"The fact that Microsoft has a majority market share in PC desktops is the biggest challenge facing the growth of Ubuntu and free software in general."

For this new Long-Term Support release, major changes have been implemented, not only in Ubuntu, but in its derivatives as well. Trusty will be supported for five years for Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu Kylin, while the other flavors using a different desktop environment will be supported as well, if only for three years. These include Xubuntu and Lubuntu.

Over the last few years, various figures have been put forth as measures of Ubuntu's desktop market share, with some sources contradicting themselves and most sources contradicting the other ones.  Below, we take a look at different attempts to put a number on Ubuntu's popularity, and explore the various shortcomings and ambiguities involved in all of them.

This question is asked a lot on Linux forums. Some commentators feel as though Linux needs to “compete” with Apple and Microsoft for “market share,” and justify that by arguing that if Linux has a larger market share, manufacturers will be more inclined to write drivers for Linux.

"There are many ways to create fire text, but believe me, no other text is looking that cool and real as this one ;) Of course it maybe a lil' more effort to get it. I will show you how to create such a hot flames text with GIMP..."

There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that Novell and Red Hat could soon face new competition in the Linux server market. Something new from Microsoft? Nope. Another attack from Oracle? Not quite. This time, the competition could come from tiny Canonical and the company’s latest Ubuntu Linux release.

Come this October, Windows 7 will go on sale, and this release, I strongly believe will be one of the greatest challenges Linux will ever face. Ubuntu Linux will also make a release within that same time and given the generally positive reviews that Windows 7 has received, it is going to be a very difficult time for Canonical to market Ubuntu.

Basically, Novell and Red Hat won’t be trying to get consumer desktop market share, focusing instead only on the ‘enterprise’ desktop market; Fedora and openSUSE thus appear to be relegated to ‘hobbyist OS’ level. Ubuntu is now THE distro of choice for home use, with no major competitors, but I think we’ve known that for some time:

Desktop Linux market share had a growth of about 50% last year according to the recent data by NetMarketShare. If we look at the data for year 2010, there was no growth at all. However, in 2011, starting from 0.96% market share in February, desktop Linux market share ended at 1.41%.