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Canonical: Ubuntu on WSL is growing faster, not overtaking the native desktop
Jon Seager tells ZDNET the widely repeated overtaking claim was a growth rate, not a headcount, and it covered only the desktop. No absolute counts were published either way.
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What happened
- Jon Seager is VP of engineering at Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu Linux, and was interviewed by ZDNET.
- Asked whether Ubuntu on Windows would outgrow native Ubuntu installs, Seager told ZDNET: "No, not really, only that the growth rate is faster!"
- Seager's follow-up comment was: "I expect to see more Ubuntu WSL users than 'native' Ubuntu users over the coming months."
- ZDNET says the confusion came from that follow-up comment, and that Seager was again referring to WSL Ubuntu's higher growth rate rather than the absolute number of Ubuntu desktops.
- ZDNET states there are, and almost certainly always will be, more Ubuntu Linux desktops on PCs than on PCs running WSL.
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Why it matters
Canonical's VP of engineering, Jon Seager, told ZDNET that Ubuntu running inside Windows Subsystem for Linux is not about to pass native Ubuntu installs, and that the figure behind the rumour was a rate of change: asked directly, he answered "No, not really, only that the growth rate is faster!" [1][2]. That matters because the claim has been passed around as if it described a population, and tooling, support and packaging decisions taken on that reading are taken on a metric that was never asserted.
The misread has a traceable origin. Seager's follow-up comment was "I expect to see more Ubuntu WSL users than 'native' Ubuntu users over the coming months," which ZDNET identifies as the source of the confusion, and which ZDNET says still referred to the higher growth rate rather than the absolute number of Ubuntu desktops [3][4].
The scope is narrower than the rumour in two further ways. The comparison is between Ubuntu Desktop usage inside WSL and native Ubuntu Desktop installations, not between Windows-hosted Linux and all Linux deployments [6]. Ubuntu also ships across servers, cloud instances, containers, appliances and embedded systems, and Seager's comments were only about the desktop [7]. According to ZDNET, they do not establish whether WSL users will eventually outnumber all forms of native Ubuntu deployment, and ZDNET's own view is that there are, and almost certainly always will be, more Ubuntu desktops on PCs than on PCs running WSL [13][5].
What is missing from the record is any denominator. The published account carries no absolute counts for either WSL Ubuntu desktops or native Ubuntu desktops, so a faster growth rate here is uncheckable arithmetic: a small base can grow quickly for a long time without crossing anything [14].
On what is driving the faster growth, Seager told ZDNET, "I suspect it's just enterprise developers rather than specifically 'AI developers', but the rise of AI development tools may well have also accelerated things, of course" [8]. That is a more mundane story than an AI land rush, and it fits the mechanics: in organisations with standardised Windows endpoints, WSL lowers the friction of adopting Linux tooling without a second machine, dual-booting or a full virtual machine [10]. Ubuntu is the default and most common WSL distribution [11]. A Microsoft spokesperson said WSL "was built to give developers access to the Linux tools they need while staying productive on Windows," that adoption continues to grow, and that the company is continuing to invest in Windows for modern development, including the new WSL Container feature and improvements to fundamentals such as memory management, with work with Canonical "an important part of that journey" [9].
Watch whether Canonical ever attaches base numbers to the growth-rate claim, because until it does the comparison cannot be audited [14]. Watch the WSL Container feature and the memory-management work Microsoft cites as its current investment [9]. And treat the desktop boundary as load-bearing: nothing here speaks to server, cloud, container or embedded Ubuntu [7].