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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."
What do Java, Ant, and Swing have to do with surveying which Linux distribution is run by web servers? I'm baffled.
This illustrates perfectly how the free-market can work without overbearing monopolistic influence: Red Hat ends support for certain software, users can (and apparently do) go elsewhere.
Cutting support in a proprietary environment means a forced upgrade or outright migration which would cost a bundle. In the free software world this could just be a lateral shift, nothing more than a speed bump.
Consider this: in the very odd chance SCO wins lawsuits and Linux crumbles there wouldn't be much involved to move Linux web servers over to *BSD as they're likely all running Apache/PHP/*SQL anyhow.
Trolling is a art,
It shows me that 75% of Linux administrators have not seriously thought about security.
/bin/false login, is statically compiled with no unnecessary options.
/etc/issue, because that sounds like what I do here in my mom's basement. And who wants to hack my netzero.com dialup hosted server anyway? Not me, I just run Linux for the Matrix screen saver.
I am not afraid to show distribution, version, or any other banner info.
why? Because apache fully patched, is running as an unprivileged user, chrooted into its environment, with a
You cannot do that with the insecure garbage put out by monopolist boy Billy Gate$ and M$ Windoze insecurity, those people suck.
Actually, all of that is bullshit, I could barely figure out how to log in to my Linux box, let alone secure it, so I just took the name off the banner.
I also modified
-Slashbot
We were debating the Progeny support system ourselves. We're going to stick with Freshrpm for a while to see if that fills the need (we can even contribute RPMs back in. We looked at SuSE, but it seemed to have the same problems that Redhat has.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
I think we might have some cause in that.. The UserLinux team is working hard to improve elements of debian and try to organize everything.. And we still need a lot of help IMO... SUPPORT USER LINUX!
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
And it doesn't.
It just goes on and on, never crashing, never getting it's knickers in a knot. Just an endless stream of prime software, at my finger tips, or at the beck of a quick apt-get. And the upgrades and patches, just happpen. The dependencies? It all just sort's itself out.
I've been in this business for a very long time, and every time I look at the list of things that "aptitude" is going to upgrade today I chuckle and say, it going to break now.
And it just doesn't!
And I'm not even on the "stable" distribution!
So what about Slackware (among others)? IMHO this survey is biased towards a few major distros.
"The chief enemy of creativity is 'good taste'" -Pablo Picasso
If you look at the numbers on the Netcraft report
A) Redhat has more installations than all the other Distros combined
B) Growth of Redhat is greater than all the other distros combined. Of course the percentage is slightly less than the others.
- Kill Yourself, spare us all! -
As a Linux developer, one main annoyance is the difficulty to build binaries that work on every system. With Windows, if I compile something and make sure that the end system has the proper MS runtime library for for C++/C, and it should work. The installation requirements can be a few standard packages. If directx is needed, it can simply require this simple to install package. However, with Linux, there is no unified set of libraries. A complex application may require the proper version of 30 libraries. It would be nice if these were in easy to install "packs" that were unified across distributions and installations. Then, if you compile against version X of a general group of libraries, it can simply require this version or higher for the entire group. If you are not up to date, utilities to automatically offer to update to the latest group (rsync or something) would make it easier. This would be easier than requiring 15 different RPMs/debs to be installed.
See what happens when you leave apt-get update all running overnight?
Back to being serious, I love Debian (I use Fink on my PowerBook) but for the life of me I have NEVER EVER NOT ONCE gotten it to install on my desktop without some serious hacking. I just can't get it to install out of the box...or not the box, as it stands, and I'm not running some odd hardware config. RedHat, SuSE, Mandrake, easy. Debian? "Please get a MS in Comp. Sci and try again."
Once it is installed, Debian is the best. Hands down, you Gentoo trolls can go compile Mozilla for the next 4 days, it rocks. But where, oh where, is a decent installer for Debian?
"Life's funny sometimes." "And sometimes it isn't." --Cat's Cradle
That is only part of the problem. The biggest problem is that netcraft counts sites and not servers in these surveys. All it takes is one big host to switch from RedHat to Debian to swing the whole thing. Every so often they post it by OS but that latest one I can find is from 2001. I think it is because they sell that info now.
Specific to this survey - you have to really look at the total numbers, too. If one distro had gone from 10 to 20 it would have been a 100% increase but I don't think anybody would be reporting it is threatening redhat.
