7 ms·

Ubuntu market-share is in a nosedive

19 points by sam345 5y ago

gigatexal 5y ago
Lol. Desktop market share for Linux matters as much as getting extra sand while in a desert. The server is what matters. Anecdotally I just install the LTS of Ubuntu and use snaps or flatpak or appimages for my tools — the distro is becoming less and less important.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- akvadrako 5y ago
  Ubuntu has never been very popular on servers and it's mostly been from people who are comfortable with it on the desktop.
ThrowawayR2 5y ago
> "Ubuntu just released, a few days ago, their latest “Long Term Support” release (version 22.04)..." Isn't the release date for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on April 21? This article is dated April 16.
- chomp 5y ago
  Probably referring to the Beta release. Just one of the many inaccuracies in this post.
locusofself 5y ago
Not sure about desktop but I would imagine cloud-vendor specific distros ie: "Amazon Linux" have pretty high market share..
RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
I wonder what the influence of WSL is on this. WSL makes installing Linux Distros so easy, and using multiple distros on the same computer easy, so I wonder if people are experimenting more with other distros.
jeffbee 5y ago
> It’s not measuring usage in data-centers or as development or cloud virtual machines. Big caveat.
oxff 5y ago
It's not a very good OS. I just use it because I dislike Windows 1*s more.
dm319 5y ago
Still using Ubuntu here, it's become the boring choice I guess (especially as I'm using ubuntu-mate) - but I need it that way to get my work done. A lot of the froth around linux is enthusiasts distro-hopping and whatever is fashionable at the time. Bit unsure about the move to snaps as I've experienced performance and permissions issues, but that isn't a deal-breaker, and the benefits of having recent builds of apps on LTS is not to be overlooked either.
- sliken 5y ago
  Same here, but looking to jump. Snaps seem pretty broken, had numerous issues, and forcing popular apps into snaps is annoying, like say firefox, thunderbird, etc. Sadly looks like ubuntu is doubling down on snaps in 22.04. I'm not against containers in general, but am against snaps.
  - dm319 5y ago
    I think this was partly driven by Firefox, but Ubuntumate is certainly shipping with flatpak and another package manager (maybe appimage, I lose track).
  - bkuehl 5y ago
    Snaps and the continuous issues with them was the main reason for me to leave. I'm very happy with Linux Mint now. I'll use Ubuntu on the server but never again on the desktop. I get what Snap was trying to accomplish, but it failed miserably IMHO.
    - sliken 5y ago
      Heh, well from what I can tell snaps were forced in before they were ready ... into a LTS release no less. Caused a ton of problems, they lied about adoption from multiple distros, and kept the server side closed source trying to create vendor lock in for any snaps users. A very poor showing. Linux Mint is top of my list for switching to.
- thawaya3113 5y ago
II2II 5y ago
When I used Ubuntu about 10 years ago, it was clear that they were pushing to make Linux more accessible. When I dropped by their website last week, it was clear that they were more interested in commercial clients. That's fine if that is where success lies for them. There are plenty of other options for Linux users. I do hope that a clear replacement pops up soon. One of the big advantages of Ubuntu's dominance was the ability to suggest a Linux distribution to someone without them receiving a conflicting recommendation from someone else. (That, and I'm not going to suggest my distro of choice simply because it is not suitable for people who are new to Linux.)
- rglullis 5y ago
  Pop!OS is becoming the beginner-friendly distro to recommend.
goodpoint 5y ago
The sources for those charts are very questionable. It's indeed difficult to measure desktop usage and most metrics are heavily biased due to vocal minorities.
rglullis 5y ago
Anecdata, but with their push for snaps I moved away to NixOS on my personal computers and to debian on my servers...
- tommiegannert 5y ago
  Why not Nix on servers? Naively, I'd expect NixOS to make more sense on servers.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    Short answer: I have a lot more experience with terraform/ansible/docker than with nix and nixops. Maybe when nixops gets a bit more tractable I will go full nixos.
freedomben 5y ago
I'm both surprised and not surprised to see Fedora climbing. I'm not surprised, because it is IMHO one of the best (if not the best) distros, but I am surprised because I expected it to happen years ago (before I realized that "build it and they will come" is not true at all). On the data center, many people I know who get to make the choice of which distro to run in prod make that choice based on what they know. i.e. if you run Fedora locally, really good chance you run RHEL or centos in data center. If you run Ubuntu locally, really good chance you run Ubuntu in the data center. I don't know how Arch will translate, but it will be interesting to see. I expect to start seeing the impact of the desktop numbers in the data center within a couple of years.
- akvadrako 5y ago
  I've only become interested in Fedora recently due to the innovations that go into Silverblue. It's just a better way to build a system and makes switching from a Debian based distro worth it.
Shadonototra 5y ago
moving to Gnome 3+ is what killed ubuntu imo i loved Unity 7 desktop, it was the perfect mix between macOS and windows, i was hyped for Unity 8, going full QT and finally getting rid of gnome, when they announced moving to Gnome 3, i nuked my ubuntu partition the same day people didn't believe me whenever i said "with this move it's the end of ubuntu", there we go, gnome drive away people
- MattPalmer1086 5y ago
  I also loved Unity - glad to meet one of the few others who are willing to admit it! But I could live with gnome 3 with a few extensions. What made me move away from Ubuntu to PopOS was snap.
RappingBoomer 5y ago
a lot of desktop use of ubuntu ...but android tablets and phones are getting so powerful and cheap, why use a desktop PC at all?
- sliken 5y ago
  Wanting to work on two 27" monitors is hard on tablets and phones.
rvieira 5y ago
I've been using other distros for more than 10 years on PCs (mostly Fedora). By a twist of fate, Ubuntu is now the distro I use the most. The reason being that I had a bunch (well, three) of old Apple machines that I wanted to wipe-install Linux on, and Ubuntu was the only distro where everything worked out-of-the-box. Perhaps I was doing something wrong with the others, but the Apple HW support is quite good.
anotherhue 5y ago
Ubuntu is consumer facing. Consumers like to click on things and tend not to do anything important. I am CLI happy and like to think I do important things. Ubuntu fights me in this regard. I will never use anything other than NixOS again. And I say this as a 20 year FreeBSD advocate.
cookrn 5y ago
I’m still an Ubuntu user on a X230t laptop because the auxiliary buttons/switches, touch screen, and drawing pen work out of the box. I use Debian on other devices when possible.

