I’ve started putting together a list of pre-installed Linux notebooks and netbooks that are currently available for sale in the US. Please check out the page and let me know if there is anything I’m missing.
Ever wonder what your website looks like in different browsers? Even though most of us would prefer that people didn’t use browsers like Internet Explorer 6, these old browsers are still widely used. If you want to make sure that your site is not completely broken in these old browsers, try Browsershots.org.
Browsershots generates screenshots of your site in up to 56 different browsers. You can easily test your design in such obscure browsers as Kazehakase, K-Meleon, and Galeon. Of course all the standard browsers are there too, the most useful being older versions of IE and Firefox on Windows and several versions of Safari for Mac OS. Give Browsershots.org a try, it’s free!
Note: While preparing this post, I found a bug in my design that causes problems with IE 7.
Microsoft … Grrr.
I wanted to learn some about YAML so I could use it in one of my current Ruby on Rails projects. A quick google search turned up a lot of information, but nothing quite as useful as the Yaml Cookbook for Ruby. The cookbook is full of examples of YAML and the corresponding Ruby code. If you learn well by example, browsing this one page should help you get up to speed with YAML.
There is no doubt that Ubuntu’s popularity has grown dramatically over the past few years, but just how popular is Ubuntu? How many people have ever heard of Ubuntu? How many people visit the Ubuntu site each month? How many people have tried Ubuntu, and more importantly, how many people are actually using it?
According to Canonical’s official press release for Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu has a “strong and growing user base of over 6 million people.” Where Canonical got this number is not clear, and they have provided no evidence to back up this claim. Nobody really knows how many people are using Ubuntu, but we found some interesting statistics online that show Ubuntu’s popularity is growing. From these statistics, it looks like Ubuntu has become far more popular than any other Linux distribution.
Note: this article is in no way a scientific study of Ubuntu’s popularity, it is just a collection of interesting stats from around the net. Have fun with it!
So, where can we look online to judge Ubuntu’s popularity?
Traditionally, people have turned to DistroWatch.com’s ranking of different versions of Linux to judge a distro’s popularity. This is simply a ranking of the average number of hits per day that each distro’s page gets on the DistroWatch.com site. This ranking system is obviously not a very accurate representation of a Linux distro’s popularity, but it is the generally accepted by the community as an indication of what distros are most popular. Ubuntu has been at the top of this list for some time, and only in the last six months has been surpassed by PCLinuxOS.
Does this mean that PCLinuxOS is now more popular that Ubuntu? As the following stats show, this is hardly the case.
There are several companies that specialize in ranking websites. None of these sites are perfect and many people discount them all together. We thought it would be interesting to see how some of the top Linux distribution websites stack up in these net rankings. Here are current rankings for the top 10 distros (from the Distrowatch list). When a distro has a corporate sponsor, we’ve included their website ranking in parentheses.
Update: As someone pointed out on Digg, Gentoo’s website should probably be included in this list. We didn’t include Gentoo in our original numbers because we used the Distrowatch.com top 10 as our starting point (you have to start somewhere). To be fair, let it be noted that Gentoo’s Netcraft ranking is 859 and their Alexa ranking is 8,919 which would place gentoo.com in 1st place and 4th place respectively.
Sites like Technorati and BlogPulse allow you to track how often people are blogging about a certain topic. We compared Ubuntu’s blog buzz to other top Linux distros and found that people are writing about Ubuntu far more than any other Linux distro.
We took the top 3 Linux distros from the above website rankings and compared them on BlogPulse. As you can see, people are blogging about Ubuntu far more often. There is also a large surge in blog posts about Ubuntu surrounding the recent October 18th release of Gutsy Gibbon.
Technorati shows very similar results when comparing Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora over the last 30 days (note the scale difference in these graphs).
| Ubuntu | Debian | Fedora |
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Perhaps the most interesting statistics come from Google Trends. This tool allows you to compare different terms and see how often people search for them. The tool is far from perfect and is still in Google’s “labs”, but it does give some interesting insight into how often people search for different Linux distros. Of course, there is a lot of room for error as someone could be searching for the philosophy of Ubuntu, for a new Fedora hat, or for The Red Hat Society.
First we compare our top 3 distros from above. You can clearly see that from the second half of 2006, there are far more searches for Ubuntu than for Debian and Fedora (including Fedora Core, and Red Hat searches).
Next we compare Ubuntu to the rest of the top 10 distros combined (including variations of the distro names such as Red Hat). As you can see, for the last few months, Ubuntu has been searched for more often than all the other top 10 combined.
We found another interesting trend when comparing Ubuntu to Linux, Unix, FreeBSD and Solaris. Clearly Linux has the lead, but Ubuntu is not far behind.
Finally, just to be fair, we compare Ubuntu, Linux, Mac, and Windows.
Then there’s always Digg.com. How many times have these popular Linux distros made it to the front page of Digg in the last 6 months (stories containing the distro’s name in the title)? We did some searching and found the following information very interesting.
So what do all these statistics really mean? Honestly, probably nothing. They can’t tell us anything about real Ubuntu usage. However, they do seem to show that Ubuntu has managed to gain a large portion of the Linux mind share, at least amongst the tech community. We enjoyed uncovering and compiling these stats, but please remember that it’s just a bunch of unscientific data, it’s just for fun. We hope you enjoyed this article, now back to your favorite OS (whatever that might be).
