More people use Ubuntu than anyone actually knows
blog.dustinkirkland.com
blog.dustinkirkland.com
It is also interesting to watch people like my mom, who never used another desktop before, learn Ubuntu. Then I showed her a Mac desktop and a Windows one and she said "they are not user friendly" -- I thought was pretty funny.
But I also hear a lot of hate from developers about Ubuntu lately -- "It is not really free", "They changed my Gnome desktop, I'll never use this piece of crap again". "They hate systemd and invented their own thing!. --No, they adopted systemd now. --Oh... ok, well they still have a stupid user interface!". Kind of stuff.
What a bunch of whiners and complainers. Before that it was complaints for a decade -- Linux on desktop. "Year of the Linux Desktop -- such a joke". We had Mandriva, Redhat, Gentoo, others for years and they couldn't create desktop usable for average people -- hardware support was bad, interface sucked, design was bad, still had to use command lines to configure things etc. Then Ubuntu came, tried to do something about it, and while not perfect, made a huge improvement. Now it is possible for normal users to use a Linux desktop and many are using it as such. And because developers use it for development, the server version also ends up in production often.
If you switch distributions forever because you refuse to install a single package to get a different desktop, you might be a complainer.
Year of the Linux Desktop -- such a joke
This has not made sense for over a decade.
The release of RedHat 8.0 in 2002 brought Linux UI up to reasonable standards of general-public friendliness. Anybody shouting this ridiculous canard after that point is likely just shilling for the proprietary industry.
The year of the Linux desktop, arguably, was 2011, when Android 4.0 was released, and brought Android up to the performance standards of iOS.
But have desktops really been eclipsed by notebooks outside of my little bubble? I don't know very many people who even own a notebook, and I personally only have one for work.
Yes, it's been possible for quite some time to install Linux on laptops. But to actually use a laptop with Linux on it, things like power management need to work out of the box without lots of configuration by the end user. Linux support for ACPI has only very recently become solid to the point that I don't need to worry about it.
And as far as notebook ownership eclipsing desktop ownership, notebook sales eclipsed desktops long ago, around 2004. For most people, unless they're PC gamers, notebooks have offered sufficient computing power for more than a decade.
Gnome on the other hand does the whole live animation thing for every window on every desktop and it is still mega fast even on my oldest machines. I press the button and basically instantly I am able to start typing and launching the app I need.
but it was removed after 12.04 if I'm not mistaken. That is why I still use 12.04 on a couple laptops. I think the time is running out for 12.04 updates, so I will need to change to something else. There is always gnome-session-flashback, I guess. Not sure if the kids will like it/want it, as they're used to Unity and it's their laptops...
But, I recently installed the new Ubuntu Mate and it is awesome! Gnome2 with a modern menu, which is probably the pinnacle of free desktops until the newer ones mature, fix their usability issues, and reverse decisions to cripple their interface(s). I mean its a fucking workstation, and they are still chasing the grandma market who moved on to iPads five years ago.
Also, for the first time in years my laptop suspends/resumes perfectly. I've had about a 1/5 chance of crashing during either as long as I can remember. No longer under Wily.
But I also noticed at the same time, my hardware on the laptop worked and the UI was smoother and more consistent. So saw enough improvements with each release to keep me happy with it.
Maybe at some point I stopped being a Linux distro hobbyist who was interested in what individual packages were called, and what kernel version each ran. I used to love that stuff. I started with Mandrake Linux, used Redhat, Gentoo for a while. But then stopped being interested in that became sort of an ignorant user that just wants his dev environment, (compilers), language packages, wifi, trackpad to work etc.
This is exactly why I have been using Ubuntu for years. If I cared about customizing every little thing and using the lastest packages then I might use Arch. I just don't have the time for that crap any more.
Ubuntu's original mission was to make a desktop for the general user, as every other desktop distro out there was already available for the technical user.
Ubuntu has arguably not succeeded at either, except by accident with Ubuntu Mate. It still isn't as cohesive and complete as Windows 2000 was, which was good for technical and general users alike. SGIs were pretty good too.
I'll give you some examples. Since the early 90's NT has supported custom gui themes, you can change colors in a theme in a few clicks. It has had a gui service manager to administer service daemons, very easy to use. (Windows has actually gotten worse also!)
This is the correct level of abstraction for a workstation. The two choices given today between broken/absent and crippled/too-difficult are no choice at all.
These things still don't exist under free desktops decades later! Or they may have existed for a few years until the next CADT wave broke them.
That said, as someone who used Windows 98 through 7 on my development platforms, my WTFs/minutes is very elevated on a Windows 10 machine.
you spend a couple hours (not even really) setting up a few pieces of software.
Your reward is not to be saddled with unity trash until you realize it's a piece of crap and go back to windows (or OS X).
Your apt-get scenario only works if what you're looking for is in the official repositories. If not, you have to add those repositories first. That's a lucky menu find in the Ubuntu installer or some random add repo command with some possibly untrusted domain in it.
Then... You get random install errors. Missing so files or package dependencies etc.
Trust me, I've done more googling trying to install stuff on Ubuntu than I ever did on Windows. At least with windows if you had the exe or msi file you were dons 99% of the time. And you almost always found that file on the site for that program.
And IMO Unity is the better DE. But I wouldn't say Ubuntu is the better overall UX. OS X has my least favorite DE. But I think it has the better overall experience. I've been using OS X for about 2 years now and I can't remember a time it came out with stuff for me to solve.
On Ubuntu recently I had to change the default kernel it was using and recompile my graphic drivers after an update, not that hard a task but not something an end user should have to go through. I've used Ubuntu 12 and am now using the 14 and it really has improved a lot both on reliability and UX, but it may take a lot of work to get it to be reliable depending on your hardware.
My dream DE would be something like DWM but without the tiling stuff, more features included out of the box and written in a higher level language.
That being said, it had less trouble with my network printer than Windows does.
I get the appeal of Linux, but I did not have a grandma-friendly experience.
The only criticism I can relate to in this is the boot partition filling with old linux images, it really doesn't make sense that cleaning those out isn't done automatically by default.
Edit: http://askubuntu.com/questions/206710/how-do-i-disable-unity...
???
Now I've bootcamped my mac and swapped out my desktop Arch installation in favor of Windows 10. There are undoubtedly things that I miss - and I wouldn't be doing this if I wasn't primarily writing C# - but it's not quite the purgatory I'd imagined / remembered it being.
Thanks, but I have better things to do with my time than chasing settings in the system, whose vendor does not respect my choices.
Yes, I keep telling myself that I'm going to dual-boot my Surface Pro 3 with Arch, but I never get around to it, in large part because Windows 10 just isn't that bad.
I always hated that Windows didn't have a [useful] terminal, cmd doesn't really cut it, but once I realized how deep you can actually go with Powershell, I've integrated it into our companies build process.
Hopefully, I can return and get an inspiron or HP.
I also think Ubuntu has successfully hit the 'fat spot' of Linux users, which is to say appeals to the widest possible set of users given the choices it has available to make. That is something which is pretty amazing given the fluidity of Linux users.
I also think Ubuntu has a shot at becoming the "last" operating system. I think that because I see Windows 10 and MacIOS :-) moving toward more opaque systems, things you package and app for through a specific toolset and with a company controlled process. This suits the Microsoft and Apple markets which are primarily users of the systems as opposed to developers. And that leaves an opening for Linux to be the primary 'tinkerers' operating system. And of all the Linux distributions I see Ubuntu as the easiest to just slap on and get started with.
Definitely an interesting development from my perspective.
Of course I am a user, but maybe it wasn't my decision or it was a very close call with another distro where it's plus or minus a few hundred instances...
The impressive thing is that they can pull that off. Because back in the day you got SunOS or Ultrix or IRIX and by golly you had to use it, there really wasn't a remixed flavor that you might even consider liking better. So with Ubuntu there are lots of remixed flavors and yet they have pulled together enough of the puzzle, whether its package management, system configuration, or hardware support that makes it the least bad choice of all the flavors.
Doesn't he know that it's mostly CI systems and deployment scripts launching containers in automated fashion? Moreover you can't count how many containers are launched, you can just count pulls.