19 points by sam345 5y ago

Lol. Desktop market share for Linux matters as much as getting extra sand while in a desert. The server is what matters. Anecdotally I just install the LTS of Ubuntu and use snaps or flatpak or appimages for my tools — the distro is becoming less and less important.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
akvadrako 5y ago
Ubuntu has never been very popular on servers and it's mostly been from people who are comfortable with it on the desktop.

ThrowawayR2 5y ago

> "Ubuntu just released, a few days ago, their latest “Long Term Support” release (version 22.04)..." Isn't the release date for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on April 21? This article is dated April 16.

chomp 5y ago
Probably referring to the Beta release. Just one of the many inaccuracies in this post.

locusofself 5y ago

Not sure about desktop but I would imagine cloud-vendor specific distros ie: "Amazon Linux" have pretty high market share..

RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago

I wonder what the influence of WSL is on this. WSL makes installing Linux Distros so easy, and using multiple distros on the same computer easy, so I wonder if people are experimenting more with other distros.

jeffbee 5y ago

> It’s not measuring usage in data-centers or as development or cloud virtual machines. Big caveat.

oxff 5y ago

It's not a very good OS. I just use it because I dislike Windows 1*s more.

dm319 5y ago

Still using Ubuntu here, it's become the boring choice I guess (especially as I'm using ubuntu-mate) - but I need it that way to get my work done. A lot of the froth around linux is enthusiasts distro-hopping and whatever is fashionable at the time. Bit unsure about the move to snaps as I've experienced performance and permissions issues, but that isn't a deal-breaker, and the benefits of having recent builds of apps on LTS is not to be overlooked either.

