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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."
"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 ?
...is right here.
Lots of discussions on library dependencies and Kaffe and such like are in the January archives.
The Army reading list
What do Java, Ant, and Swing have to do with surveying which Linux distribution is run by web servers? I'm baffled.
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
Physicists get Hadrons!
I'm absolutely in agreement.
These days you need a couple of CDs for Debian.
When I was a lad we used to fit a full Debian distribution on one side of an 8" floppy disk.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
Namaste
~Darl
Not suprised one bit. Both Debian and Gentoo are the only two usable UP TO DATE distro's that will run on a sparcstation. They obviously care to encompass EVERYONE who might use their OS, and gladly, Ill join that line.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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.
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!
Debian is more than just Linux. It is possible to use The HURD as your kernel, for Debian/HURD, and similarly, Debian/NetBSD, Debian/OSX, and Debian/FreeBSD efforts are under way. I believe there is even a Debian/Cygwin port in usable shape, although I haven't heard of progress on development in a while.
Now that you can find cheap SCOWare license packs up and down ebay, ubid, Silcon Auctions and the likes, perhaps it's time to take Debian in a new direction.
May I be the first to propose:
I await your comments.
~Darl
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.
It's easy to be the fastest growing when you have a tiny market share.
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
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
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But the more powerful driving factor behind Debian's recent growth is its having become the first Linux distribution to partner with SCO. In an industry shaking maneuver, Bruce Perens has brokered a deal between SCO and the Debian team, in which Debian has agreed to share 15% of net revenue in exchange for full idemnification for any and all use or misuse of SCO's intellectual property.
As soon as the ink has dried on the mutually signed contract, SCO will be in receipt of Debian's financial statements. This 15% of Debian's commercial revenue will surely mean a powerful boost for SCO's next fiscal quarter. The Boies back home will be proud.
~Darl
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.
I've been a long time Redhat user, both on the server AND desktop (yeah, that's right, desktop).
After Redhat's new policy on Redhat Linux was announced, I knew I had to switch. Why? Redhat had made it clear it didn't want me as a customer.
I need patches and that's it, I don't need hand holding and I don't need a 5 year plan (if that really turns out to hold). I'd gladly pay for patches, but the Enterprise options are why too expensive both for my current workplace and me personally. Fedora sounds like a good idea, looks good for messing around. But serious server work? No thanks.
I read you load and clear Redhat, so I'm moving on.
I looked at all the distros and kicked the tires. Gentoo is promising, but not mature enough (portage needs some work and not just technical). Slackware, well, I started with Slackware and I just can't go back. Debian (stable mind you) takes a little getting used to, but it's heart is in the right place and I look forward to being a contributing member of the community.
Anything is possible given time and money.
http://www.hadrons.org/~guillem/debian/debtakeover /
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
[If it's not obvious: italic text comes from the parent post, which has already been modded into oblivion.]
;-)
I like Debian because it works on my Powerbook (big-endian non-x86 architecture with slightly odd hardware) just as well as it does on my (ordinary, mainstream) PC, and because it also managed to work on my friend's mutant box-of-bits (Cyrix 500MHz cheap-knock-off CPU, ancient AT keyboard port, USB mouse due to no PS/2 ports, serial and parallel ports on an expansion card, graphics card that didn't do VESA... the thing was extremely dodgy).
I also like
- the fact that the packages are made by control freaks (in the nicest possible sense of the words...) who care about consistency and things working nicely together to a sufficient extent that they have formal policies for large classes of packages, but package things in such a way that you can apply local hacks if you don't like how they did it, and make a great effort to preserve local changes to configuration
- the way the development process is usually as transparent and open as the source code of the packages themselves
- the fact that they've built a complete operating system out of software held to standards of freedom and openness high enough that even the Free Software Foundation's "Free Documentation License" doesn't qualify.
- the fact that no one entity controls Debian, so as long as someone's interested in developing for it, it won't go away
- the social contract that sets out the principles Debian will work by.
Debian sucks because
Debian rocks because
* Out dated packages, even in unstable
* Packages are tested (and compiled on more architectures than I care to imagine), and even unstable is actually usable
* Buggy and hard to use installer, people are told to use 3rd party installers because the developers cant be assed to fix it
* A text-mode installer which doesn't blithely assume that graphics mode works properly, or even that you *want* graphics mode (very handy if your hardware is bizarre, like my friend's old PC which couldn't do some of the standard VESA video modes)
* More security flaws than any other distro
[To parent: Really? Please provide links to back that up, I'm interested]
* A transparent mechanism for security updates and bulletins which doesn't introduce new and untested code at the same time, and takes all reported security flaws seriously
* Contains too many redundant and legacy apps
* Contains a huge choice of apps
* All the people who actually used Debian have fled to other distros such as Slackware, Gentoo and Fedora. Only the eleetist pricks are left now
* um... how to answer that one... how about "I actually use Debian, you insensitive clod?"
