When you think of Ubuntu Linux, what do you think of? I would guess you think about the Linux desktop. While Ubuntu is certainly a big player—maybe the biggest—when it comes to the Linux desktop, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu wants you to know that “A remarkable thing happened this year: companies started adopting Ubuntu over RHEL for large-scale enterprise workloads, in droves.”

Shuttleworth makes this claim because, according to W3Tech, which surveys technologies used on the Web, shows that since July 2011 Ubuntu has overtaken Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for Web servers. According to W3Techs, as of February, “Ubuntu s now used on 6% of all Web servers, up from 4% one year ago.”

Shuttleworth choose Web servers for his benchmark because “Web services are a public affair.” Nevertheless, Shuttleworth claims that “the trend is even starker if you look at what we know of new-style services, like clouds and big data.”

He may be on to something.

Is Ubuntu becoming a big name in enterprise Linux servers? More >