The down side of containerization for Canonical though, is that as engineers get more sophisticated with microservices and Docker in general, container images are built from much smaller distros such as Alpine, Busybox and even from Scratch.
(disclosure: I work for Docker)
It's going to be interesting to see whether Red Hat and Canonical try to make the shift to being the OS inside containers, or if they'll be content with being the container host.
There's a bug in Ubuntu where old kernel packages are kept on the boot partition and not uninstalled. These accumulate, and quickly (<6months) fill up the boot partition.
This is such an easy fix, and it's frustrating that it is still a problem. Both users have come to me saying "I don't know how to make Ubuntu work" because of this.
I'd argue that as much as we think Linux is getting more popular, we (as perusers of HN) are naturally part of the tech bubble, the small segment of people that are likely to use Ubuntu. Outside this group, I've yet to see Ubuntu recognized by many people.
Not saying this is a great metric, if we're talking Ubuntu on the desktop which is what you're thinking of it seems, then the numbers must be very much lower than that but total of real people using it on both the desktop and the server directly is probably above the million mark though.
Then again, marketing rarely makes much sense when looked at rationally, and this is definitely marketing.
The entire world runs on FreeBSD, Debian, and Windows :).
And if watching Netflix on their smart TV makes people Ubuntu users, then having a bank account makes them users of any number of exotic IBM letters-slash-digits operating systems. (though ironically, Netflix is just about the only thing I run on my old Ubuntu laptop, and superior compatibility with that Ubuntu laptop was the primary reason why I switched from the silverlight-only Netflix clone I used before to Netflix, so for me personally, they are very much related)
I run it on my home systems and my work laptop (a Lenovo, I'm one of the few who prefers it over Mac hardware it seems). My wife runs it on her work computer, she's a film academic and finds it just works well enough given most of her time is in web apps or watching films (though she does keep a Windows machine for creating Powerpoint slides).
It just works, and has done for a long time.
I am super happy with Softmaker since many years. But recently I had to work on an investment pitch presentation with a buddy who uses word. The ppt file, made by Softmaker, that I sent him did not look very good when opened with Powerpoint. (I send the file to their very good support service, they are always improving)
I guess if you are interested you start with the previous version, which is free:
I have tried many distros over the time and I liked Arch Linux for quite some time. But the problem was reliability. I spend my productive time fixing an issue or trying to isolate the issue or fixing PKGBUID to install a package.
Ubuntu on the other hand was my backup in case Arch crashed.
My Linux experience can be titled 'From Ubuntu to Ubuntu'.
Now I believe using a stable distro is really productive unless you have lots of time in your hand.
I like Ubuntu except the Unity part. No problem. Install Xfce and live happily.
Wikipedia, the 7th most popular site in the world according to Alexa, reports ( http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOpera... ) that Ubuntu clients were 0.48% of Wikipedia's web traffic in June 2015 (0.49% in May 2015, 0.49% in April 2015).
I have been running mostly OSX on the desktop for a while, but IIRC Compiz has a couple different alt-tab switchers that you can configure.
Not sure how reliable Ubuntu identifies itself in the user agent of web browsers. But just for fun, I counted requests on my webserver via a simple grep:
grep Ubuntu access.log | wc
grep Windows access.log | wc
Looks like I get 1 request from Ubuntu for about 100 hits from Windows.
I use Linux and OSX desktops every day and catching up to OSX or Windows in terms of everyday usability via reasonable graphics performance is basically impossible without the ecosystem working together.
That being said, Ubuntu can do whatever they want, it's their money and resources and they can sink it into Mir if they choose but wow, what a waste.
Note that there's some debate on the accuracy of some of the examples. That they used it in the past or used it partly doesn't mean an entire company uses it now.
Case in point, why does MySQL automatically get started (in an insecure state, mind you) when installing from the official repos on Ubuntu? And standard Apache and Nginx configuration patterns (and the changes from 10-12-14.04) sometimes make me want to give up supporting Deb/Ubuntu!
Re: apache: at least apache on deb-based systems keeps the same name everywhere, and you don't have to remember which part of the system calls it httpd and which part calls it apache :)
Ubuntu server's default UI is a bash shell.
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/server
Not saying you should be switching over now because of this, but come on.