We’re about to embark on a new cycle and with that comes the hopes of many that the Perfect LTS can be a really good break through release. I was reading a comment by the ever ready Jeff Spaleta over on Mark Shuttleworth’s Blog. His assertion was that Ubuntu has been loosing people according to the Wikimedia web stats data, so I decided to put this to the test.
A warning to those new to web stats: they can be unreliable and not very scientific, there could be many reasons for the following data, in addition this is a limited data sample using data from people’s browsers who visit wikipedia.
Taking data just for Ubuntu in the months just previous to a new release. So March and September of each year to give lagards 5 months to upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu, I put together the data to compare the past 4 releases and over their in context previous stats: Download PDF Here Spreedsheet Here
Jeff politely says “Ubuntu has been trending downward”, but to me over the cadence of the release it looks worse.
The other interesting comparison and the reason for the graph is the percentage of users upgrading to the next release. You can see 66% upgraded to Karmic while 18% stayed behind on Jaunty. For the LTS release Lucid we get a strong 69% upgrade while 15% stayed put, Maverick was still quite strong even coming after an LTS release with 42% of users upgrading and 41% staying with the LTS as expected. But with Natty we have a huge tumble to 13% of users upgrading and 21% staying with the pre-unity 10.10 release as well as 49% of remaining users sticking to the LTS release.
I’d love to hear your thoughts, what do you think we should talk about at UDS to try and pick up the adoption a bit and get Ubuntu on track for world domination? Are we failing and should we just pack up and install Android? Your thoughts as always below…
Update: Thanks to the comments about the Firefox user string, it does appear as if 11.04 was the start of the great Mozilla bleaching, removing any identifying marks from the browser agent. So all those identified as using Ubuntu 11.04 are actually using Chromium or one of the other browsers. The last data point is impossible to gauge now and it’s probably not that low. Still an estimated 15% of users aren’t using Firefox, not bad.