this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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This article is strange... The author uses "being able to open Microsoft Office documents" as a common example of what an OS that claims to be easy to use should be able to do. Then says...
No default installation of Microsoft Windows EVER opened Microsoft Office documents. If this was a simple oversight in the write-up it'd be fine, but the point is hammered over and over again.
I don't have an opinion about Ubuntu including or not including more software in the default installation (my guess is it became too big to fit on a DVD?) but this article failed to make it's point to me by making a comparison to Windows that isn't true.
Also...
Is this supposed to be a cocky joke? I can't tell. What metric of "most popular" is the author using?
This author really needs to take a step back to reality.
The average person who’s already technically knowledgeable enough to download Ubuntu and burn a DVD or make a USB stick is already aware of the App Store on Mac and whatever the Windows App Store is called.
Which is why Macs only come pre installed with the App Store and finder
Officially it's called the "Microsoft Store" but I don't think anyone really calls it that (Same with the "Windows Explorer" until they renamed it to "File Explorer" as everyone has been calling it)
Wordpad has had docx support for a while. Microsoft is killing Wordpad to push people to office online, but that's a common Office file format that you can open out of the box.
macOS is the one that has come with office suites and tons of other tools for ages, and honestly it's better for it. The problem with Ubuntu is that most of the suites canonical can redistribute aren't that great in comparison with the competition.
The DVD argument is weird IMO, who's still using physical DVD drives to install operating systems in 2023? Most laptops and computers can't even take DVDs anymore. Flash storage is dirt cheap, so the only reasonable limitation is the end uer's internet connection.
What Ubuntu could (should?) do is default to a full install from the internet. Offline installers are nice and all, but they're out of date the moment you download them and you're going to download half the OS again the moment the software updater gets triggered after the first boot. May as well package a minimal system and install whatever is necessary on the fly. That would also allow the user to make a choice of preinstalled tooling ("minimal", "standard", "fully featured") rather than assuming everyone wants to download LibreOffice.
I'm pretty sure Ubuntu remains the king of Linux distro because everything is still made to work on Ubuntu by default. Most commercial packages and drivers come in "Ubuntu", "Fedora", and "figure it out yourself" form. Trying to download Discord will get you a .deb regardless of the platform you're using and so does Visual Studio Code. Canonical may be starving Ubuntu with their silly decisions, but Ubuntu remains very popular among the masses.
Number of active users.
those numbers are nonexistent for most distribution, since forcing telemetry isn't really a cool move in the free software world
The number of IPs hitting their software repos can be a decent way of estimating active users. Also, ISO downloads and so on.
There’s also the check connectivity to Internet ping that network manager does. Arch Linux defaults to Arch’s servers, etc.
Local repo mirrors are pretty standard in the enterprise world are they not?
Any company invested enough to host a local mirror will not give a blank install of Ubuntu to their employees though.
You can argue that other distros are popular as well, but when it comes to the "I've heard of this Linux thing, let's try it out" crowd Ubuntu is the goto option, no doubt about it. And the impact on this crowd is exactly what is discussed in the article.
Hundreds of thousands of people using eg. Debian plus a software profile plus a sources.list file with an intranet address don't count as using Debian?
I'm not arguing about the contents of the article, I'm discussing specifically the relevance of generating usage statistics based on IP hits and ISO downloads.
For the purpose of the article: no they don't.
If you want to discuss telemetry or how to measure popularity of Linux Distros, please submit and link me an appropriate post, I'll be happy to discuss it there. But it simply adds nothing to the discussion here.
I reckon a nifty idea instead of preinstalling software is to have a file extension finder that suggests software based on the file extension. Sure, there are some file types that have multiple uses, but many proprietary solutions use distinct extensions, making it quite straightforward to organize the recommendations.
You don't even need to look at the extension to identify most file formats, as there are unique magic numbers stored at the beginning of most (binary) formats. Only when a single binary format is reused to appear as two different formats to the user, e.g. zip and cbz are extensions relevant. This is how the
filecommand and most (?) Linux file explorers identify files, and why file extensions are traditionally largely irrelevant on Linux/Unix.This means your idea of suggesting software based on the file type is even more practicable than you described.
Ubuntu claimed be the most popular Linux distro on their website, backed by hot air. People who didn't know any better took that at face value, including the author of this shoddy article, perhaps.
They do have statistics about how many systems send upgrade pings. There are some caveats to that, but I believe the difference with other distros is significant enough for that not to matter.
What other desktop Linux would be more popular? Fedora? Arch?
Yeah that's a pretty funny error, seems to forget that MS office is a very expensive bit of software and doesn't come included with windows.
It does in recent times. My laptop came pre installed with win 11 and office home 2021(i think).
All i had to do was click activate to link the key to my email account. It showed up as a notification on first login.
Even if not activated it still would open files with that warning.
Including a trial to incentivize users into paying for the software doesn't make it "built-in".
Not trial. Home Single user license.