Ubuntu powers Netflix, Uber, Snapchat, Tesla, and more

Apr 8, 2016 13:30 GMT  ·  By

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.

The infographic, which you can see attached at the end of the article, is, in fact, based on a recent blog post by Canonical's Dustin Kirkland, a member of the Ubuntu Product and Strategy team led by Mark Shuttleworth, entitled "How many people in the world use Ubuntu? More than anyone actually knows!"

The truth is that most of us don't need an infographic to know that Ubuntu Linux is one of the most used GNU/Linux distributions in the world and the most popular free operating system, at least according to Canonical, but just looking at it makes us wonder where else Ubuntu is used. So is it really everywhere?

"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!"

Ubuntu is used on the International space station

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.

Ubuntu is used on the International space station, on 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, at the Brigham Young University to control the Mars Rover, and it is even behind the largest supercomputer in the world.

Even we use Ubuntu! Do you use Ubuntu?

Ubuntu is everywhere infographic
Ubuntu is everywhere infographic