[sk5t]

My honest first thought: hasn't Ubuntu's share of the Linux market been dropping since their introduction of the universally-reviled, highly unintuitive Unity UI? I tried out 12.04 a couple months ago, tried to use it for a few weeks, and very enthusiastically retreated back to CentOS.

[bad_user]

Ubuntu has by far the biggest mind share. On HN it's the only distro I'm seeing in the news. On VPS hosting it is most of the time featured alongside Debian.

I hate Unity myself, but I've switched to Xubuntu. There's also Kubuntu, and even if these are supported by the community, they do a better job than most other distros.

Also don't be fooled by stats.

[tuxychandru]

I guess I'm in the minority then. Unity is one of the few desktops which gets completely out of your way and uses minimum screen real estate while still remaining usable by non-technical users.

With HUD in 12.04, it's the only widely-used DE I can control almost entirely with keyboard.

[dimmuborgir]

Don't be fooled by DistroWatch stats. It means nothing.

[moylan]

i hate unity. it's nothing but distracting eye candy. a non standard waste of resources. but i like ubuntu overall so at the mo i use xubuntu. suits all my needs without unity.

but ubuntu is still an organisation to support especially in terms of them helping produce hardware that will be 100% linux compatible no matter what distro i choose to run.

[k_bx]

> a non standard waste of resources

I don't know what resources you are talking about, but it's definitely not wasting my screen resources as others do.

My vertical spaced is saved my menu-on-panel integration, on fullscreen title goes into panel too. Left-panel is also nice, it doesn't do "minimize on second click" as docky or others, it does nice "overview" on click on multi-window app. And finally, it also saves space by combining launcher and app-switcher.

[pjmlp]

I am a very happy Unity user.