Any ideas on Ubuntu's net growth?

[aysiu]

So, I see the number of registered forum members is gradually increasing.

Ubuntu's getting a lot of press in the mainstream computing news, and it's been #1 at DistroWatch for a while now.

Still, I see a lot of people coming on to these forums saying, "Yeah, I gave it a shot, but I'm leaving," and then others saying, "Ubuntu's great. installation was a breeze."

I know some people don't care about Linux desktop adoption, but I do, and I know there are people who do care. If you don't care, please don't even bother replying to this thread.

If you do care, what are your thoughts? Are we growing? Are we not? Is there any way to tell?

[xequence]

If you hate something so much (like the trolls that say ubuntu isnt ready for the desktop) you are bound to be more vocal about it then someone who just silently got ubuntu working perfectly and everything.

[raublekick]

This is my general experience with Linux in general at my university. When i started there in 2002, most students didn't have much experience with it, and there was a shoddy Debian lab set up on old Gateway PCs. We had to use the Debian lab for programming projects, but the lack of knowledge on how to turn that nasty Debian setup into a nice one was lacking for most people (myself included).

Then around the time of FC2 a kid I had class with got me into Linux, but he was the only person I knew that used it. Last semester I found 2 Ubuntu users that I had class with. This semester someone put some Breezy/Hoary CDs in the lab, and all that is left now is one Hoary CD.

I like to think that more people are at least trying it. I tried FC2 and gave up in a week. Then I tried Suse and didn't like it much, and didn't return until Hoary, which wasn't working right and I didn't take the time to fix it, so I gave up on it too. Now Breezy has been my main OS since it was released.

My point is that even though people are leaving, not happy about what they experienced, they are mostly people who are new to Linux and probably would have given up no matter what distro they used. Those people probably came into it looking at Ubuntu as the saviour that will make Linux easy to use right off the bat. They were probably expecting Linux to be something that it isn't. I know that's how I was at first, but once I got used to the Linux/Ubuntu way of doing things, I realized how much better it is. At least they tried though, and I would be willing to bet that half of them come back, maybe to another distro, but they will try again.

[matthew]

I don't know of a good way to track this objectively, but Ubuntu is getting a lot of attention in the Linux world and appears to be growing by leaps and bounds. I can't see any way to get real data though.

[Wolki]

If we believe that Goobuntu article (not that I do, but they attribute this particular information to Canonical), we're growing, and pretty too:

"It is top of the Distrowatch download chart, is installed on up to six million computers, and doubling every eight months, according to estimates from Shuttleworth's company, Canonical."

There's probably no way to get exact numbers, but I'd guess they can get good estimates from repository access data and other services they provide.

[BLTicklemonster]

Aysiu, just the other day, I was sitting there thinking, and came up with the idea that we ought to find out some way to ascertain (I say ascertain because I don't know if it's gage or gauge or gauge is spelled that way or guage) not only the growth of ubuntu and or linux, but the raw number of users, then come up with a spam team to contact people like yahoo, ati, (darn, there's on particular one I can't remember who stated that they have no plans to make their product work on linux) and let them know just how much they are missing out on.

I am ready to leave windows, but there are things that I do (mapping and scripting) that either I can't do in linux, or turn out totally different in linux as opposed to how they turn out in windows. (If I compile the Zark Flak Cannon in linux, the projectiles fly away so slowly that you can actually watch them fly. This may be fun because it got me to thinking, and I slowed them down more, raaaan across a map and watched all the smiley faces fly by, but it kinda doesn't work so hot for a sniper cannon thingy that is the desired effect I had when I "zarked" the flak cannon in UT. I dug around and there's actually a line or two of code that gets dropped from the script in linux when I compile the package. No idea why.)

Were'nt expecting all that were you?

Anyway, I think ubuntu is growing and will continue to grow, and will eventually eclipse all others.

[xequence]

watched all the smiley faces fly by,

I just realised about 5 minutes ago that the Flak shot 2 has a smily face on the front =P My little brother came and told me that shot 2 goes really slow in the water of CTF-November.


Were'nt expecting all that were you?

Somehow I doubt it ;)

[Iandefor]

Linux is growing. I highly doubt the growth is anywhere near what Canonical estimates, but it's growing nonetheless. I dunno how fast it would be growing, but it really seems like there are a lot of new users pouring into these forums at an ever-increasing rate.