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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."
People who I suspect don't know what Linux is, are now starting to talk to me about this cool "whole computer thing on a CD". When you ask a few questions, it turns out it's Knoppix they're talking about.
I've got no idea if they're ever going to actually switch to Knoppix, but it has a coolness about it that's pretty impressive to a whole lot of people. That's what getting distributed in magazines will do for you. In fact, reading those magazines the month after they bundle a Linux distro, there's always a bunch of reader's letters talking about how great "this Linux thing" is after all.
Red Hat -> Lots of enterprise and business users
Suse -> More of the same, except mostly in Europe
Mandrake -> Fast growing with non-techies and some businesses too
Fedora/Old Red Hat -> Fast growing with home users
Debian -> Growing with home users Slackware/Knoppix/Gentoo... -> all have niche audiences
http://www.distrowatch.com/ has a ranking of people downloading each distro from them at the lower right of the page.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I read a review of about a dozen distributions and being only familiary with very early Slackware and RedHat (from v.4) was supprised at how different they are. I just recently downloaded Knoppix and I see a real niche for it. I have some old equipment and want to know if there is a distro that will perform less sluggish than the latest RedHat 9 (either through a default config options or ommisions of unnecessary packages).
However, I have found value in going with the popular thing (how often is the majority wront?) sometimes so yes, after all this "useful?" speak, I see some value in these kinds of things from some angle.
Magic Eight Ball: Outlook not so good., Hmmm, how about Excel and Word?
With IBM's Superbowl commericals, and them pushing Redhat (somewhat..mostly..):
http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/va_4010.shtml
I'd say Redhat will pick up and start growing fast, and soon! IBM is the big player here, and if they support Redhat, people will listen. More people trust IBM, than Microsoft!
Mod +5 Drunk
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Of course an article/posting on debianhelp.org is going to say that its the fastest growing distro. Relying on that information is like relying on the Microsoft TCO numbers from an "independant" research company.
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touche,
but more importantly there *is* some signifigance in that it was in the google first "I feel lucky" spot/rank.
In this case, I'm calling google the authority (somewhat tongue and cheek). At the very minimum it means people are talking about debian, fastest growing linux et al in the same sentence/page/context AND linking to the page/site I referenced earlier, with similiar text in some sort of quantity and/or quality.
*shrug* but you knew that, right?
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
Finally Debian is getting its due! RedHat is fastest, as the first post noted, but shrinking. Debian's security is LEGENDARY. Spinoffs of Debian such as Xandros only help to entrench Debian as a secure OS.
.sig. More info at my homepage.
ANYONE making a secure and stable Linux distro deserves props. Debian leads the pack. Xandros puts out a different GUI. Props to them all.
--
To find out about people leeching off Debian, and exactly how to stop the cancer that is attacking Linux, click the link in my
Lindows Steals Copyrighted Art and Promotes Porn
As with most IT articles, the objective seems to be a good headline rather than a factual appreciation of the facts.
.0000001% of the market - so what.
From the article, RedHat seems to have the most numbers out there, AND Debian has the fastest growth as a platform for Apache. No conflict there.
But which is the fastest growing distro? Who really cares. If I sold 1 last week and 10 this week I may have the fastest growing distro, but with
However if Sun really start shipping the Java Desktop (Suse based version) to all those chinese sites then it would likely win
Because of the nature of Linux and FOSS, it's very hard to know exactly how much deployment any particular distribution is getting.
Sales figures are one thing, but users able to install the same CD on multiple machines mean that the number of installations could be higher.
Worldwise, subtracting new MS licenses from total new x86 hardware sales doesn't account for unauthorized installations of MS software on those other x86 machines. It's not all going to Linux and the *BSD releases. But MS probably has a better idea than anyone about the prevalence of piracy, so they may well have the most accurate figures about Linux installations, better than Gartner, IDG, and the other consulting firms.
Then there's folks like me that have bought several releases of SuSE, but only run the latest one.
And there are people recycling old Win98 boxes into single purpose servers on Linux.
Finally, a few distros might "phone home", but the user is permitted to modify this behavior, so that's not a complete measure either. It might be a good lower bound.
There's just no really accurate way to count installs.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
>Mandrake 991
Lots of ex-RedHat users are shifting to Mandrake instead of playing with the Fedora Core. Mandrake is a lot like RedHat, especially if you're used to downloading compiled RPMs and such. Not to mention Mandrake is usually recommended to new people because of its installer and overall GUI-ness.
Can someone tell me why Slackware hardly ever gets a mention in these sorts of articles that purport to be written by journos with their fingers on the pulse?
Slackware is used by a LARGE number of sys admins so though it may me small fry in the home market its anything but in the server arena. Perhaps these writers should get a bit more clued
up about whats really going on out there rather than just finding out and waflling about distributions that their mates have mentioned to them.
You've got it dead-on. That describes me perfectly. I've been using RedHat almost exclusively since RedHat 5.1.
So I'm trying Debian on a spare P3 600. Trouble is, the video card in it is an nvidia geforce 256. I simply cannot get X working. (I haven't had a problem configuring X with RedHat since 6.0, on a system with an intel i740 [iirc] graphics chipset...)
