It Doesn't Look Like Ubuntu Reached Its Goal Of 200 Million Users This Year

[kenjitamura]

Is Ubuntu even still the flavor of choice for linux users these days? I ran away from Ubuntu around 2013 and boarded the linux mint ship for a while and then when Mint froze at 17.x I jumped again to Korora which I am loving. The magic of Ubuntu + Gnome2 has long since passed and I thought it has to this day been hemorrhaging its faithfuls since the default transition to Unity.

[Delgarde]

As mentioned in the article the main reason Canonical is off target is probably Ubuntu Touch being further behind in development than it was planned.

If Canonical had got Unity 8 onto the desktop and Touch working with all the convergence features I think the estimates would have been realistic. Without convergence in Touch or Unity 8 on the desktop there's been no compelling reason for user numbers to increase dramatically.

I think that's a consequence of them trying to do too much at once. Canonical isn't a large company, yet they're trying to run a number of large and ambitious projects simultaneously - and because of some bad decisions (e.g Mir vs Wayland), they're having to do all the work themselves instead of being able to leverage work being done elsewhere.

[Luke]

Your last point is the real bummer IMO, professional software. There are no signs that this area is getting any better.

I have long suspected that paid software (most non-open "professional" software) will always be the domain of the paid OS. The question then becomes this: do free software principles work for those doing specialized paid work where the number of users is small and the number of potential FOSS devs thus even smaller? Sometimes it is by an indirect route: Blender was written as a paid project for a single customer who insisted the project be opened if the original author failed to mantain it, so their investment could not be ruined by abandonment. That paid off for the original customer when Blender was in fact abandoned and for us when that meant it was opened and got new maintainers.

Suppose Disney or the US miilitary needed a new, super-powered, GPU accelerated everything video editor for 8K video but could not find a vendor who could be trusted to mantain the code for decades into the future? In that case, an open-on-abandon contract would suit their needs. Once opened these projects can be ported to Linux.

OK, nobody pays for my videos and I refuse to sell ads on them. No way in hell I will pay for video edititng software no matter how good it is, and in addition I don't trust the authors of closed software. Kdenlive is good ENOUGH for my purposes, if Adobe has something better that is of no relevance except as a target for trying to develop Kdenlive to equal at some future date, assuming the features in question would even be used. Someone at Disney making movies is not cost sensitive, but feature demanding. In this case we might be talking free software for free uses (most modern published video) and paid software for paid uses(the declining movie and TV industries).

[F1esDgSdUTYpm0iy]

Is Ubuntu even still the flavor of choice for linux users these days? I ran away from Ubuntu around 2013 and boarded the linux mint ship for a while and then when Mint froze at 17.x I jumped again to Korora which I am loving. The magic of Ubuntu + Gnome2 has long since passed and I thought it has to this day been hemorrhaging its faithfuls since the default transition to Unity.

Base Ubuntu I'm not touching either; the UI is too resource hungry, takes up too many pixels, tries to be a lot of things at once without really accomplishing much of anything and ultimately doesn't make using a desktop PC any easier or better. However, various of its flavors have their strengths, I find. Personally, I'm using Xubuntu and I'm loving it. The core infrastructure of Ubuntu with the lean, mean and performant nature of Xfce.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

OS X has become a three tier platform for a reason: it works and pairs its hardware to provide a near seamless experience. The world is mobile and embedded. The back end is two tiers and those mobile users won't waste time with hobbled ecosystems. Linux never was going to win.

[carewolf]

OS X has become a three tier platform for a reason: it works and pairs its hardware to provide a near seamless experience. The world is mobile and embedded. The back end is two tiers and those mobile users won't waste time with hobbled ecosystems. Linux never was going to win.

No, that is just what their ads say, and that is why they are successful, because people believe they are the ones being stupid when OSX doesn't behave as expected, but look in any bookstore, and you will find more books explaining OS X than Windows, exactly because it never really works, and when it does, it is never perfect or seamless, so it makes them feel stupid and they go buy books instead of cursing at the OS like they would on Windows.

So, what Linux needs is ads, or maybe not, what is this "winning" anyway?

