Xfce, LXDE, & GNOME Are Running On Ubuntu XMir

[mrugiero]

By that definition, Linux owns the majority of the desktop market share. No, it's better to know things, even if inaccurately, than not to attempt to do so to begin with.

Hmmm, it depends. To take decisions, it's probably better not having any data than having biased data, because in the first scenario at least you are aware it's not really informed, while the other gives you a false idea of being informed about what are you doing.

[Awesomeness]

It depends what you mean by popularity.

That sounds a bit like the old Mac vs PC ad in which Mac and PC argue about the definition of “better”.

Red Hat makes money from enterprise services and support, with an emphasis on servers. If that is what you mean by popularity, then Red Hat is indeed more popular.

Do you have any data that backs up your claim that Red Hat's emphasis is servers?
If servers are the focus of Red Hat, why do they sponsor GNOME, LibreOffice, Nouveau, and more recently also KDE?

If by popularity you mean "number of desktop users", and you also believe that web browsers are a good metric for measuring that, they Ubuntu is more popular (Wikimedia stats)

Which browsers do advertise the distribution in the user agent? Do all Ubuntu derivatives with all browsers say they're a derivative or do they announce themselves as Ubuntu? The numbers for Mint seem suspiciously low…

Even if those numbers where not skewed by inaccurate user agents, all those numbers say is that users with Ubuntu or an Ubuntu derivative are more likely to have individual IP addresses. Individual users sharing a single or a handful of IP addresses because of a NAT setup also count as desktop users but 5,000 users may only show up as one.

Neither Canonical nor Red Hat are non-profit which means that we can measure popularity in a unbiased way: Compare revenue. It's the only tool of comparison between for-profit Linux distributors we have. The next best tool would be comparing access numbers to update servers but only a handful of distributors make those public, therefore we really only have revenue to compare.
Red Hat makes >1bn/year, Canonical loses money. These are facts.
If Ubuntu was oh-so-popular and great and so on, why don't enterprises not switch to Ubuntu LTS? Why is RHEL so immensely dominant, even RH's competitors offer RHEL support – SUSE offers support for RHEL but *not* Ubuntu: https://www.suse.com/products/expandedsupport/

And no, I'm not a user of RHEL, Fedora or any derivative. I'm an openSUSE user. I have zero problems admitting that any competing distro is more popular than mine.
However I simply do not see any hard data that indicates that Mir will be more widely distributed than Wayland. Heck, even Ubuntu will ship Wayland though Debian.

[seb24]

Neither Canonical nor Red Hat are non-profit which means that we can measure popularity in a unbiased way: Compare revenue. It's the only tool of comparison between for-profit Linux distributors we have. The next best tool would be comparing access numbers to update servers but only a handful of distributors make those public, therefore we really only have revenue to compare.
Red Hat makes >1bn/year, Canonical loses money. These are facts.
If Ubuntu was oh-so-popular and great and so on, why don't enterprises not switch to Ubuntu LTS? Why is RHEL so immensely dominant, even RH's competitors offer RHEL support ? SUSE offers support for RHEL but *not* Ubuntu: https://www.suse.com/products/expandedsupport/

In fact Canonical are investing in some specific market. But you don't have any data to say "why don't enterprises not switch to Ubuntu LTS".

[erendorn]

If servers are the focus of Red Hat, why do they sponsor GNOME, LibreOffice, Nouveau, and more recently also KDE?

Hum, that might have to do with the fact that "with emphasis" is not the same as "exclusively" in English, but hey, who knows.

[dee.]

Which browsers do advertise the distribution in the user agent? Do all Ubuntu derivatives with all browsers say they're a derivative or do they announce themselves as Ubuntu? The numbers for Mint seem suspiciously low…

At least on Linux mint 13 (LTS) the user agent string in Firefox says plainly "Ubuntu", nothing more. So I guess any stat counter that uses user agents will count Mint users as Ubuntu users.

