Ubuntu Popularity

[Thomas Karnes]

What's the trick to get off this user group discussion mary-go-round;-)

Tom

On Thu, 2005-12-22 at 20:36 -0500, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> Really, this is sounder material!
> 
> On 12/22/05, Mike Bird <mgb-ubuntu at yosemite.net> wrote:
> > 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
> >
> > 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.
> 
> I believe I did not state usage, now did I ;-)?
> 
> > 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.
> 
> Plus, popular perception is that Ubuntu is not targeted at a server
> release so it wouldn't be at all accurate to extrapolate from server
> to desktop.
> 
> > 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%
> 
> How come no breakdown by Other? What % of Macintosh and Linux agents
> report as Windows agents?
> 
> >   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%
> 
> Are you lumping Ubuntu and Kubuntu together here?
> 
> > 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%
> 
> Seems a little suspicious that Kubuntu (arguably more crude than
> Ubuntu) would out-number Ubuntu 7 to 1 (can you draw that
> conclusion... do the user agents self-identify as Kubuntu and
> Ubuntu?).
> 
> > >From this unbiased but limited data, it appears that Kubuntu
> > is doing well in the KDE world but that Ubuntu is lagging.
> 
> You may consider yourself unbiased (and, I don't doubt you analysed
> them in as fair a manner as possible), however, it is questionable
> whether the underlying data was representative.
> 
> Your demographic was reportedly "young", can you be sure that all user
> agents are recorded properly, and, that the user agents self-report
> accurately (as you yourself partially recognise with the "Other" list
> above... unless you're avoiding mentioning Windows on purpose, with I
> don't think)?
> 
> I question your conclusion about the popularity of Kubuntu vs. Ubuntu.
> In the identified Linux visits, you have a 20.3% to 75% Konq vs. FF
> ratio. However, you report 5.9% Konq/Kubuntu vs 0.8% FF/Ubuntu.
> 
> Anyway, there are too many questions still about your analysis. The
> one thing I do find informative is that Ubuntu is the most common
> _identified_ Linux!
> 
> > As always, better statistics would be welcome if anyone has
> > them.
> 
> Absolutely! A wider selection of web sites would be helpful, but, what
> would be more interesting would be to have a non self-selecting survey
> of what computer users run (given that browsers mask their identity,
> estimates of platform usage can never be more than crude guesses (more
> so than normal surveys)).
> 
> Your quick-n-dirty analysis raises more questions than it answers, but
> that is a good thing.
> 
> Eric.
>