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

Distro quality?

[Billly Gates]

I find recent versions of Suse, Mandrake, and Redhat to be alot more flakey and buggy then their 5.x and 6.x pasts from years ago.

I switched to FreeBSD for this reason.

A distro today is getting more and more complex and not all the api's for many programs are well tested so bugs get passed on.

Some programs like Gnome have improved tremendously but I do notice alot more apps core dumping out of the box without an update then 3 years ago.

Debian like FreeBSD is stable and the developers do not have the pressure to get the latest and greatest apps and versions of kde out of the door to increase sales.

Mandrake started this tradition.

For a server this is important. Especially a webserver.

If I had highbroadband before trying out FreeBSD, I would use Debian. I need a full integrated feel by the same teams and BSD and Debian provide that.