Debian Fastest-Growing Distro, Says Netcraft

Oskuro writes "According to this story at news.netcraft.com, Debian was the fastest growing distribution in the last 6 months, closely followed by SuSE and Gentoo. RedHat, while still reigning, has started to lose sites in Netcraft's survey after they announced the end of support for their desktop releases. The survey is based on the stats from webservers which include the distribution name in their webserver's header." Maybe it would grow even faster when Java issues are worked out -- read more below on that.

adamy writes "For people like me that use both Free/Open Source software and Java, the two have come together with two major exception: The Java Virtual Machine and the Base Libraries. Seems the folks trying to get Java packages ready for Sarge could have listed the issues. This is an interesting example of dependency tree pruning: Several packages are orphaned because they depend on Ant, which depends on Swing. Swing has been lower priority for the Classpath because most of the java pacakages are server side or lack a UI componenet."

Comments

75% servers without Distro name...

[Erik_]

"Debian has been the fastest growing Linux distribution when measured by counting active sites which contain the name of a Linux distribution in the Apache Server header... A distribution name is present in a little over a quarter of Linux based Apache sites."

To me it says that 75% of the Apache administrators on Linux boxes have tought about security.
Sure, it's an Apache server, but do you really need to show which distribution you are using ?

I seem to remember predicting...

[Space cowboy]

Debian would be the one. It has the ring of solidity that characterises a lot of open-source stuff. For people actually *using* Linux rather than playing with it, reliability's a big issue.

I'm not saying the others are unreliable, I'm saying that the perception is that Debian is more true-to-the-roots, and therefore more favourable. Perception is all - a statement that can mean two distinct things, and be simultaneously correct :-)

Simon

Re:I seem to remember predicting...

[Mr. Piddle]

Debian would be the one.

So far, among Linux distributions, I've found Debian to have a lot of the flexibility and sensibility of Slackware and the breadth of Red Hat, without being as spartan as Slackware and not as retarded as Red Hat. I used to use Red Hat a lot for home/school, but it just didn't scale with me as I grew older (their installer and RPM-basis got more and more rigid and inflexible relative to my needs until I just got fed up with it). At this point in time, I'd have to say that Debian is the best all-around distribution.