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The most popular Linux desktop? The numbers might surprise you
(6 votes, average: 4.83 out of 5)
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What Linux desktop is most popular? Ubuntu, openSUSE, Fedora, Mandriva, Slackware, or another distro?
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes that he thinks it’s Xandros. Yes, that’s an unexpected result, but he has a point — Xandros is the distro shipped on the Eee PC, and by SJVN’s count, they’ve pumped out about 1.1 million Eee PCs and are still going strong.
Now, by my count, that puts Xandros in about 4th place, but closing rapidly. Ubuntu, unfortunately, doesn’t track — or at least doesn’t release — their installs, but Mark Shuttleworth has been quoted a couple of times as saying that they have 6 million or 8 million users. But they don’t have hard numbers (that I know of) so if we’re conservative and reduce the quoted numbers by half, that still gives us about 3 million Ubuntu users — well ahead of Xandros.
Fedora’s most recent stats say they have about 2 million Fedora 8 users in six months, and our tracking says we have at least 1.5 million openSUSE users on various releases. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that 1.1 million users is impressive, but Xandros probably isn’t in 1st place. Yet.
However — I think the Eee PC’s runaway success shows that the UMPCs are going to be Linux’s path to the mainstream desktop, and we need to be thinking very heavily about that. (Note that we’re on several UMPC devices as well — like HP’s Mini-Note systems that actually have a usable keyboard…)
The new wave of UMPC devices and new mobile devices are a strong opportunity to put Linux in the hands of new users. The resource requirements mean that Linux is well-suited for these devices, and the fact that Linux can be heavily customized also means that Linux is a great choice for manufacturers looking to differentiate themselves from the competition in ways other than hardware and pricing.
But Xandros’ strong showing on UMPCs hasn’t put it in the lead just yet, at least not by my count. Stay tuned, this is going to be a very interesting year for Linux on the desktop…
This thinking is completely flawed. I bought an Asus Eee laptop and immediately put Ubuntu on it. I am sure a lot of other people do the same. (Even if it would be Xandros, it means that Debian is winning.)
Some people do buy Eee PCs (or other systems) and put another distro on them, but if you were to analyze the 1.1 million Eee PCs, I doubt more than 5 percent of those users have put a different OS on them than what is shipped with them.
Many of who I know has replaced it with.. Windows XP
I’d never imagine there would be that many people that would know how to or be able to install XP on those machines and get it to work properly. If your friends are employees of Monopolysoft, then that doesn’t count since I doubt this is a large percentage of all “friends” out there buying these machines.
That’s exactly how Microsoft will say the sales of Vista is going up like a rocket: You can not buy XP anymore, and even if you buy Vista and downgrade to XP,this will count as a Vista sales……
However I guess indeed that the percentage that installs other OSses will be small (and the percentage that will install (illegally) XP on it might even be higher…
No one can really say how much users per distro… I personally believe that there is no chance that XandrOS is the most popular linux distro.
Distros like Mandriva get install in many computer of the educational system of Russia, France and Germany… Even here at Israel I already see some schools use only Mandriva\SLED… If mandriva is ain’t the most popular distro, the most popular one could only be some enterprise distro as SLED\RHEL\CentOS….
Looks like openSUSE has this post, he says Novell’s success is a result of how good openSUSE is, not it’s partnership with Microsoft. It’s good to see someone who “gets it” and doesn’t jump on the “MS is 100% evil” bandwagon.
Wish I could edit that comment up there! :-> I was trying to say:
Looks like openSUSE has really impressed Vaughan-Nichols. In this post, he says Novell’s success is a result of how good openSUSE is, not it’s partnership with Microsoft. It’s good to see someone who “gets it” and doesn’t jump on the “MS is 100% evil” bandwagon.
So, I vote for an editing option for commenters. Anyone else?
I have been wondering: Why does it matter at all whether one is most popular? If I ever indulge in such “Microsoft Mentality”, then would I not be bound to assume that Microsoft wins every time, just because theirs seems the most popular? I think we should be asking “what features are making it easier for common folk”, and then get those results out. And still, if you try to count “popularity” by how many were distributed, that is obviously and ultimately WRONG! It’s like counting votes when one voter is allowed to make as many votes for their choice as they have resources to make. Of course it’s not telling me which is more popular. Maybe 90% of people hated it after they bought a PC with Lindows preinstalled! I refuse to call that one popular just because it was preinstalled on the cheapest computer, and then lots of people bought the cheapest because they didn’t feel they had much to lose because they never had an idea of what they were buying! Actually they likely did not even realize there was risk of things not working. My friend just thought that if they bought the “Lindows” one then everything would be like “Windows”. MS does not teach us how to make choices, so who ever learns if they always relied on MS?