About 2 years ago, I stopped using Windows on my main computers at work and home. I switched to a Mac Mini, then to a Macbook, for all of my daily work, web design, programming, photo organizing, etc. We also have a large install base of Ubuntu Linux machines and a few Windows 2000 boxes at work, so I didn’t use OS X exclusively, just whenever possible.
Then, about two months ago, I switched to using a new Dell with Ubuntu Linux at work. For the most part, I couldn’t be happier, but there are a few things I really miss about my Mac. Here’s a list of the 10 things I miss the most. If you know of replacements for any of these under Ubuntu, please leave a comment and share your solution.
When I first upgraded to OS X Tiger, I thought the Dashboard was silly and a waste of processing power. After almost two years, it became the thing I instantly missed the most when using Ubuntu. With a selection of Dashboard widgets including clocks displaying multiple time-zones, the weather, system stats, and website stats, the Dashboard can become quite addicting. When using Ubuntu, I keep wanting to press F12 to check my widgets, but I haven’t found a good desktop widget solution for Ubuntu yet.
I love Quicksilver on the Mac for quickly launching apps and doing repetitive tasks. I can’t use a Mac without Quicksilver because digging through the Finder to launch something like the Activity Monitor drives me nuts.
I’ve only scratched the surface of what Quicksilver can do, but I can’t find anything on Ubuntu that does these tasks quite as well. I’ve tried Deskbar but find it slow and annoying. Is there something out there that compares with Quicksilver on Ubuntu?
Adium is simply the best chat client I’ve ever used. Because it is based off the same messaging library as Pidgin (GAIM), it supports just about ever IM network out there. The interface, however, is much nicer than Pidgin’s interface and integrates perfectly with OS X.
When Using GAIM on Ubuntu 7.04, I feel like I’ve stepped back 5 years. GAIM under Ubuntu is clunky and rather ugly. It’s also much more difficult to see when new messages arrive because there is no notification system similar to Aduim’s Growl based notices. The version of Pidgin shipping with the Ubuntu 7.10 looks more promising, hopefully it is more polished and fun to use.
Yeah, I know, this is probably the number one complaint that everyone has about using Linux, but I’ve found it to be true - I can’t find any really great professional graphics software for Ubuntu. I know, GIMP is great, but I’m accustomed to using Adobe Fireworks for web design and site mockups, and GIMP just doesn’t fit my needs. Come on Adobe, start supporting Linux already!
I spend a lot of time working in a text editor. I got hooked on using TextMate for my web and Ruby on Rails work. It might not be the best text editor in the world, but it seems to be the best on the Mac.
On Ubuntu, I’m using a combination of Gvim and Nautilus to replace TextMate. Gvim is fine, but I’m not yet a Vim expert and the lack of a good integrated file browser really bothers me. I think I’ll get over this one pretty soon.
Mac OS has a great built-in dictionary application. I often find myself launching this app (with the help of Quicksilver) to check a word or find a good synonym. The high quality entries are from the Oxford American Dictionary.
On Ubuntu, there is a dictionary application, but it can only look up words in free dictionaries (results and quality vary). This means that you must be online to look up a word, which is kind of a bummer. There are some cool features like multi-language dictionaries, but the quality often leaves much to be desired. Is there a really great dictionary app for Linux?
Quicktime is one of those things that Mac users take for granted. It’s just there and it plays almost any media file you throw at it (especially if you’ve installed the Perian plugin).
Playing your favorite media files on Ubuntu is not a great experience. Sure, if you hunt around the web enough, you find instructions on how to make just about any media file play in Linux, but the results are usually buggy. I often find it possible to play a file but not possible to fast forward or rewind without the player crashing. I miss Quicktime and its simplicity.
Bluetooth support in OS X is simple and easy to use. I have a mobile phone with Bluetooth and it only took me a few minutes to pair it with my Mac and start syncing files. A few minutes later, I was using the phone as a mobile modem that can connect my Macbook to the net while on the road. Transferring files to and from devices like mobile phones and the Nokia N800 is also a breeze.
While I was able to get rudimentary file transfers working with the Bluetooth module in my Dell N1420, it was not easy. Syncing contacts and calendars also seems to be impossible. Much work could be done to improve the Bluetooth experience in Ubuntu.
Mac OS X has system-wide spell checking for all Cocoa based apps. This means you can have just about everything you type into your Mac spell checked. This unified system means that you only have to train one dictionary with your new words.
Of course there is spell checking in almost every Ubuntu application, but each one has its own system. You need to train the dictionaries for each app and get used to each system’s little quirks. Hopefully, someone out there is working on a system-wide spell checking framework for Linux.
I prefer to use an external mouse instead of a notebook’s trackpad, but if I have to use one, I want it to behave itself and be easy to use. Apple’s implementation of the trackpad is simply brilliant. You can customize the trackpad to ignore accidental clicks, use two-finger scrolling, and the all-so-cool two-finger “right click”.
After using a Macbook for over a year, the trackpad included with my Dell Ubuntu system seems horrible. First of all, the scrolling feature of the trackpad doesn’t work at all. What’s even worse is the lack of a setting (that I can find) to make the trackpad ignore accidental taps. I’m constantly having the cursor jump to another spot on the screen because I accidentally tapped the trackpad with my palm while typing. I’m really hoping that Ubuntu 7.10 addresses some of these issues.
Overall, I have to say that I’m very happy with using Ubuntu. These are just a few little things that really bug me about my Dell Ubuntu notebook. With a little patients, I’m sure most of these issues will be solved. There are also a lot of things I love about Ubuntu that I miss when I use OS X, maybe I’ll share those in my next post.
