Skip to main content
  1. Blog
  2. Article

Mark Baker
on 9 January 2014

Ubuntu: Web OS of the year…. ….for the 3rd year in a row


It is with great pride that we saw Ubuntu winning W3tech’s Operating System of the year award.

For those of us that work on Ubuntu, increased adoption is one of the most satisfying results of our work and is the best measure of the if we are doing the right thing or not. What is most significant about this though, as is highlighted above, this is the third year running that Ubuntu has won the award. The reasoning is fairly simple: the growth of Ubuntu as a platform for online infrastructure has far outstripped that of other operating systems.

In fact, over the last three years only two Linux operating systems showed any growth at all – Debian and Ubuntu, although Gentoo had some traction in 2013.

Ubuntu overtaking CentOS was the most significant change in 2013 and our popularity continues to grow whilst many other decline. Many of the notable web properties of 2013 are confirmed Ubuntu users: Snapchat, Uber, Instagram, Buzzfeed, Hailo, Netflix etc…Developers at fast thinking, innovative companies love Ubuntu for its flexibility and the ability to get the latest frameworks up and running quickly and easily on cloud on or bare metal.

As observers of the industry will know, tech used in Silicon Valley startups quickly filters through to more traditional Enterprises. With the launch of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS in April, Ubuntu is set for continued greatness this year as more and more businesses seek the agility and innovation shown by many of the hot tech properties. It will be fun trying to make it happen too.

Read about the w3tech awards at:

http://w3techs.com/blog/entry/web_technologies_of_the_year_2013

Images courtesy of w3techs.com

Related posts


Ishani Ghoshal
17 June 2026

Validating real-world skills through Canonical Academy

Ubuntu Community

In an increasingly volatile job market, standing out from the competition is vital. For many in the open source community, formal recognition for self-taught skills is a significant challenge. These skills are often built through hands-on hobbies, side projects, and deep community contributions. While the market is flooded with certificat ...


Bertrand Boisseau
17 June 2026

Virtualized Android comes to Anbox Cloud

Ubuntu Ubuntu tech blog

With our latest 1.30.0 Anbox Cloud release, available today, we are introducing one of the most significant evolutions of the platform to date: support for virtualized Android.  For the first time, Anbox Cloud can launch complete Android system images inside lightweight virtual machines, managed and orchestrated through the same Anbox API ...


Nina Rojc
16 June 2026

Template: Streamlining open source design contributions

Design Ubuntu tech blog

As designers working at Canonical, we’re always thinking about open source. We believe that encouraging more designers to contribute to open source  benefits everyone, from the project maintainers to the end users themselves.   In the 2025 edition of FOSSBackstage conference, we presented our research findings on  why designers don’t get ...