In fact, coming from the RedHat world, Debian is very confusing over all, X issues aside. I'm trying Debian because I hear how easy it is to upgrade. The whole "I installed Debian in the kernel 2.0 days; now I'm running 2.6 without re-install" thing. I want to run:
- kernel 2.6
- KDE 3.2
- ext3 filesystem
Since this is a spare system, I'm OK with trying "testing" or even "unstable". Starting from "stable" woody, its been difficult to get anywhere. I'll spare the details, but I've specified using the "testing" branch, run the apt update/upgrade stuff, and I still can't tell at all how to go from 2.2->2.6, KDE 2.x->3.2, ext2->ext3. And still no X.Maybe I'm completely spoiled by how easy RedHat has always made things, but... I'm about one more wasted days' effort away from ditching Debian and giving Fedora a try. Looks like Debian might be a bit more, ah, "configurable" than this particular geek has any need for...
Sorry about the rant... but if Debian were my first attempt at a Linux installation from running windows, I'd have given up days ago, when I couldn't find any "official Debian" install ISO to download... I want to get this system running but this is just too much hassle. Looks like I may be waiting for Fedora Core 2 after all... :(
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Much like a newborn puppy...
I 've tried RedHat and SuSE but I loved Slackware! ;-)
Its simple but not oversimplified. Its easy, but it doesn't try to do anything. You can configure it in 30mins flat, and if something goes wrong, you DO know what has been done, you cannot blame any not-so-clever-finally configuration utility.
Oh, and Pat is a really cool guy
As someone said: Slackware is for newbies who don't want to remain newbies.
"Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler"
Btw. I included "Linux", to remove irrelevant hits. Hopefully, it scaled down evenly.
Once you get it running (which is remarkably easy), it's very much like Debian on the inside. KDE comes nicely preconfigured, desktop setup I find to be excellent (FAR superior to recent Mandrake releases on utterly basic issues like default font readability). MEPIS also works well as an easy-setup, no-fuss personal server box. I wanted a Debian-based server for my Asterisk system, but didn't feel like dealing with a time-consuming install, and wanted something I could test for hardware compatibility right away with a bootable CD. Most critically, I wanted something that came with out-of-the-box support for NVidia motherboards to avoid the hassle of having to separately download and burn to CD all the NForce (and NVidia graphics) drivers so you can compile and install them to get your NForce2 motherboard working properly (no ethernet until you install them, makes it hard to get online to fetch the drivers, and pain-in-the-butt ensues). MEPIS worked out of the box, Mandrake took a couple of hours of compiling and installing different versions of the NVidia drivers to get things working perfectly.
The only thing I don't particularly like about MEPIS is that it lack the sheer volume of documentation that other distros have. Luckily, you can almost always do things the standard Debian way - but trying to figure out if there's some lovely preinstalled KDE tool for package/configuration management or whatever to handle some particular issue is just not as thoroughly addressed as it is with Mandrake, for example (which is still the king of a good GUI tool package out of the box, and there's TONS of info on distro-specific HOWTO stuff). It took me half an hour to figure out how to make sure the SSH daemon was getting started at startup before I figured out the Debian way to do it is dpkg-reconfigure ssh (I am a RedHat guy by background, and a Mandrake user in recent years, so this stuff is not obvious to me, as the Debian init system is completely different). Oh yeah, and MEPIS is a shitty name. I think they'd be growing even faster with a less lame sounding name - something you could be proud to show to your friends. Knoppix - that sounds cool. So does Red Hat... Debian is alright... MEPIS is just terrible.
Knoppix has been around for a while now. Aside from being a live CD distro it is also known as an "easy Debian".
Its GPL
Why can't the Debian folks just cobble all of the good stuff Karl Knopper did into Debian?
Steve
Package management isn't even to avoid hosing the machine.
It's so it's remotely possible to figure out what is ON the machine.
Again, that's mostly related to maintaining multiple machines, but I've gotten to the point where I just build a Debian package for anything custom I do, just so I can replicate it and it's dependencies on other machines in a sane manner.
Your URL is incorrect, that should be slackware.com it's a .com, not a .org. Incidentally, Patrick Volkerding, the sole owner of Slackware, likes to point out that it's the only Linux distro that's always been in the black. :-)
"Redhat's not shrinking, it's pining for the fjords."
Redhat's been bleeding users -- by attrition if by nothing else. Yes, these are people who would not have otherwise paid for the distro. That's fine and dandy but it's not going to stop the users going away. This includes corporate users who were sucking off the RH teat.
People want their linux free, and if they're not going to get paid, on-demand support for it anyway, they'll go with something with a strong security record and a strong policy of "let's not fuck with the customers". Oh, Hello.
Unless RH does something to increase their numbers -- things like, oh, not forcing upgrades every 6 months. I personally know companies that still use and deploy redhat 5.2. They're not going to change their product just for the hell of it.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Yep, clearly you haven't tried Slackware recently. I've tried so many distro's (of which Mandrake used to be my favourite) but they all tend to make it either as easy as possible (Deadrat,Mandrake etc..) or they tell you what you want and how you want it or they give you so much freedom (gentoo) that the endless possiblities might confuse some people or it might not work that well in a non-networked environment. I still believe it's a matter of choice and I will never dis anyone for using a certain distro.We're all GNU brothers after all... But Slackware IMHO really stayed true to what it used to be all about and I still prefer building my system the way I want it and if it takes me a week to get my X and sound to work properly then so be it, but the enjoyment of doing it myself rocks my world.I can understand that people are fond of gentoo. I tried it as well, but with limited access behind the firewall at work it gave me lots of headaches..:-( Slack will probably never be the biggest or fastest growing distro either, but it will always have its followers.
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig