Michael Dolan Dot Com

Wednesday, August 30th, 2006

Most Popular Linux Desktop…. Ubuntu (there’s a non-official stat now)

Just saw SVN (not subversion… Steven Vaughan-Nichols) wrote up a short article on the results of the 2006 Desktop Linux Survey. The winner is officially Ubuntu which unless you’ve been hiding out in Redmond, you probably knew already. Ease of use, out of the box functionality (including wireless) and very few headaches (recent X explosion excepted), Ubuntu is clearly a “polished” distribution despite all the different interpretations of what “polished” means :) It was nice to see OpenSUSE up there with SLED which when combined beat out Debian for 2nd place. Debian plus Ubuntu, however, did account for over 40% of users… that’s quite substantial.

This survey is also interesting b/c they ran a similar one in 2004. That survey had 3,800 voters – this years had over 15,000. That’s quite an increase… is the user base growing?

I have to completely disagree with SVN’s interpretation of Gentoo. Yes, it took 4th place and kudos to the Gentoo squad. However, being described as a platform “almost no one who uses it as their first choice for day-to-day work” is like picking something to say just to say something – and it’s a very poor description. I would agree it is a “Linux experts Linux” but I’d also say for those curious that Gentoo now has a GUI installer and has made great strides to be more accessible to beginners. And besides, the Gentoo forums are quite possibly the greatest helpdesk you will ever find compared to corporate enterprise helpdesks… and it’s no different from other distributions for day-to-day usage… what gives?
Anyway, without further ramblings, here is the article I referenced.

And here is the actual page with the survey’s results.