Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux operating system and distribution for personal computers, smartphones and network servers. It uses Unity as its default user interface. It is based on free software and named after the Southern African philosophy of ubuntu (literally, “human-ness”), which often is translated as “humanity towards others” or “the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity”. The popularity of Ubuntu is such that it is used on International space station and is behind the world’s largest supercomputer. It runs the servers of popular online services like Netflix, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, Dropbox, PayPal, Wikipedia, and Instagram, in Google, Tesla, George Hotz, and Uber cars. It is also employed at Bloomberg, Weta Digital and Walmart.The Brigham Young University is using Ubuntu to control the Mars Rover. To celebrate the forthcoming Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, due for release later this month, on April 21, Canonical took the time to put together a very nice infographic, showing the world how popular Ubuntu is across the world. “To celebrate our upcoming 16.04 LTS we wanted to shine a bit of light on how many people in the world actually use Ubuntu,” said Alexia Emmanoulopoulou, Demand Generation Marketing Manager, Canonical. “The reality is, hundreds of millions of PCs, servers, devices, virtual machines, and containers have booted Ubuntu to date and are in use!” According to Canonical’s infographic, there were over 60 million Ubuntu images launched by Docker users, 14 million Vagrant images of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS from HashiCorp, 20 million launches of Ubuntu instances during 2015 in public and private clouds, as well as bare metal, and 2 million new Ubuntu Cloud instances launched in November 2015.
