All The Places You Can Find Ubuntu

There's still no agreement or way to define exactly how many Ubuntu users there are in the world, but we all know that it's a lot.

At the end of last year I wrote about how It Doesn't Look Like Ubuntu Reached Its Goal Of 200 Million Users This Year. Two hundred million Ubuntu users was a goal set by Mark Shuttleworth four years prior. At that time he wasn't entirely clear whether he meant just desktop users and servers, their ambitions for Ubuntu on TVs, phones, and other consumer electronic devices, or what. Or if one individual firing up hundreds of Ubuntu VMs would be counted as one or many. But I and many others took it to mean actual Ubuntu users running bare metal installs of Ubuntu on hardware within their possession, similar to how many others would count an OS installation.

By that measurement, they didn't meet that milestone as even with official Ubuntu.com information indicated in the tens of millions users. Let's not forget the overall Linux desktop market-share is a few percent or less depending upon your interpretation and who's data you believe. But among Linux distributions, we all know Ubuntu is near/at the top depending upon the market segment.

But Dustin Kirkland of Canonical responded to that earlier piece by saying Ubuntu has more than one billion users. Kirkland's count includes people who use services that run on Ubuntu, like PayPal, Dropbox, Uber, Walmart, and the many other IT infrastructures that rely upon Ubuntu considering it dominates in the cloud.

Over on Ubuntu.com Insights is now a post today with "How many people use Ubuntu?" and has created an infographic with this information from Kirkland. Click the link to check it out in full if you're curious.

It's a nice infographic regardless of whether you count Tesla car owners, Uber users, Reddit and Instagram users, and others as being Ubuntu users and shows just how far Ubuntu has grown in the past 12 years. (By that same logic though, I guess all Windows 10 users will soon be counted as Ubuntu users too with the Ubuntu user-space becoming available on Windows 10?)