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Netcraft: Red Hat Still Top Linux Server Distro
darthcamaro writes "Looks like Red Hat is still the #1 distro according to Netcraft stats cited by Internetnews.com. Gentoo is now the fastest growing, replaced Debian which was the fastest growing distro just six months ago...and as we all know, and as the article rightly points out, the stats aren't accurate cause most webserver admins disable version reporting...right? So if all version were known, what would be the #1 distro for hosting? Read the Netcraft stats (without the context that they're BS) here"
That things like CPanel that are commonly used were up until recently only available on RedHat.
Is that Red Hat Enterprise or Fedora?
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I wouldn't say BSD is dying. Look at Apple. Darwin is based on FreeBSD and you can't say that xserves are not selling.
that's always saying BSD is dying? As a NetBSd user, I wouldn't consider them an reliable source. ;)*
*winky provided for the sardonically challenged
Gentoo, 6-month Growth Rate, 49.5%.
Seems like we have the biggest growth rate...
C'mon geeks, show some backbone, come to Gentoo, our precious...:)
And it isn't even hard to install. When I was starting linux for the first time, without no previous experience, 1 year ago, following the manual up to the last slash*, it took me only 1 reformating and 2 days total. Nowdays, it's less than 24 hours on my P4, for the critical stuff, once KDE is up, the rest can follow safely. *Literary, the manual had a section where they didn't had an extra slash and that screwed me for half an hour:)
Lets see, NetCraft has successfully identified my exterior Linux Virtual Server boxes, RedHat; great. However they don't know that there are 90 systems running behind that LVS server, 20 of them are RedHat (as they were part of the origional deployment) the other 70 are Debian ... since the licensing change, we changed our corperate distro of choice.
22 systems running RedHat 7.3 (All paid for)
70 systems running Debian Woody (Company donated $6000) to the debian folks.
All in all, netcraft see's two systems. Sweet.
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More important in this piece is that all of them are growing in absolute terms, and growing quickly. 10-15% growth every six months is nothing to sneeze at. It would be interesting to see these figures for other OS:es.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
RedHat AS/ES or Suse for the enterprise. The logic being that Suse and RedHat invest a lot in the mid-range to high-end server market. Not only do they make sure their kernels take advantage of this hardware but they'll support them as well. RPM may have it's problems but a well trained admin should know how to avoid them.
Gentoo's growth really shouldn't suprise anyone. The ideals behind Gentoo fit well with the entry-level sys admin / "hacker" types that run servers for most small companies.
I think it's sad that Debian, which is one of the best (if not THE best) server distro, appears to be losing momentum. I'm sure that will change though. Who knows, these stats are merely an indication.
Just my two cents on the matter. Heh, there goes the karma....
Expect to see more momentum when Debian Sarge finally becomes stable, replacing good ol' Woody. I love Debian, but for an increasing number of servers I find myself going to testing or unstable to grab packages when the Woody ones are just too old for my uses.
Besides, the new debian-installer is actually quite nice. Still text based, but its fast and intuitive even at beta stage. Its a great improvement on boot-floppies, and the cross platform support is impressive to say the least.
Lets not worry about which Linux distro owns the market, but rather worry about what operating system owns the market, huh?
Gentoo had the fastest growth rate only becasue it went from .7 to 1.0 market share. .9%, compared to the next highest Debian which gained only .4%.
SuSE however gained the most market share going from 10.9 to 11.8. It gained
So it looks like SuSE picked up more RH defectors than any other distro.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I see alot of people touting there distro lately. But what matters to my boss (and therefor me) is what works, what works well, and how much overhead a system is avoiding.
Any distro out of the box should be looked upon as all-for-one generic solution. I would not be caught dead putting an out of the box distro in production. Not even after a few hours customizing it.
My point is yeah, I can install and get the latest apache running with one command on Gentoo, but will it be optimized. (No ofcourse I don't mean hardware optimized.) I am talking about for the company network. No its not. I want to install two web-servers, one light-weight, and one with a good number of mod_*s.
Though this is one example, what I am trying to say is that any good admin, that doesn't work for a small company hacks and twicks the system so much, that the system doesn't behave like all-for-one solution at all. The distro was the foundation, but even that is changed with a kernel compile and some thread tweaking.
SO what does it really matter. As someone pointed out earlier, most admin's including me turn of any type of version response, (at least on perimeter servers). Anyway I digress.
I'm to pay money for the support. Ummm.. Not nice.
Actually, I thought that was the whole point of the new software economy created by open source... you get the software for free, and then you pay for support so that the developers can afford to create more software to give away for free.
Anyway, I'm not really familiar with 64-bit distros, but I'm sure you could do a fedora install or something with a 64 bit yum repository, and then you wouldn't have to pay for software updates. I'm sure you could do something similar with Debian! If there's one distro I can think of off the top of my head that I know will have an x86_64 port with a free repository for updates, it'll be debian (and debian makes a great server anyway).
As for your other comment about linux servers being far more prolific than linux workstations, that's exactly consistent with my expectations.
I don't think it's a typo. "Teh" is a common typo; "it's" is due to ignorance/stupidity.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
to which Feztaa replied:
Only a problem with that: 23 million desktops is by no means 3x as popular as 7 million servers. Considering the ammount of servers and desktops out there, 7 million servers is very popular while 23 million desktop is very unpopular. For servers, we've been there for a while. For desktops, we're definitely not there yet.
Since when doesn't Slackware have a package system? man makepkg man explodepkg man installpkg man removepkg man upgradepkg man pkgtool Not having dependency checking does not equal not having a packaging system.
What Novell has coming with Suse. I have experience with Netware(4,5,6) and find it easy to use, reliable and secure. With Suse added to the mix it could become a real high end competitor to Red Hat Enterprise. Think about Cisco hardware with a Netware backend, all running on Suse, close to vault quality. I don't like everything that RH has done lately (dropping the desktop, bluecurve) but have to admit they are a big part of the push for corporate Linux. That is not a bad thing. I'll settle for Linux winning in the totals of all distro's.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.