I was surfing along or maybe I was on IRC anyhow something pointed me to this Its a SPOOF on Debian.
:)
My favorite is apt-get install finger
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Netcraft rates servers. Debian is being lauded as a replacement for Red Hat servers aggressively (like Server Beach did while I was with them). Debain stable is a good replacement on the server, so expect these numbers to continue to climb a bit (the whole Red Hat thing probably shook up a lot of people and left a big opening for a wholly OSS, stable solution).
I've seen a few posts mentioning their favorite distro scoring suspiciously low, but remember: Mandrake [yours here] is a distro mainly targeted at the desktop, not the server.
Quack, quack.
Does it now take a 12 ISO download to do a base system install?
Matt
Use Testing for the desktop. It is new enough (typical a new Gnome release costs about two weeks or so), but I don't believe it breaks (see also Bruce Perens comment in this thread who uses unstable for 10 years). Perhaps you shouldn't force packages that are kept back for a reason?
Infrequency of adding packages? Usual there are reasons for this and Fedora will have the same infrequency in future. Only thing which is a bit Debian specific is the withdrawing of License related problems.
Sid is more for developers and adventurers.
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.
None of the commercial vendors impressed me with their technical support, which is funny since I paid them for it. Red Hat of course dropped support for their desktop distribution altogether.
Both gentoo and Debian, in my experience, have extremely friendly communities who are willing to answer even my worst inane questions ("How can I get video1394 to load automatically on boot?")
I ran gentoo for probably six months, but the cost of compiling everything once a week to keep up-to-date just wore me down, especially on the laptop. I know it has binary packages, but not for everything, and anyway I was all proud of myself for having optimized binaries for AMD...
Well, no more. Now I'm on Debian and I'll probably stay there. It has the best "everything just works" rating out of all of them, even the commercial distros. Well, it has the best rating after you've installed discover. (And why doesn't discover load video1394 when it sees my firewire cable? It seems to know to load raw1394...)
My only complaint is that there needs to be kernel-image packages that have ACPI compiled in.
I'm impressed enough with Debian that I intend to install it on 50 desktops at work, if only I can convince management of the benefits of doing so. (Especially with Fully Automated Installation, woo hoo.)
Wow, a lucrative publishing contract! I don't have to be evil anymore. --Meteor
Yes, the X packages are well behind in Debian, but it's for a number of good reasons. One being that the packages underwent a massive reorganization for 4.3. This was, in part, to prepare to accomodate the oncoming packages of the freedesktop.org stuff. The libraries have been split in to individual packages, rather than massive bundles. Once the freedesktop packages go in, the infrastructure should be there for you to mix and match X libraries from both XFree and f.d.o as you need them.
Another reason is that, simply put, XFree86 produces unportable code. Tons of the porting work must be done by the Debian team itself, and that isn't easy. The fact that a lot of the code itself is crappy is an issue too.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Sadly, testing and unstable have _no_ security updates.
Unstable is handled by basically updating to whatever the upstream developer produces, which usually includes the security fix, but getting those fixes into testing is not in any way reliably prioritized. It can be weeks to months before serious open currently exploited bugs get fixed in testing.
I really love a lot of things about debian, but the security policies are rather incomplete.
-josh
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!
When will people learn?
apt-get dist-upgrade is meant for that: DISTRIBUTION upgrade. You've been running woody, want to run sarge, apt-get dist-upgrade.
Other than that, it CAN cause breakage. It is meant to remove all traces of the previous distribution, thus it defaults to _remove_ packages which do not exist in the new one.
For everyday use you type apt-get upgrade (no dist-). It upgrades to the new packages, and when conflicts arise it always assumes the conservative approach (leave you with non-upgrade packages instead of breaking).
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.
I do have to agree there. Unfortunately, one of the big problems is that some of the porters simply weren't building 4.3 pre- packages on their arches for a while. They really dropped the ball, and x86 seemed to hurt for it. Unfortunately, I don't think all the work for x86 was really done, even though the packages worked for most people. Hopefull now that the big reorganization is over with, and 4.4 packaging has already begun, things will move quicker in the future. If get time, I'm going to help out with the 4.4 testing/packaging effort, but that probably won't happen until post-sarge. FWIW, Branden does want people to help him, hence the move to svn.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Just use Gentoo and spare yourself the disappointment.
