Ubuntu Usage Reaches 8 Million

It’s official, Linux is growing fast, and it has numerous sources to thank. Aside from the desktop, millions of mobile devices are running some form of Linux, like the Eee PC, so that in itself is helping to improve the scene. On the desktop side though, Ubuntu’s commitment to the community has really helped skyrocket usage in the home, and according to one stalker of Canonical’s marketing materials, the distro now has around eight million total users.

How this number was produced is anyone’s guess, but users are speculating it’s done by calculating the number of people using the apt-get command and are connecting to Ubuntu’s own repositories. Either way, eight million is an impressive number, especially for an operating system that’s completely free and is so different from Windows. Linux still has a long way to go compared to Windows and OS X, but things are at least readily improving.

Alas, measuring Ubuntu’s active installed base can be tricky since a single copy o the operating system can be freely installed over and over again on multiple systems. And in mid-2007 during the Ubuntu Live conference, Ubuntu/Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth estimated the operating system’s installed base at 6 million to 12 million users.