Yes, but Debian was already in third place behind Red Hat and Cobalt. It was ahead of SuSE, Mandrake, and Gentoo to begin with. It will almost certainly pass up Cobalt in the next six months (Cobalt has a negative growth rate and Debian is right behind). Of course, Red Hat has more market share than everyone else combined, and they also have a very strong growth rate (17.8%). They actually added more hosts than anyone else, although Debian was fairly close.
But it does a lot for the quality of a distribution to release it on all sorts of hardware. A lot of flaky intermittent bugs turn solid on one of those architectures.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Debian, like many good tools (vi), can be hard for beginners. It has a lot of new commands to remember like apt-get, apt-cache and dpkg. It has "the debian way" of doing things, which newbies often tangle with before learning. It doesn't have an X based installer, etc.
The key is that once you do spend some time and learn it, the payoff is huge. Debian is a lot eaisier to run then most distros. When managing a lot of servers, you can do it more reliably and with less time using Debian over something else, due to the well-thought-out layout, and the killer package management system.
Its heartwarming to see that lots of people are willing to accept a learning curve for a better operating system. Long-run learning instead of short-run clicking.
One of my favorite reasons for using debian (besides the ideology of a 100% free OS) is the one givin by HP. If you write software or drivers for RedHat, they may only work on RedHat. But if you write software/drivers to go into debian, they work on ALL linux platforms.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act" - George Orwell
It depends on how you think. No, seriously. I'm a Slackware and BSD user, and I can't stand Debian. It's too complex and if something breaks in the dependency system, it's a bitch to fix. Development is also too slow. Stable is too stable. And performance is slow.
However, I have a friend who has been using Debian since the beginning. He absolutely loves it.
For me, I find it too complex. I like the simplicity of Slackware and *BSD systems. I have no problems with the BSD license.
For him, he's a GNU nut, and finds the BSD license too free.
So it depends on how you think, your philosophy, how you work, etc. It's almost like choosing between a laptop that has a trackpad and a trackpoint. Either you love one or the other.
Wow, Mandrake's low scores really surprised me. I've been using it for quite a while, and find it to be the best there is for the desktop. It's sitting there right above Gentoo, and with gentoo's current growth, will probably be at the bottom in about a year.
I think mandrake has one of the best desktop distros around. I had some friends who installed fedora a few weeks back. They just made it a little too un-linux for me. Mandrake still maintains that linux feel, without making everything a bitch to use.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Fedora Core has gotten just as much pre-relese testing as previous consumer-level Red Hat distributions -- probably more, with the more-open development model.
In some senses, perhaps. However, Red Hat was well known for their internal stress testing of kernels, at the expense of releasing bleeding edge kernels. They were selective about backports, yet the new features were generally available in Raw Hide (like USB support in the earlier 2.2.x kernels). Fedora is the renamed Raw Hide. While many end users are testing Fedora inside and outside of Red Hat, improvements resulting from this testing are getting applied to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Sure they end up in Fedora, but along with new features such as new kernel schedulers, new virtual memory engines, new compilers and C libraries, etc.
It's also not *really* a hobby distro, any more than Debian is.
On that, I agree. There are many Debian servers and "shops" out there. Some use stable but most have switched to unstable since stable is collecting dust and cobwebs. I imagine we'll see a similar number of Fedora servers after a while.
LOL, these anti redhat activists are entertaining.
The end of life for RH distros was not a surprise, they gave plenty of warning that this was coming
If you want enterprise level support, $349 is not a bad price
You claim fedora is an "untested hobby distro" which tells me you've never seen it. I actually installed and tested it on several boxes, and can best describe it as "red hat 9 done right" as a number of irritating RH8/9 bugs are absent from fedora, and it is noticeably snappier.
you claim it requires a complete reinstall - again, you are 100% wrong - I have upgraded several RH 8 and RH 9 servers to fedora, remotely, and they remained in service the whole time. A reboot is required to load the new kernel, but that can be done at a time of your choosing, or never if you prefer. Also, apt-get makes it a dream to keep up to date.
I am in the same situation.
I've been and Linux user since 1993, and most of that time was spent using Redhat. When Redhat recently spun-off Fedora, I thought it might be time to give other distros a chance.
I tried Debian. I had many problems. I did become quite comfortable with the installer, but despite my repeated attempts to install and configure X and a few other key things I needed, I was never successul. I think Debian has some very attractive parts to it (apt, for one), but in the end I abandoned it. I eventually went with FreeBSD and am very happy with it.
