October 20th marked the seventh anniversary of the Ubuntu distribution. Anniversaries are times for reflection, so I’ve been thinking of how Ubuntu has succeeded and how it has failed in the last seven years.
To hear those involved with Ubuntu, the distro’s history consists of nothing but triumph. Community manager Jono Bacon marked the anniversary with a blog entry full of nothing except praise and enthusiasm.
Founder and dictator Mark Shuttleworth did not refer specifically to the occasion, but he did blog that Ubuntu “is the #1 OS for cloud computing,” and that the next release “will be the preferred desktop for many of the world’s biggest Linux desktop deployments.”
Elsewhere, Ubuntu is presented as “third most popular operating system in the world,” presumably after OS X and Windows.
But although such claims might be true, we have no context in which to judge them. Linux generally requires no registration or activation, and, in these days of virtualization, one machine may have three or four guest operating systems. Thanks to virtualization, someone may have Ubuntu installed for testing or information purposes, but not be a regular user.
As a result, the claims about Ubuntu’s user base are largely meaningless, because we have no idea what assumptions they are based on. Estimates in the last few years have ranged from 10-14 million, a variation so wide that it indicates how little certainty actually exists.
Moreover, if you accept the figure of 1.8 million downloads from unique IP addresses for Fedora 15, then assume that Distrowatch’s downloads for the last six months accurately represent the relative popularity of distributions (a large assumption admittedly, but perhaps the most unbiased available), then Ubuntu’s actual user base is more like 2.7 million.
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