Ubuntu User Survey: Who's Behind the Curtain?

Who runs Ubuntu? Where, why and how? That’s a question lots of people — including probably even Canonical employees — would like to be able to answer better. Toward this end, a survey of general Ubuntu users is underway. Here’s the scoop.

Last month, Canonical completed a survey of Ubuntu server users that revealed quite a bit of interesting information — from the apparently hobbyist nature of many Ubuntu server deployments to the ways people are and aren’t currently deploying Ubuntu servers in the cloud.

Now, a new survey of Ubuntu users as a whole, titled simply “Ubuntu Survey 2012,” is in progress. It’s available to all comers via this link.

Whose Survey, Anyway?

Various blogs purport that this is an official survey sponsored by Canonical, although I’ve been unable to find any links from Ubuntu or Canonical’s sites. It also seems a bit bizarre that Canonical has conducted previous surveys at survey.ubuntu.com, while this one is being run on Survey Monkey. And there’s at least one typo in the questionnaire (see question 7), which adds to the air of informality surrounding the whole affair.

Learning More About Ubuntu

But regardless of who exactly is running the survey, it poses some interesting questions about Ubuntu demographics, including how old Ubuntu users are, which languages they speak and where in the world they live. These are all vital points of information that would be helpful not only to Canonical but to many channel partners seeking a better understanding of Linux users as a group.

Meanwhile, it’s notable that the survey doesn’t ask much specifically about what Ubuntu users like and dislike about their experience with the operating system. There’s no mention of different desktop environments, for instance, meaning the survey won’t do much to help figure out whether Unity is actually deeply unpopular with a wide swath of users, or merely with a vocal minority.

There are also no inquiries about which versions of Ubuntu users are running. For developers and others, it would certainly be nice to know more about how many people stick to LTS releases, for example, or how often they upgrade their systems.

And of course, like the Ubuntu Survey Server from earlier this year, this second questionnaire suffers from the fact that respondents will undoubtedly be highly self-selected. Expect geekier users — who are probably the least mysterious group of Ubuntu users to begin with — and those who feel particularly strongly about Ubuntu to take the survey more than the general public.

That’s too bad, because learning more about Ubuntu users who are also “average” people — not Free-software ideologues or professional programmers — is really the holy grail of building a stronger open-source ecosystem by helping to make Linux more accessible to the masses.

But the survey won’t hurt, and I look forward to the results — presuming that whoever’s behind the initiative releases them.