Linux usage more than doubled during April, increasing from a share of 1.36 percent of all desktop operating systems in March to 2.87 percent in April. Much of the increase was seen in Ubuntu.

Potential reasons put forward for the increase include people working from home so having more freedom to choose their operating environment. Another potential reason is Microsoft ceasing support for Windows 7 at the end of January - our own Windows 10 avoider thought long and hard about moving to Linux as their desktop system before caving in to Windows 10, and we reckon other people might have jumped the other way.

Figures from Net MarketShare showed that Ubuntu in particular had a great month, with its desktop share rising from 0.27 percent in March to 1.89 percent in April.

These statistics arrived shortly after the results of a survey from Ubuntu itself which had asked 21,862 people questions about what they thought were the most important things to be included in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, which has just gone live. 

One thing the developers wanted to know was users feelings about the GNOME desktop that replaced the Canonical-developed Unity desktop environment in Ubuntu two years ago. The Ubuntu team says they know the move was controversial in the community but was made because ultimately people were already using GNOME and liked what they had. The survey showed that 30 percent of respondents were still hoping for a return to the Unity desktop, and 80 percent wanted GNOME to be improved.

Other responses showed that Ubuntu users are fairly evenly split in their attitude to snaps, the software deployment and package management system built by Canonical as an easily updatable way to package software. Snaps are designed to be secure and work across Linux distributions, clouds, IoT devices, and on the desktop. Users were almost evenly split between negative, neutral and positive comments at 30.1 percent, 33.5 percent and 36.3 percent, respectively.

Other points of note were that Kubuntu and Xubuntu are the most popular Ubuntu flavors after 'Official Ubuntu' , and the biggest 'wanted' on the list is improvements for gaming. All hard at work in lockdown, then.

More Information

Ubuntu Survey Results

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