A look at Ubuntu MATE web traffic stats

Cuppa n' Brew
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Topic split from:

Stats start here:

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Hi, @GeekBone (and everyone else) :slight_smile:

You wrote:

It may not be your case, but I know that some people think that the DistroWatch list / ranking is some kind of metric of Linux distributions downloads and/or their respective usage. It is NOT. Here’s the explanation about the DistroWatch “ranking”:

https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

" (...) The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring interest in Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch was accessed each day, nothing more. (...)"

I hope this is informative :slight_smile:

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DitroWatch themselves are saying that it is indirect measure at once removed! They aren't even looking at the Distros' home pages!

Only thing that would be close to valid would be the count of unique visitors for each Distro's HOME domain.

Anyone out there have access to a tool like

and would be willing to collect the numbers for the distros listed on

which members have identified as the "fallback", and compare those numbers for the 6 or 12 month window ... and share those with us?

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It's possibly true that attention on Ubuntu MATE has fallen over the past 4 months. Let's just check our visits according to Cloudflare Web Analytics:

Date Visits
May 4 to May 10 336.73k
May 11 to May 17 325.33k
May 18 to May 24 319.76k
May 25 to May 31 284.24k
Jun 1 to Jun 7 266.05k
Jun 8 to Jun 14 255.44k
Jun 15 to Jun 21 252.6k
Jun 22 to Jun 28 273.62k
Jul 6 to Jul 12 288.02k
Jul 13 to Jul 19 289.09k
Jul 20 to Jul 26 283.48k
Jul 27 to Aug 2 298.15k
Aug 3 to Aug 9 252.67k

Across all 3 websites:

  • #1 • start-ubuntu-mate-org
  • #2 • ubuntu-mate-org
  • #3 • guide-ubuntu-mate-org

(Aggregated visits. Any one blocking the analytics won't be counted - Cloudflare try to make them privacy respecting.)

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The higher May numbers could be the effect of the release of 25.04 - so maybe it has dropped in that period but maybe thats normal?

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Just looking at ubuntu-mate.org specifically: (Can only do a 30 day range)

Range Visits Page views
Feb 12 → Feb 28 28.49k 86.54k
Mar 1 → Mar 30 45.51k 141.12k
Apr 1 → Apr 30 46.05k 97.97k
May 1 → May 30 40.81k 78.29k
Jun 1 → Jun 30 36.41k 68.43k
Jul 1 → Jul 30 37.22k 68.38k

(Excludes bots. We moved the website to Cloudflare Pages at the start of this year. Not sure how long analytics are retained or maybe first enabled in Feb.)

It does seem the case that 25.04 beta/release spiked interest in March/April. The numbers afterwards don't scream "Wow! Amazing! Let's share links to my friends & family!"

I would predict October 2025 might be spike higher with the end of Windows 10 mainstream support.

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Thanks for clarifying that for me, Rick. Makes more sense now.

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I take it that you wouldn't be able to report similar numbers for

so we could get a sense of the "depth" of the competition?

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Correct, we don't host their websites so we wouldn't know.

If you wanted to know the "popularity" of desktop environments within Debian/Ubuntu, there may be ways to count how many times the package was installed (the meta-package, like mate-desktop)

For Debian, it's https://popcon.debian.org/... but it's opt in. Not sure for Ubuntu.

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