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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,
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.
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! -
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.
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.
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).
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