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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"
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.
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.
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
To put that in perspective, it took me about two hours to install Slackware 3.3 on my totally obsolete 386SX when I started using Linux. That was installing off of a parallel port Zip drive on a machine with 4 megabytes of RAM. Even then, to install on that limited of a machine, you had to mount the root floppy directly rather than loading it into a ramdisk, and setup a swap partition before even being able to run the installer.
24 hours to install on a shiny new Pentium 4 is NOT progress.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
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.
Simplicity.
Simply put, you in all likelyhood have no idea how Portage works. It's easy to use, yes. So is apt-get. Both are great from a user's perspective, but Slackware is not designed to be a user-friendly Linux like Mandrake or Suse. Slackware is an old-school, hacker distro. Gentoo claims to be a new-school hacker distro, that's development oriented, etc.
However, there's nothing hacker friendly about Gentoo. While there's nothing wrong with the distro, it often seems like the loudest Gentoo proponents are the ones Slack and Debian users tell to shut up and rtfm on IRC. They can emerge apps and stuff, sure, and they feel all leet because they're compiling stuff. In actuality though, if Portage ever broke (or some dependency got fucked up) the vast majority of Gentoo users would be stuck. Not because they're stupid, though they might very well be :) but rather because portage isn't hacker friendly.
Slackware is the distro you use if you want to really understand how Linux is put together but don't have time to do LFS. Gentoo users like to say that Gentoo is "automated LFS". But the automation completely removes the whole point of LFS, which is comprehension. Gentoo offers no comprehension.
Hope this clears things up for you.