Is Ubuntu really losing ground to Linux Mint?

In November of the year (2011) past started a controversy quite heated about how Linux Mint had surpassed Ubuntu in the DistroWatch ranking, thus becoming "supposedly" the most popular Linux distribution of the moment.

Fear not! Ubuntu is still the most popular distribution. Our guest writer, David Gómez de emsLinux, explains why.


As expected, these statements given by various media and blogs around the network caused a great nuisance in the ubuntera community and shouts of joy in the community around Linux Mint.

But unfortunately for some and fortunately for others, these claims lacked a solid basis, as the distrowatch metrics only reflect the greater popularity of Linux Mint over Ubuntu in DistroWatch, not in the real world.

Among the most radical and somewhat aggressive positions in response to the statements delivered by the media and blogs is the one written by Benjamin Humphrey de OMG! Free! entitled 'Dare To Be Different: Ubuntu's Popularity Is Not Declining' in which he treats as "idiots" those who held the idea that DistroWatch's metrics reflected the current superiority of Linux Mint over Ubuntu in market share.

Just days ago Joey sneddon also editor of the same blog, write an entry related again to the subject titled 'Stats Show Ubuntu Not Losing Ground to Linux Mint', this time, doing it in a much friendlier way and delivering really relevant data about the popularity of both distributions, this due to a comment he received in his email whose translation would be the following:

"Given the latest download figures delivered by distrowatch, shouldn't this site change its name to OMGMINT to remain relevant?"

In response to this bold comment, Joey responds by posting a series of data provided by Wikimedia in which it is clearly evidenced that Ubuntu remains by a wide margin the Linux distribution most popular out there and it doesn't seem to show any signs of falling in favor of Linux Mint.

The Wikimedia numbers show how Ubuntu users who visited the site during the month of October 2011 were 16,924,000 while Linux Mint users were only 556,000Additionally, in November 2011 Ubuntu users who visited the site were 29,432,000 (a dazzling figure for any operating system) and the Linux Mint ones were 624,000.

As we can see, the Linux Mint numbers have improved, and a lot, but not to the point of reaching become a real threat to Ubuntu or even get to compete directly with it in terms of market share.

Nobody say (at least if it is a reasonable being) that the numbers of DistroWatch they do not matter or have no relevance. But keep in mind that these numbers only represent the "preference" of DistroWatch visitors, not the preference of 100% of Linux users and much less the preference of the whole world, something that if a little more Wikimedia.

Still, the increase in Linux Mint users is remarkable and worthy of applause, because this distribution has made merits to become one of the most popular and will surely continue to grow now that Cinnamon has seen the light receiving a great reception on the part of the users of GNOME.

Being able to put this issue aside, it will be that the next controversy (fight) will be about how Cinnamon will attract more users than GNOME-Shell… What do you think?

David Gómez is a systems and servers administrator expert in technical support, through his blog emsLinux tries to spread the use of free software from a practical and functional perspective.

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  1.   gorlok said

    Mint is interesting, but some things should work. The recommended update is clean installation, and network updating and others are discouraged. That is fine for the expert user, but not for the normal user, who needs simple and proven solutions.