This leads me to my question. It seems this report suggests that Debian is the fastest growing *Linux* distro. But how does it compare to the growth of FreeBSD? Seems to me like FreeBSD is growing rapidly, perhaps more rapidly that Debian or any Linux distro. Seems to me like many hard-core *nix users are moving to FreeBSD. I could very well be wrong, but I'd love to know how FreeBSD compares to (in terms of growth).
Fedora Core says 6 months of support.
[...]
Fedora Core's policy is explicity to upgrade to the latest packages.
Take a peek at Fedora Legacy. This addresses your first concern directly. And, although I haven't heard anything of it, if it turns out that Fedora Core's updates policy is too disruptive, I wouldn't be surprised if Fedora Legacy picks up the slack there. (In the meantime, there isn't really any indication that the updates policy will be as disruptive as threatened. Time will tell.)
not nearly as entertaining as migrating all my servers.
The end of life for RH distros was not a surprise
no. they gave plenty of warning. i used that time to look at other distros.
If you want enterprise level support, $349 is not a bad price
true. although it's significantly more than the cost of rh9 rhn entitlements.
You claim fedora is an "untested hobby distro" which tells me you've never seen it.
this tells me that you are a hobbiest.
I have upgraded several RH 8 and RH 9 servers to fedora, remotely, and they remained in service the whole time
score one for fedora. woot!
let's get this straight: i spent a lot of my life in a red hat world. i have bought boxed sets of 5.1, 6.2, 7.3, 8 and 9. i bought bob young's mediocre book. i fought tooth and nail to roll red hat into my previous place of employ. i have been a red hat evangalist since 5.1.
so dismiss me as an "anti red hat activst" or whatever, if that sort of label makes you feel comfortable but you know what i really am? the kid who goes to the 7/11 in 1986 and sees shelves of "new coke".
2 1337 4 u!
Why is Slackware "dying?" It's stil number 7 on Distrowatch, which isn't half bad considering that the most recent version of Slackware was released in September. It doesn't need crap like RPM updates every day, and Patrick knows that. If we actually want desktop and library updates that don't interfere with the distro, there is always Dropline, which takes care of most major needs between Slackware's 6-month upgrade cycles. And, if Slackware's upgrades are a problem, you can always keep "current" with Swaret.
Slackware is a distro for the power-user that doesn't need dependancy checking. The only other real alternative is Gentoo or doing it with LFS.
Besides... I can compile most anything within a minute and have it work to perfection, instead of going out ant tracking crappy user-made RPMs that don't run worth a shit from RPMFind. Slackware just works, and require minimal maintenance once you know its ins and outs. Slackware is perfectly functional because it is fast and practical, kinda like BSD.
It is interesting that Timothy posted my submission underneath the one about which distros are most used. While they are related topics, I think they should have been posted separately.
I submitted this article to be posted under developers.
There have been several comments about Swing in Ant. Yes the Sun JDK comes with Swing. But Debian cannot redistribute the Sun JDK due to Suns licensing.
The Debian goal is to come up with a complete set of Java tools that are available under the oipen source license. While there are several compilers that work just fine (jikes and gnu javac among others) that does not address the libraries. The gnu classpath project, (I didn't included a link to keep from slashdotting their already slow servers) is attempting to fill the missing step, but needs help.Most of the classes that have not been completed are UI specific either under AWT or Swing.
As a post script, my submitted articles list shows this one as being rejected. Oh well...
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
You can do a PROPER install of Debian with the MEPIS live CD.
This isn't a troll, I'm genuinely wondering: why do people keep saying this on Slashdot? I've done a few HD installs of Knoppix, and it sure as heck looks like Debian to me. I think the word "Knoppix" comes up a few times when booting, but that's about it. apt-get and everything else I hear that's good about Debian is right there waiting to be used.
What makes a "proper" Debian installation? Are there things I'm missing? One other question, too: why does a liveCD come on 2 CDs? Is the second CD for use only when you install to the HD? Or am I misreading something?
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
So not only is is Fedora unstable with a horrid development model but its especially bad if you care about security?
1.) I've never had a fedora crash (except when I tried to install 2.6 kernel
2.) it has exec-shield stack protection enabled by default but its less secure than your precious debian who got owned last month right? if they used exec-shiled that brk() exploit would have failed (yes i know debian will have it soon, thank ingo who works at redhat for that).
I'll never run Debian not cause of its quality but because of its childish group of users who piss me off with blind zealotry. Now that I've vented I want to pose a question. Would you rather pay $0 and have a distro. or have people pay $174 to a company that pays people around the clock to:
maintain GTK+
wrote/maintain orbit
Anaconda (which has been ported to debian and others)
freedesktop.org
Kudzu (did knoppix thank them?)
rpm
gcc
glibc
exec-shield
selinux
X/x.org
open nvidia drivers
opens GPL software from propritairy companys they buy out. (see selestia)
notice a trend here or shall I continue? I'm not just using an OS today, I'm investing in OSS.