sliken 5y ago
Same here, but looking to jump. Snaps seem pretty broken, had numerous issues, and forcing popular apps into snaps is annoying, like say firefox, thunderbird, etc. Sadly looks like ubuntu is doubling down on snaps in 22.04. I'm not against containers in general, but am against snaps.
- dm319 5y ago
  I think this was partly driven by Firefox, but Ubuntumate is certainly shipping with flatpak and another package manager (maybe appimage, I lose track).
- bkuehl 5y ago
  Snaps and the continuous issues with them was the main reason for me to leave. I'm very happy with Linux Mint now. I'll use Ubuntu on the server but never again on the desktop. I get what Snap was trying to accomplish, but it failed miserably IMHO.
  - sliken 5y ago
    Heh, well from what I can tell snaps were forced in before they were ready ... into a LTS release no less. Caused a ton of problems, they lied about adoption from multiple distros, and kept the server side closed source trying to create vendor lock in for any snaps users. A very poor showing. Linux Mint is top of my list for switching to.
thawaya3113 5y ago

II2II 5y ago

When I used Ubuntu about 10 years ago, it was clear that they were pushing to make Linux more accessible. When I dropped by their website last week, it was clear that they were more interested in commercial clients. That's fine if that is where success lies for them. There are plenty of other options for Linux users. I do hope that a clear replacement pops up soon. One of the big advantages of Ubuntu's dominance was the ability to suggest a Linux distribution to someone without them receiving a conflicting recommendation from someone else. (That, and I'm not going to suggest my distro of choice simply because it is not suitable for people who are new to Linux.)

rglullis 5y ago
Pop!OS is becoming the beginner-friendly distro to recommend.

goodpoint 5y ago

The sources for those charts are very questionable. It's indeed difficult to measure desktop usage and most metrics are heavily biased due to vocal minorities.

rglullis 5y ago

Anecdata, but with their push for snaps I moved away to NixOS on my personal computers and to debian on my servers...

tommiegannert 5y ago
Why not Nix on servers? Naively, I'd expect NixOS to make more sense on servers.
- rglullis 5y ago
  Short answer: I have a lot more experience with terraform/ansible/docker than with nix and nixops. Maybe when nixops gets a bit more tractable I will go full nixos.

freedomben 5y ago

I'm both surprised and not surprised to see Fedora climbing. I'm not surprised, because it is IMHO one of the best (if not the best) distros, but I am surprised because I expected it to happen years ago (before I realized that "build it and they will come" is not true at all). On the data center, many people I know who get to make the choice of which distro to run in prod make that choice based on what they know. i.e. if you run Fedora locally, really good chance you run RHEL or centos in data center. If you run Ubuntu locally, really good chance you run Ubuntu in the data center. I don't know how Arch will translate, but it will be interesting to see. I expect to start seeing the impact of the desktop numbers in the data center within a couple of years.

akvadrako 5y ago
I've only become interested in Fedora recently due to the innovations that go into Silverblue. It's just a better way to build a system and makes switching from a Debian based distro worth it.

Shadonototra 5y ago

moving to Gnome 3+ is what killed ubuntu imo i loved Unity 7 desktop, it was the perfect mix between macOS and windows, i was hyped for Unity 8, going full QT and finally getting rid of gnome, when they announced moving to Gnome 3, i nuked my ubuntu partition the same day people didn't believe me whenever i said "with this move it's the end of ubuntu", there we go, gnome drive away people

MattPalmer1086 5y ago
I also loved Unity - glad to meet one of the few others who are willing to admit it! But I could live with gnome 3 with a few extensions. What made me move away from Ubuntu to PopOS was snap.

RappingBoomer 5y ago

a lot of desktop use of ubuntu ...but android tablets and phones are getting so powerful and cheap, why use a desktop PC at all?

sliken 5y ago
Wanting to work on two 27" monitors is hard on tablets and phones.

rvieira 5y ago

I've been using other distros for more than 10 years on PCs (mostly Fedora). By a twist of fate, Ubuntu is now the distro I use the most. The reason being that I had a bunch (well, three) of old Apple machines that I wanted to wipe-install Linux on, and Ubuntu was the only distro where everything worked out-of-the-box. Perhaps I was doing something wrong with the others, but the Apple HW support is quite good.

anotherhue 5y ago

Ubuntu is consumer facing. Consumers like to click on things and tend not to do anything important. I am CLI happy and like to think I do important things. Ubuntu fights me in this regard. I will never use anything other than NixOS again. And I say this as a 20 year FreeBSD advocate.

cookrn 5y ago

I’m still an Ubuntu user on a X230t laptop because the auxiliary buttons/switches, touch screen, and drawing pen work out of the box. I use Debian on other devices when possible.