I did help my friend buy a Lindows PC from WalMart. They chose it because it was cheap but then bought Windows XP retail box (expensive) for me to replace Lindows because they felt that MS Word was the only word processor they could use, and that everything would be too hard to use in Lindows because they only knew Windows.
From the Open Source Census, https://www.osscensus.org/summary-report-public.php, it looks like it’s Ubuntu. We can’t tell how many are desktops versus how many are servers, but since most of the contributions so far are from one person (not a couple of hundred from a company), I would think that they are mostly desktops.
… it doesn’t matter, which system is the most often installed… in the end it is important - that it isn’t Windows!
it doesn’t matter which distro it is , in the end it is importand ” THAT IT WORK ON YOUR PC !!! “
We should count Linux users in general, its easier… but still a hard task
Cheers to Xandros and the EEE PC!
Xandros and various versions of SUSE - SLED, Slick, and openSUSE - have been among the systems that Steve has used and praised in previous reviews. He has also positively reviewed SimplyMEPIS in the past. He seems to keep either a version of Xandros or SUSE of some flavor on at least one of his systems and some version of Windows on another. Clearly he is pragmatic in his views, and he can speak from experience in running and using both Windows and desktop Linux systems. I think his opinions are worth evaluating and respecting, whether you happen to agree with them or not.
Personally, I have agreed with many of his reviews and speculations. He tends to be a bit more optimistic than I am about the imminent rise of Linux to higher percentages of use. I tend to think that Linux will continue to etch out bits and pieces of markets here and there, but I also do believe that anyone who is serious about running Linux, whether on desktops or servers, could do it today.
At my place of employment, we run many important server applications using Linux server software, but we have not made any corporate leaps to using Linux on the desktop, though we have had several advanced research projects to assess the feasibility of storing critical company data on back end storage devices, then utilizing any number of thin to thick clients for the desktop software. If fully realized, this could open the doors to a Linux option on the desk in our company.
At home, I definitely use desktop Linux software in preference to Windows or other software. Even at those times that I do run Windows, it is generally to access some proprietary software in order to retrieve information stored that way from others. If I even stay on Windows after that, I use free software such as Seamonkey, Firefox, or Thunderbird for browsing and Email, and a Windows ported version of Vim and/or Emacs for editing.
Popularity contest? Sounds like a So Cal thing. More than two years ago I weaned my wife from Msoft because of virus attacks. At that time I chose AandRos because it was stable, and would be an easy transformation for her. Was that a good decision. Has not missed a beat yet. I was trying OpenSuse 11, but do not want to compile drivers, so switched to Mint beta…and WOW. And I thought Ubuntu was on the right track.
We all know Slackware rules the roost. Install it, and open up the case once every couple of years to blow out the dust.
Oh wait, you mean “desktop” Linux (as if there was such a thing - I’ve never seen a “desktop” kernel release).
Never mind.
I have been a happy EeePC user - but had little patience for the Xandros Eee version. Like many others - putting a different linux distribution on it has been a fun (and mostly) rewarding exercise.
A group of us at openSUSE are working at enabling op-enSUSE 11 (due out in two weeks) to have the necessary drivers for EeePC available.
I am running the release candidate of openSUSE 11 now - and of the five different operating systems I have tried, it has been the best overall experience.
How do you count the fact that I have eight distros and love them all… !
Each distro has strengths. I have used Ubuntu 8.04, Fedora 8, OpenSuSE 10.3 and of Knoppix for rescue work when nothing else does the job. I will be downloading OpenSUSE 11 shortly. Ubuntu strikes me as the easiest that I have seen for newbie venturing into the Linux world to escape from Windows and Internet Exploder. For me, I prefer a distro that makes it easy use LVM to configure file systems. That is one area, where Ubuntu is behind OpenSUSE and Fedora. I have been using Linux Thinkpads and other notebooks for past 10 plus years. The question is always which distro has figured out the new hardware first. I prefer KDE for the desktop, which puts OpenSUSE at the top of my list. OpenSUSE has consistently done the best job with implementing KDE for my daily use. I am looking forward to seeing OpenSUSE 11.
Well, I just received my subscription copy of Slackware 12.1 last week.
Does it count I have Slackware installed on around 20 computers using the same distro disks as 20 installs or 1 purchased subscription copy?