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
First, have you used slackware? It's been traditionally the fastest distro since its inception 10 years ago. Gentoo doesn't beat it on speed, and isn't likely to.
Second, Gentoo does a lot of things in interesting but non-standard ways. Slackware users like tgz's, standard startup scripts, the usual directories, manual installs, etc. Basically, slackware is as close to unix and BSD as linux gets.
I'm not saying Gentoo is bad - I'm thinking about trying it just to see what all the fuss is about - but it's not right for every possible situation, which a number of gentoo users try to imply. For people who want a stripped-down, screaming box that does exactly what they want and absolutely nothing more...well, that's a job for Slackware.
Not quite. The difference is that a plain upgrade will hold a package back if the new version has dependencies or conflicts which your system doesn't currently satisfy, while a dist-upgrade will automatically install new dependencies and remove any conflicts (usually obsoleted stuff, though not always) in order to meet the needs of the new version of the package.
The only time I don't use dist-upgrade is on the occasions when there's an inconsistency in the dependencies of some set of packages I use. Right now, for example, mozilla has been upgraded, but galeon (which I use) hasn't been built against the new version yet, so dist-upgrading would remove galeon so that the new mozilla can be installed. But I just look at what changes apt says it will make, notice that galeon is marked for removal, and just switch to using plain upgrades for a few days until the inconsistency is resolved.
That sort of situation is pretty uncommon though, and in most cases it's better to use dist-upgrade. Otherwise you're stuck with a bunch of old packages which aren't upgraded because the new version has spun off some functionality into a separate package, or depends on a different library (libgnutls vs. libssl, for example), and the plain upgrade won't handle the change.
The only time dist-upgrade will remove a package is when it's specifically incompatible with something else. For the general task of cleaning out old packages that you don't need anymore (libraries that nothing depends on anymore, for example), use debfoster.
You can install Woody with 2.4.18 by using the "bf24" kernel disk. From the CD, just type "bf24" at the isolinux prompt.
Unstable is actually quite usable though; most Debian developers run it on their desktops. I've been running it for 3.5 years without ever needing to reinstall.
You can't say which distros own which percentage of the overall market by looking at server numbers alone. Doing so completely ignores workstations (for that matter, it also ignored embedded Linux as well, but let's not quibble) - and presumably there are a lot more (potential) workstations to run Linux on the desktop than (potential) servers to run Linux.
Get off my launchpad!
You have installed Knoppix, not Debian. I made the same mistake myself, once, when a colleague needed a machine quickly. There are some packages specific for Knoppix and not compatible with standard Debian. Sadly, these include the kernel and a shell, that is used somewhere during boot process (by initrd?). I forgot the details. There were some USENET postings detailing the procedure, though.
If you can manage to install a standard Debian, get yourself the first CD (if you have a fast connection), install a base system and then upgrade to testing (+ some packages from unstable, like maybe Mozilla, OpenOffice, whatever). You will have less problems with upgrading and maintaining the system as compared to Knoppix.
Kind regards
zapyon
I like my spaghetti with source.
Well - I never really got this one. I actually like Debian's strict policy on software licenses even if it now and then causes some inconvenience. As for Java - well - it didn't take me long to realize that I needed the original - and that Blackdown have a ready made Debian package that can be included in apt's sources.list. That's all - one line in a configuration file and you've got perfectly working Java in Debian.
And here's the line:
deb ftp://ftp.tux.org/pub/java/debian/ testing non-free main
By the way - I would assume this problem to be exactly the same on all other Linux distro's due to SUN's licensing. Isn't that so?
scripsit zapyon:
I've never done this, as the Debian installer never struck me as particularly intimidating... but I was under the impression that if you point your sources.list at Debian servers and crank up the Pin-Priority in preferences, a simple apt-get dist-upgrade will get you a stock Woody, Sarge, or Sid box. (Pin-Priority>1000 will `upgrade' even if it is to an earlier version of the package.)
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
Fedora is easy to maintain/patch, with yum and apt-get.
Debian is a good distrib, but please stop this fanatism. Other than Debian could be viable solution.
You may have been told this already, but the best thing to do after installing a standard Debian setup is to use apt-get to install hotplug and discover. This should do the majority of hardware autodetection for you.
HTH
* 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=-