I was just playing around with Google Trends and I thought of showing the result of one of my search.
You can see on the figure (or directly at Google Trends) the evolution of search request perform by users of the Google web search engine in 2005 and 2006.
At the beginning of 2005, Ubuntu was rather new, hence the growing number of request over 2005 and 2006. I have no explanation about the sudden rise of Vista in the beginning of the second 2005 semester.
So was Ubuntu more popular than Vista in 2006? Well if by just using Google Trends we would have such an answer that would be easy, but this is only one factor amongst many. So you can think of your own good idea.
To conclude, you could check this other trend comparison between various version of Ubuntu, interesting…
References
That little bit of extra information is for reader who do not know what Linux, Red Hat, Fedora, etc. all means. So I decided to had a reference sub section.
- A definition of Linux on Wikipedia,
- A definition of a Linux distributions on Wikipedia.
A list of the official web site of the various Linux distributions used in the above trends:
- Ubuntu is based on Debian and supported by Canonical Ltd,
- Debian is a community supported and developed Linux,
- Red Hat offers enterprise grade Linux and supports a community edition: Fedora,
- Fedora is a community supported edition based on Red Hat,
- SUSE offers enterprise grade Linux and supports a community edition: openSUSE, SUSE is the property of Novell.
- openSUSE is a community supported edition based on SUSE.
The contender official web site from Redmond: