Once upon a time Ubuntu was the popular Debian-based desktop Linux distribution that everyone-well not Debian’s hardcore fans-loved. That was then. This is now. Today, Ubuntu has gotten into servers, the cloud and Canonical the company behind it, wants it to play in TVs, tablets, and smartphones. That’s all well and good, but what does Ubuntu’s faithful think of all this? Well Canonical asked them and this is what they had to say.
Over 17,000 Ubuntu users responded to Canonical’s survey. According to Gerry Carr, Canonical’s director of communications, the average Ubuntu user’s age is between 25-35. Carr also found the Ubuntu’s users “Overwhelmingly male. The average number of women responding is <4%. Here I do wonder how much the bias of the sampling methodology has affected the response rate – i.e. is that for whatever reason the way we reached resulted in fewer women responding than is actually reflective of the user base. We can’t extrapolate from this data, but certainly such a hugely weighted response means we have to look at how we make the product, the community and probably both, more appealing to both genders.”