-- "of course thats just my opinion, I could be wrong." --Dennis Miller
Okay, fair enough -- FUD might have been a bit strong. Never attribute to malice and all that.
:)
Anyway: Red Hat / Fedora doesn't have the nifty "upgrade between releases while the system is running" thing you get with Debian. (Although you could try it with apt-rpm or yum, and probably get decent results, it just won't be as clean.) But the installer is able to detect previous installations and relatively smoothly update them.
Since you pretty much have to reboot to make a completely-upgraded distro really take effect (new kernel, new libc, new everything), it's not really a big deal.
Red Hat Linux has been able to do this since forever, and it's the primary reason I switched from Slackware back in the day. Well, that and SysV init scripts.
For what it's worth, I hate Debian. Tried to install it once, and it was a horrible experience. I've run a couple of Knoppix ISO's because they had some neat security tools on them that I could check for rootkits with. The exact same arguments I'm going to make involving Debian, could be made with Suse, the old "RedHat Linux", RHEL. I only contrasted Fedora with Debian, because that is what the post I was responding to brought up. He said it was in the same class as Debian in terms of "non-hobbist", and it isn't.
Fedora core could never, ever crash, and it wouldn't be production deployable.
Fedora core could never ever have a zero day exploit, and have always have a security fix ready and available the moment a security problem is found by a cracker. It still wouldn't be production deployable.
Fedora Core's modius operandi (MO) is keep on the upgrade treadmill. That is fundamentally counter to "production deployable". Here try this one one for size:
Use a third party module for Apache. Apply apache Fedora Core's upgrades. It's possible, that your third party module no long works because the new Apache version is not longer binary compatible with the old Apache version. I've tracked project that constantly change the Apache API/ABI (subversion). If Fedora kept pace with Subversion and Apache, they could really screw up third party modules for Apache. So now my options are:
Not use the third party module (which isn't an option, if I could have done that, I would have in the beginning).
Run an insecure old version of Apache.
Attempt to either patch the old version of Apache, or find someone else who already has done that and use theirs, or follow their instructions.
From that point on, I will forever have to do my own fixes for Apache until I can get a new version of the third party module that works with Fedora Core's upgraded module. Even if I have the source to the third party module, I'll have to remember to rebuild it. That's still a pain.
That is a case in point, of where Debian Stable (as out of date as it is), would be superior to the policy that Fedora Core professes to follow.
Even if Fedora never crashed, and always promptly had security fixes, the above scenerio is precisely why it isn't "production deployable".
We can go thru the same process with how long security fixes are going to be provided for:
I don't ever upgrade distro's in place. I have 24x7 machines, if something goes wrong, I'm screwed. I build new machines, migrate services so that there is very minimal downtime. That's production deployable. When Debian releases a Stable Release, it'll be 2-3 years until they'll release a new stable (much to the chagrin of Debian users). That means, you only have to do that process every 2-3 years (which nicely matches our new hardware purchasing time table).
With Fedora Core, I either have to upgrade in place, with no safty net (other then tape backup), or I have to do the migrations every 6-9 months to ensure that Fedora will be providing me with security fixes. That's not "production deployable".
Fedora Core can be the end all, be all of Linux distributions in terms of uptime, stability, and timely security fixes. However, that doesn't move it out of the category of "hobbiest". What moves it out of the category of "hobbiest", is security upgrades will never, ever break the system. Security upgrades will be provided for that version for at least X months, where X is larger then 18-24 months. Fedora core doesn't fit the bill.
Tell me what a pleasure Fedora Core 1 is 18 months from now. Tell me about how no security fix they release has ever cause an hour of downtime. Tell me that Fedora Legacy is working flawlessly, and is still supporting Fedora
* Packages are tested (and compiled on more architectures than I care to imagine), and even unstable is actually usable
Even unstable? My parents use testing... I setup the box, configured everything, and I run apt-get update and upgrade occasionally, and they keep on ticking. Sure, applications crash every once and a while (once every other week or so, mainly mozilla and kmail), but X and debian itself are rock stable... Never had a system or X crash in the last 6 months. In fact, testing mozilla crashes less than IE.
If my computer-illiterate parents can use debian testing for their home desktop, I'm pretty sure many other people can as well.
-=Lothsahn=-