[blackiwid]

I also think that most points dont matter especialy about photoshop and office and stuff like that. of course this niche users that need a 1000 Euro photoediticng programm will not switch, but we are talking about the mass, there is no autocad or photoshop for android so far (maybe some small joke version of it, I dont know of) still it has more users than windows 10 and windows 8 and windows 7 together. ok maybe I should not count phones but tablets of course, they replace pcs. not for everybody and for all of them but maybe a person had a few years 2 3 pcs and now only one and a tablet like my father. And also like me, ok I have 3 pcs but one is a htpc (linux) and one is gaming (still windows) and one is laptop/workpc (linux) but there is a tablet too. K because I care about freedom and nsa and stuff and I am one of the few that found a late love to mechanical or at least keyboards at all, I would consider something like a 2in1 laptop if they would be straight forward with linux support and not that garbage 32bit uefis, but that are special requirements.

Netbooks was a good example, they got sold with linux on it at the beginnig, then MS gave away the windows for that devices nearly for free so the companies started to preinstall windows again, but it sold fine and nobody asked for autocad, heck even with windows nobody did run these slow machines autocad or photoshop most likely not even ms office (except the cracy people).

So that is all not needed you need the preinstalls not more not less, then the proprietary companies support them from alone its also the only way to make them support it. Not that I care about that, its more a horror vision that more of this evil companies poison the linux desktop.

Canonical also proofs that the success of a evil linux company can hurt GNU/Linux, it fragments the whole ecosystem everything has now be developed 2 times 1 time with the canonocial loogo on it and one time 99% identical without it.

[edoantonioco]

Nobody mentioned xiaomi and their powerful but very cheap laptops, than will probably be powered with ubuntu (and somehow wasn't covered on this blog since the specifications and price are already available)

[blackiwid]

1. there was a time where many developer bought macs, partialy because of the often relative good hardware, and linux on this machines never works perfectly so they keep macosx and because they are lazy and its linuxish enough to be ok for many of them.

but there are backlashes to that, but so much about that, macosx has some small sucess but the main enemy is still windows if you care about market share at all.

2. I think steamos and gaming companies start to support linux will change linux a bit, get some commercial support/influenses, but it will change them too. As example there is no good reason except drm that is often serverside anyway or gets broken in 24 hours anyway or companies sell their games without drm anyway on gog. So there is only the weak excuse of drm that may be for some titles very important for most others not, to not open up even the AAA games under the GPL.

Some people that dont know the free software / opensource lisenses will shurly argue "but then the game cant be sold" thats not true, you can still keep the rights on the name and more important on the artwork which is the bigger part in most games. So companies would not loose much, if more than 1 company would do that, they could even start share some code and make production of games a bit cheaper... but thats only a small side-aspekt, its more about marketing or giving the customer what he asks for. But even that would be good we see on the last badman title how they cant even provide a stable/good game for windows. so opensourcing their games will happen sooner or later. one will start maybe valve itself then they see that it works and even gets more customers for that, and then in this hard competition the rest will follow.

So having propriatary support for linux is maybe not neccessary, of course thats more difficult for autocat or photoshop because there the code is the main product, and maybe engines, but they at least gave the code free for too, and for them its easy to track if somebody sells a product with their engine without lisense.

So I guess this apps will stay proprietary if they then make some f2p versions with adds or something like that as alternative "payment" modell we will see. But because they relay on users that are used to pay for propriatary closed source apps, they will not by them self happily support linux, except maybe some cloud versions.

So starting with the games is a better strategie.

Also I am interested in how much wayland will inpact, fro me personaly I dont care to much, was hyped more about it. but for normal users it could make a huge difference, I dont know the mac but windows feels the gui like the os, and linux feels the gui always like an optional addon, what it in reality is, too. technicaly that changes with wayland not that much as far as I understand, but when it "display everything pixelperfect" without exploding monitors (flashes) it could feel much more similar to windows for adopters.

makes also installs faster I guess. because it should be much smaller (or do they only push all the code/stuff into gnome and co and this desktops gets bigger?

We will see hopefully this message dont gets into /dev/null like my last aperently.

[wagaf]

OS X has become a three tier platform for a reason: it works and pairs its hardware to provide a near seamless experience. The world is mobile and embedded. The back end is two tiers and those mobile users won't waste time with hobbled ecosystems. Linux never was going to win.

Well on mobile Linux "wins" with Android. It could totally succeed in the same way on desktop, with a company such as Google, Valve or Canonical building an open ecosystem on top of it.