[mrugiero]

Neither Canonical nor Red Hat are non-profit which means that we can measure popularity in a unbiased way: Compare revenue. It's the only tool of comparison between for-profit Linux distributors we have. The next best tool would be comparing access numbers to update servers but only a handful of distributors make those public, therefore we really only have revenue to compare.
Red Hat makes >1bn/year, Canonical loses money. These are facts.
If Ubuntu was oh-so-popular and great and so on, why don't enterprises not switch to Ubuntu LTS? Why is RHEL so immensely dominant, even RH's competitors offer RHEL support ? SUSE offers support for RHEL but *not* Ubuntu: https://www.suse.com/products/expandedsupport/

As a matter of fact, that method is also wrong. You would be able to measure Ubuntu's popularity by revenue if they'd charge license fees, but they don't. What you would be measuring by revenue in Canonical is, at most, their popularity as professional support, not the popularity of their distro, since that's where their revenue comes from. Since not too long ago, their revenue comes also from the scopes, but that only measures default Unity's popularity (I say default because you can actually disable that feature).
Also, RHEL is used mostly on the professional market, while the comparisons involving Ubuntu are usually from a consumer desktop perspective. And I bet Ubuntu wins there, because for RHEL you need to pay a license, which is worthy if you make money out of your use of it, but not at all if you are mostly a casual user who could do better with Windows or Mac (if willing to pay, I mean), which grants you better compatibility for consumer software than Linux, or that could use something free of charge, like Ubuntu.

[Awesomeness]

As a matter of fact, that method is also wrong. You would be able to measure Ubuntu's popularity by revenue if they'd charge license fees, but they don't.

Neither Fedora nor CentOS cost money.

[mrugiero]

Neither Fedora nor CentOS cost money.

So? You mentioned only RHEL (which is the specific distribution for which Red Hat makes revenues) and Ubuntu (which is a distribution that doesn't leads to direct revenues to Canonical).
Also, they don't probably take money from Red Hat either, since the support they pay is already needed for their commercial product (if they didn't put this distros out, they'd spent almost the same amount anyway). And in any case, you are judging their general public distros popularity based on how much money they get from their business one, when they may be completely unrelated.

[Awesomeness]

So? You mentioned only RHEL (which is the specific distribution for which Red Hat makes revenues) and Ubuntu (which is a distribution that doesn't leads to direct revenues to Canonical).
Also, they don't probably take money from Red Hat either, since the support they pay is already needed for their commercial product (if they didn't put this distros out, they'd spent almost the same amount anyway). And in any case, you are judging their general public distros popularity based on how much money they get from their business one, when they may be completely unrelated.

You claimed that I can't compare Red Hat to Canonical because Canonical gives Ubuntu away for free and RH doesn't. Despite what you claim, it is possible though various ways to get Red Hat distributions for free ? CentOS is one of said ways, Fedora (it's to RHEL what non-LTS releases are to Ubuntu) is another way.
And yes, I say that revenue generation says something about popularity in capitalistic societies. Your claim that both are unrelated wasn't proven by you. Therefore I'm still the only one here backing up my conclusions with actual facts.

[mrugiero]

You claimed that I can't compare Red Hat to Canonical because Canonical gives Ubuntu away for free and RH doesn't. Despite what you claim, it is possible though various ways to get Red Hat distributions for free ? CentOS is one of said ways, Fedora (it's to RHEL what non-LTS releases are to Ubuntu) is another way.
And yes, I say that revenue generation says something about popularity in capitalistic societies. Your claim that both are unrelated wasn't proven by you. Therefore I'm still the only one here backing up my conclusions with actual facts.

I didn't say you can't compare them, you can in several aspects. Specially in functionality aspects. In popularity, I don't think so, because they both aim to different kinds of user for a start. Then, you can't compare them by their revenue, since what Red Hat gives away what they already worked on (the only extra work would be packaging), and the revenue only relates to RHEL, not the free of charge distros.
Revenue generation relates in a direct way to popularity when you charge for a product, of course. But Ubuntu's popularity can't be related to its revenue, the same way Fedora's and CentOS' can't. And no, just saying "capitalistic societies" doesn't automatically prove your point. I explained already the logic behind this relation, and why it's not valid for either Ubuntu, Fedora or CentOS. To make a comparison, you need valid data for *both* parts on the comparison, and you haven't.
Ubuntu's revenue relates to: A) enterprise users *trust*, they trust them to know what to do, to give them support; Canonical charges *support* only, the use is still free of charge, and B) closed source (I don't know if it does yet) derivatives. So, it only marks the minimal popularity (nobody will pay them to support a distro they do not produce, since it isn't likely they really know it in depth) they can have, but says nothing about how many users are the real deal; it only indicates how many of their users are also their clients.
Red Hat's popularity, measured by revenue, only takes into account RHEL's users (ergo, it marks only the minimum, too), but says nothing about how popular it actually is, but says how many of their distros users are also Red Hat's clients, which means you haven't valid data for Red Hat's popularity either. I admit I originally assumed you were comparing RHEL versus Ubuntu, and I had to reread later that when you took the revenue point you named the companies instead of the distros. But my point is still standing, you mark minimums which can't confidently relate to popularity.