Ubuntu Popularity

[Mike Bird]

On Sat, 2005-12-17 at 22:04, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> I would suggest you stop and take a look at the following (crude)
> break down on page views for the past three months at DistroWatch
> <http://www.distrowatch.com/index.php?dataspan=13>:
> Rank	Distribution	Hits Per Day
> 1	Ubuntu	2739
> 2	SUSE	1891
> 3	Mandriva	1801
> 4	Fedora	1030

Eric,

Those figures are certainly interesting.  However, they count
views of the page describing Ubuntu, not people actually using
Ubuntu.  Most of the people viewing that page are people who
have heard about Ubuntu and are considering switching but are
not actually running Ubuntu yet.

It's already been noted that Ubuntu was invisible in Netcraft's
server rankings, but that measure is subject to the criticism
that Ubuntu has not yet put out a proper server release.

I therefore analysed the last million hits at a national-
-brand website with largely teen and young adult demographics.
(To avoid bias, I first filtered out the accesses from our
office and customer systems - about 0.3% of the total hits.)

  PERCENTAGE OF ALL HITS
  Linux                0.13%
  Macintosh            3.08%
  SunOS                0.01%
  Other               96.78%


  PERCENTAGE OF LINUX HITS
  Debian                3.7%
  Fedora                0.1%
  Mandrake              0.0%
  Mandriva              2.2%
  Redhat                0.0%
  SUSE                  0.2%
  Ubuntu                5.7%
  Anonymous            88.4%

It turns out that 88.4% of user agent hits which included the
Linux string did not include a recognisable distro.  Although
Ubuntu and Kubuntu include the distro name in their Firefox
and Konqueror user-agent strings this is rare.

I also analysed the 50.4% of Linux hits which were from either
Firefox or Konqueror:

  PERCENTAGE OF FIREFOX OR KONQUEROR LINUX HITS
  Kubuntu/Konqueror     5.9%
  Mandriva/Firefox      4.3%
  SUSE/Firefox          0.3%
  Ubuntu/Firefox        0.8%
  Anonymous/Konqueror  14.4%
  Anonymous/Firefox    75.0%

>From this unbiased but limited data, it appears that Kubuntu
is doing well in the KDE world but that Ubuntu is lagging.

As always, better statistics would be welcome if anyone has
them.

--Mike Bird