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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."
Has got to be RedHat.
It's SCO Linux
...or the fastest growing one would be the one that went from 1 to 5 users last week ;)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Gentoo would be rated higher, but they're still waiting for the results to compile.
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For commercial market share, Red Hat and Suse take the cake (and Red Hat gives the recipe for the icing). But there are a lot of people using Debian in a dizzying array of roles. You can't really measure the commercial rollout of Debian though. If you're just talking about home use, there's no way to tell.
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.
When you purposefully discontinue distribution to half of your customers!
Likewise, logically, from a purely differential standpoint, the fastest growing distribuion atm would have to be Fedora, since it gained (what?) half of Redhat's customers in the course of a single day (when Redhat told that half of its customer base, guess what, you're now a Fedora customer).
My debian distro grows every day. not sure how fast though.
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
30 new packages installed, none removed and 2 held back.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
I think it has got to be Knoppix. I mean it is the best option for newbies and has inspired so many sping-off's. I think it definately qualifies as the fastest growing for that reason. It has introduced more people and is helping more people to come into the Linux World.
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.
Debian based distros seem to be generating a lot of buzz just now. Reviews of Lindows, Lycoris, Mepis, and all the Knoppix-varients seem like they`re everywhere.
Part of this I attribute to Redhat`s less-than graceful move away from the desktop (I know that`s an oversimplication...). Fedora is there, but I think Redhat made it too obvious that users would be leaving Redhat and moving to something else. People thought, "Well, if I`m leaving Redhat anyway, maybe this is a good time to try something else." The biggest "something else" to Redhat is Debian.
Another cause might be the brilliant success of Knoppix. It`s easy to try, and easy to like. Of course, it runs a little slowly from the CD, but a hard-drive install is easy. And what do you do after you install? Atpget update.
Of course, the commercial distros are actively working to get people to use and buy their product, but I`m not sure how much that really has to do with it. Right now these companies are benefiting from the Debian buzz, and they will contunue to benefit until they do something to antagonize their customers.
Has only been in distribution for a couple of days now and it's doing pretty well. I'd say it will surpass lunix by the end of the year.
Mandrake has always been very popular because of its ease of use.
But Gentoo has stepped out of the shadows and now is talk of the town among geeks (although it has yet to gain a lot of popularity under "Linux laymen".
I'd say it's a toss-up between Mandrake and Gentoo. RedHat IS shrinking, for obvious reasons, and Fedora just isn't that popular. Debian isn't as "big" as Mandrake, Slackware... I haven't heard much about that in a while... and SuSE, while up there, seems to have been more popular two years ago than it is now.
The fastest-growing LiveCD linux obviously is Knoppix, which really is its own class apart from the desktop/server environments.
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
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?
1. What is the best distro for servers?
:)
a. ease of setup up
b. security
c. ease of upgrade
d. longevity of support
e. remote management ability
2. What is the best distro for the desktop
a. speed of setup
b. has the apps I need
c. ease of upgrade/patches
d. supports my hardware
e. ease of use for newbies
3. What is the best of both worlds (1 plus 2)
Just because something is the fastest growing doesn't mean it's the best. While I've read tons of reviews most have such a bias as to be laughable. I'll keep using my tried and true redhat/debian/mandrake/fedora box for now
AngryPeopleRule
"Science is about ego as much as it is about discovery and truth " - I said it, so sue me.
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
Come on its gotta be Fedora, I remember just a few versions ago it all fit on 1 CD, but this weekend I had to download 4 DAMN discs to make the new version run.
"Luke, I am your node.parent();"
Redhat vs Debian: RedHat wins! ;p
Redhat vs Slackware: RedHat wins!
Redhat vs Gentoo: Redhat wins!
Open Source vs Closed Source: Open Source wins!
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
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.
But for certain, the slowest growing Linux distro is the SCO "All your code base are belong to us!" Linux.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
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.
I will tell you what; if you set up Gentoo a few times, you'll truly understand the Linux boot process and associated configuration.
Thinking outside my Head
...all other distros are for wussies
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"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
Btw. I included "Linux", to remove irrelevant hits. Hopefully, it scaled down evenly.
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
2 months ago, no one was using my distro.
1 month ago, I created a distro, which was remarkably similar to Red Hat, but with a few extra configuration files specific to our computer lab. My distro had one user -- me.
This month, I installed my distro on 10 other machines in the lab. Yes, that's right -- in one month, my distro's userbase increased from 1 to 11, or an increase of 1000% That's an annualized growth rate of 10^12, or over ONE TRILLION PERCENT!
So, please either acknowledge that (1) my distro is the fastest growing, or (2) "fastest growing" statistics are really dumb.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what's the big difference between a Fedora customer and a Red Hat customer, except the name? What are people so excited about? From what I can tell both RH 9 and Fedora are still free (as in beer) and all still get security updates (now from a corporation supported community instead of just a corporation). Red Hat is still pouring a lot of effort and money into the community. Are people upset because they don't get phone support any more or something like that? Seriously, what makes people feel sold out?
I personally am excited that a OSS-based company is starting to succeed and is creating a winning business model in the market place. OSS helps the market by increasing competition. I'd better get used to OSS companies needing to make money somewhere, if I want to see them take market share from proprietary companies. It seems such corporations make in-roads into the market more easily then a less organized community. Red Hat's success, its relationship with IBM, and IBM's increasing dependency on OSS is a great thing, IMHO.
While I don't contest the stats in the article, I just wonder if web server stats are valid for "Fastest Growing Linux Distro", even if they are valid for "Fastest Growing Apache platform".
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Unless you assume every corporate/SME file/print/authentication server and all desktops run publicly accessible webservers, this is a really bad metric
IDC stats aren't much better either
Of the > 30 machines running Mandrake that I have installed (ranging from corporate authentication servers to firewalls to laptops), only one has a publicly accessible web server.
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