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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"
There's another netcraft article tying cobalt gains to opening the ROM source.
Especially interesting in the context of the fact the product was discontinued.
Tweet, tweet.
Is there anything that suggests people using Debian would likely use RH externally, more than vice versa? Or that Debian users are more likely to disable version numbering?
Unless there is, I don't see what the problem is with the figures.
To paint a picture you have to use broad brush strokes.
So if all versions were known, what would be the #1 distro for hosting?
Probably still RedHat/Fedora. It's quick, easy to set up, well supported, has decent-to-good administration tools, and gives good Karma to both you and your boss.
We use Fedora for both our dedicated servers (to be leased/rented to clients) and for internal use. We theoretically offer FreeBSD installs as well, but no one has ever taken us up on that offer (I wonder why)...
RH's kickstart and anaconda features are godsends, the text-only and curses utilities are more than adequate when needed, and with Yum I know longer have to care about RPM dependancy hell.
Gentoo? Give me my three days back, please.
Debian? I suppose... but something smells "stagnant" to me and it's not just the water.
*BSD? Too complex for most customers, and a headache I'd rather not have to deal with on our production machines. There's very little that the BSDs can offer me (for the time invested in learning all the "oddities" (from my perspective)) that's worth it for me to move over.
Your mileage may vary, but mine stays pretty constant.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Why anon? I think that's obvious, I hope...
I'm not really interested in what the current "popular" Distro is. I need to know what has a proven track record in very important areas.
Anyone else's input is also appreciated.
Don't be fooled by that last column. It's pretty much meaningless to compare the ratio "july/jan" for each distro; it's the tiny "jan" value for Gentoo what makes its "6-month Growth Rate" look impressive, which it's not (looked at on a number-of-installations basis).
Basically RH lost a %, SuSE gained one, some others gained fractions of a %. Nothing terribly interesting.
Ah, bitter dregs.
Screw the most popular, ill take Slackware any day of the week. It installs what i tell it to, it compiles 99% of my software like a dream, and i dont have an rpm dependancy nightmare. If you end up taking this poll too seriously, think about how popular mcdonalds is.
People keep arguing that Gentoo is for geeks, gentoo is time consuming, etc... Please, don't pretend you know it! Tell me if you know of any distribution that can install VMWare Workstation, Eclipse, Tomcat, JBoss, etc... with one (ONLY ONE) command: emerge XXX That saves me a LOT of time! Time you spend with instalation (it can be fast using stage3) is saved many times by Gentoo's excellent PORTAGE. Here in Brazil, Gentoo is becoming VERY popular. I use Gentoo on my desktop, I was a Red Hat user and must say Gentoo is MUCH better. But for a server I would use debian stable, nothing can beat it in terms of stability and maintainance. I think that what makes Gentoo an excellent desktop OS (very uptodate - gnome 2.6, etc...) makes it a dangerous OS for a server.
Many people had advised me against Gentoo on server machines due to the fact that it might be unstable. Everyone used to recommend Redhat for servers cuz it was supposed to be more stable.
I have a server running on Gentoo, and another one on Redhat. Both on machine with exactly the same config, running same stuff (LAMP). The one with Gentoo is waaaay faster than the one with Redhat.
Though neither of them crash!
I thought Google kept track of host systems accessing their search engine in some fashion. That's still going to have some problems (masquerading, randomness of sample, etc.), but it seems like it would be at least as good as the Netcraft stats.
Debians not totally dead - have just about completed migrating 20 production servers over and to be honest i have never been happier. Apt-get just works ! Used to be RedHat through and through -then went to Mandrake (work was a mandrake shop when i got there) and to be honest urpmi - although a refreshing change from RedHats incomplete package management system (granted this was RH 7.2-7.3 days) compared to apt-get, it is somewhat broken.
Running Debian on my desktop at home - as for being out of date - just run unstable.
that said, Gentoo and SuSE both have 64-bit versions out right now, and you can get neccesary updates to either one free of charge. It sounds to me as if you are running Fedora, not true RH if you are supposedly being charged for updates. I can tell you that if you purcahsed RH's supported product, you would get free updates and still have spent considerably less on TCO than if you were running Windows. And while I am not been a RH user since RH9, I find it very hard to believe that Fedora has no free security updates...that would just be irresponsible. I download my RH9 for free, never gave RH a cent, and i still get free updates to this day.
Lastly, 64-bit versions are in development for both Slackware and Debian :) Unfortunately I think Debian's will most likely be ready first(slack dev. is sometimes slow). However, from what my 64-bit laptop toting friend has told me, 64-bit isn't really ready-for-primetime in anything other than servers yet anyways.
once you go slack, you never go back
You would probably get a larger performance gain from ditching KDE then from any optimized compiling you did.
once you go slack, you never go back
On the other hand I'm sick of wasting time on tuning my OS. I want it to work, out of the box, 100% of the time. Redhat&Suse work fine for that matter. If I want to run something on an obsolete box, Slackware is good enough and still takes less time to install and configure.
Gentoo is fun but it has no place on my servers and desktops. I have one image on a spare disk and when I'm in the mood, I can screw my system as much as I like.
I used to feel the same way about Gentoo. I ran LFS on my main system, and Slackware on any others. I tried out Gentoo, and found that I was right. It *can* be a hacker's distro, but so can Red Hat in the right hands. I was impressed by what Gentoo offered, but still did not feel it was up to the hype given it. Then I started writing my own ebuilds and making my own patches to add functionality. I started submitting my ebuilds to Gentoo's bugzilla and got noticed by a developer, who offered a development position to me. Now I am not only a developer, but the new QA Manager for Release Engineering, and I couldn't love Gentoo more. I tend to think that what you get out of a distribution is equivalent to what you put into it. I don't necessarily mean submissions or code, but how much you decide to learn the system and exploit its strengths, and work on its weaknesses.
At work, we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as our platform. I am really starting to like it just as well. We are using kickstart to build new servers and have setup a satellite server. We have created custom channels for each of our server types. Now to bring up a new MX server, we simply kickstart it, which registers it with the satellite server at the end of the install, then subscribe it to the "MX Server" channel and
the machine to download all of the necessary packages automatically. This makes our lives very easy and also proves my theory.We have put a lot of work into working with the tools provided to us by Red Hat, and make the best use of them. Because of that, we get a lot out of our servers and have to spend minimal time brining up new ones or changing their roles.