has massively hurt desktop adoption. We should have been picking up millions of pissed off users when Windows 8/10 were released, instead all of that ill-will against Microsoft has been wasted. Users are either getting on with Windows 10 or a small number are migrating to Mac. GTK is a mess now, I've been trying to find GTK 2 to 3 migration guides including for gtkmm and the documentation is woeful. There are no examples of howto migrate applications, just tons of posts saying X is deprecated use Y now, without explaining how to. I'm not talking about simple function drop-ins either. Entire concepts of things such as pixbufs have been re-engineered and there is no documentation for migration. Anyone complaining about half this stuff is getting shut down with "systemd isn't the problem you're the problem for not liking systemd" or RTFM and re-learn the API from scratch when the API hasn't been documented and hasn't got examples... makes it a total pain in the ass for someone who is working on code on an ad-hoc volunteer basis. A lot of open source projects are being developed on weekends and after work by people because they want to liberate themselves from Windows. relearning APIs/migrating to newer APIs is a burden, but it's something which can be tolerated if proper support is available. Right now I'm not seeing evidence of that. GTK/GTKMM documentation needs a massive overhaul. I know this post rambled a bit and crossed a few topics but there's a sense I'm seeing, that Ubuntu stopped being helpful around the 10/12 series and since then has been jamming a lot of stuff in which is not helping to gain adoption.

[stevenc]

By emphasizing the use of Ubuntu in the cloud and at the corporations listed, that will keep shareholders optimistic, but at the same time it shows a certain disregard for the desktop users. Maybe it's true then, that the Ubuntu desktop distro will soon be ditched in favour of its business offerings?

[Passso]

Maybe it's true then, that the Ubuntu desktop distro will soon be ditched in favour of its business offerings?

I do not think so. Ubuntu is still a pretty good desktop environment, and the only one winning in the touch screen convergence.

I was one of the first to be puzzled in front of Unity but on a daily basis it is really good and Ubuntu remains really stable if you do not try to tweak it too much.