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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 ?
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!
~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,
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
The above poster is right. People want to run Java servers on their Linux boxes.
But the fact that Debian currently has some issues with installing those automatically shouldn't hold things back. Certainly, Red Hat aren't going out of their way to support Java.
And as far as Ant goes, it's not that hard to install:
antversion=1.6.0{
cd
wget -O - "http://apache.inspire.net.nz/ant/binaries/apache
ln -sf
echo "export ANT_HOME=/usr/local/apache-ant
export PATH=\$PATH:/usr/local/apache-ant/bin" >
chmod +x
}
FWIW, I run Linux Virtual Private Servers with a bunch of Java hosting tools like Tomcat preinstalled on my distros.
And, at least for me, Red Hat (including Fedora) is still outselling Debian by 5.3 to 1. Maybe it's because I install apt-rpm on the Red Hat boxes to make them just as easy to manage as the Debian ones :)