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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."
I had to give up on Debian because its "stable" distribution was frequently unstable. I know, I know, they have a different definition of stable to everybody else in the world, but fuck it... it's not okay.
And I'm talking the kind of problems which aren't caused by breaking any important config files. Even creating a new user and trying with them didn't help anything. Enough with Debian until they get up to date or something. Having packages lurking about which were last compiled in 2001 doesn't sit well with my idea of keeping a system "up to date". :-/
That being said, this was supposedly a server survey... so it makes sense. Yes, Debian is kickass on the server side.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Red Hat can and do maintain support for their desktop releases. RHEL3 Professional is $130 Australian, which IIRC is $fuckall US. For God's sake, could the editors either do some fucking research, or listen to anyone that keeps posting in reponse to these continual troll submissions.
And to the troll above: er, you can upgrade Red Hat 9 to Fedora just fine. Since Fedora is maintained and worked on by Red Hat employees, and is merely a Red Hat 10 from a technical POV, the 'untested' claim is pretty ripe. But if you want support, you'll pay for it by purchasing RHEL3.
I protest this unfair representation of Gentoo that Netcraft is spewing. Of course, when you consider the source, it's not surprising. These guys have been saying for ages that Microsoft has fewer web servers than apache.
Netcraft claims that, of the Linux distros represented, Gentoo has a microscopic 0.86% of the servers, and is only growing at 19.5% per year. While this data may be true at present, it is misleading, since it does not take into account the number of Gentoo servers on which apache is not running because it is still compiling.
Just wait till my compile finishes, and those of the many others compiling apache RIGHT NOW! You'll see that Gentoo is a force to be reckoned with!