Slashdot Mirror
What's The Fastest Growing Linux Distro?
darthcamaro writes "What's the fastest growing Linux distro? This really solid article on InternetNews.com contains interviews with the Debian Project leader, the founder of Mandrake, SuSe, Red Hat and TurboLinux to get their take on who's the biggest and who's the baddest on the distro block.
Also includes some interesting insight into the next round of releases."
You could get a feel for the number from
http://counter.li.org/reports/machines.php
I really should check our Gentoo, it might just work on my crappy 5 year old Wintel machine...
I wouldn't recommend it unless you don't want to actually work on that box.
I mean, sure you could save on the compile times (good luck compiling KDE/gnome, Mozilla and Open Office on a "crappy 5 year old Wintel machine") by getting binaries, but then, why not just use Slackware or Debian...
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
Selling 1 license last week and 2 licenses this week would be a 100% increase. Selling 0 licenses last week and 1 license this week is an infinite percentage increase. I hope you pay somebody else to compute your taxes...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
According to DistroWatch.com, ranked by hits per day on their website:
Mandrake 991
Red Hat 696
Knoppix 643
Debian 567
Fedora 518
Gentoo 477
SUSE 460
Slackware 423
and the list goes on and on
Of course this is very limited sample and probably doesn't include any enterprise use.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
The article says it has had the slowest growth rate, not that it is shrinking.
"RedHat has a far greater number of installations at 1.5 million, but a slower growth rate in the six-month span at 17.8 percent; "
It is still growing, just not as fast as the other distros.
I realize you're trolling/joking, but Debian supports new hardware just fine. I installed it on my dual Athlon 2200+ w/ SB Audigy and Radeon 9700PRO a year ago, and it worked fine and still does. Myths about Debian's hardware support mostly seem to come from its lack of an autodetecting installer, although Knoppix and debian-installer are fixing that.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
While not very usable on a single 5 year old box, Gentoo can be used on such hardware. I manage a small network of systems that run Gentoo. Some are 5 years old. One of the systems is used to compile and build binary packages. All the other machines install or upgrade from these binary packages. Some of the other machines also participate in the compilation process using distcc.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Sorry, but when exactly did Slackware loose "The distribution with attitude" feeling? We are havin quite some fun over at dropline, thank you! ;-)
Lispy
The article ranks only Web servers. So it's hardly going to provide useful numbers on desktops.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The article says: "RedHat has a far greater number of sites but a slower growth rate, and actually fell this month"
I sell distros through my website, fastdiscs.com. I sell more copies of Mandrake GPL than all the other distros put together. It's quite phenomenal.
Distro of the week though? MEPIS. Try it, it's fantastic!
James
Like tinyurl, but one letter less! http://qurl.co.uk/
scripsit SoTuA:
Actually it's not:
Note that Woody==Stable -- that's 2.2.2-14.7. Sarge (Testing) currently has 3.1.3-1, and Sid (Unstable) has 3.1.5-2.
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.
Maybe for personal use, but fedora basically is redhat without th support is it not? My cousin just went and bought a magazine about linux cause he wanted to try it out (he doesnt get cable where he lives only 56k) but i think that stuff thats easy for people to obtain will help it grow, my cousin probably doesn even know how to burn a iso.. if peopel want to experince/ try out linux cause the realized MS sucks paying 80 dollars for suse or redhat at bestbuy may become a trend..
However the parent was talking about how Red Hat cut off half there customer because they stop producing a free downloadable and boxed set version of their operating system.(Which really was just draining money doing so, because the number buying it didn't outweigh the money involved in making it). Once they cut the dead weight, Red Hat is now actually turning a profit, and their stock has risen over 100% since. (Though that could just be do to them filing a lawsuit against SCO).
Most of the usablity improvements come from KDE 3.2 & linux 2.6 (though it was fast enough with 3.1.2 & 2.4) In fact, it is much more responsive than Windows (any version with a bit of security (not 9x, ME)), Fedora Core 1 (fresh install on a 1GHz P3-celeron, 256MB RAM & 10K rpm SCSI drive) Now admittedly the fedora installed very quickly. The recent updating included building most of the system over again (for about 6months only security related packages had been updated) which took about a week, but the system was still often usable while it was compiling (slow, but usable).
Some people have argued that in a particular library/program compiling for -march= with gcc (as opposed to most of the binary distros -mcpu=) only leads to a 2-3% improvement in speed per program/libary. If true (and only that much), that adds up, X is 3% faster, Qt is 3% faster, kdelibs is 3% faster, konqueror is 3% faster= 112.6% faster, which is better than the change between any of the Pentium 4 Extremely expensive edition, and Athlon 64 (of which I have not seen ONE mainstream benchmark site running in 64-bit mode...Windows (beta) or Linux) Many over clockers don't get that much performance increase stablily.
If you want to there is the GRP (Gentoo Reference Platform) which will install with binaries, so you don't have to compile everything.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/35588.html But the real security problem in Xandros is precisely the Windows affliction: too many networking services are enabled by default.
da'covale d'Rie Bolmdahl
The Debian people are rewriting their installer right now for the upcoming release. One of the big goals is improved auto-detection of hardware. I'm not sure if they are pulling things from Knoppix, but hopefully so for the x86 platform.