It Doesn’t Look Like Ubuntu Reached Its Goal Of 200 Million Users This Year”, says Michael Larabel of Phoronix , in a post that it seems he’s been itching to post for months

Why the negativity?!? Are you sure? Did you count all of them?

No one has. And no one can count all of the Ubuntu users in the world!

Canonical, unlike Apple, Microsoft, Red Hat, or Google, does not require each user to register their installation of Ubuntu.

Of course, you can buy laptops preloaded with Ubuntu from Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Asus. And there are millions of them out there. And you can buy servers powered by Ubuntu from IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, Lenovo, Quanta, and compatible with the OpenCompute Project.

In 2011, hardware sales might have been how Mark Shuttleworth hoped to reach 200M Ubuntu users by 2015.

But in reality, hundreds of millions of PCs, servers, devices, virtual machines, and containers have booted Ubuntu to date!

Let’s look at some facts…

Drones, robots, network switches, smart devices, the Internet of Things. More Snappy Ubuntu.

How about Walmart? Everyday low prices. Everyday Ubuntu. Lots and lots of Ubuntu.

Are you orchestrating containers with Kubernetes or Apache Mesos? There’s plenty of Ubuntu in there.

Kicking PaaS with Cloud Foundry? App instances are Ubuntu LXC containers. Pivotal has lots of serious users.

How many “users” of Ubuntu are there ultimately? I bet there are over a billion people today, using Ubuntu — both directly and indirectly. Without a doubt, there are over a billion people on the planet benefiting from the services, security, and availability of Ubuntu today.

More people use Ubuntu than we know.

More people use Ubuntu than you know.

More people use Ubuntu than they know.

More people use Ubuntu than anyone actually knows.

Because of who we all are.

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