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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 wonder what the BSD numbers would be like. anyone know where to get those stats? would be nice to see if all those 'bsd is dead/dying' arguments are right or wrong.
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
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.
I'm sure 2004 is the year of Linux on the Desktop!
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:)
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.
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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As a Gentoo user, it's nice to see that they have 1% of Linux's 1%. Sort of the fringe of the fringe.
Red Hat, as we all know, dominates the US market. SuSE used to have a strong hold on Germany, and I think momentum is taking them through that to some degree. Mandrake seems to have plucked the right strings with the French Govt (major buys lately) and they will see some domestic growth there.
Asia is still wide open: Red Hat is the only real distro around, but their execution is leaving a lot to be desired. SuSE just isn't here, and Turbo, Miracle, Red Flag are such odd little operations that they cannot seem to gain any marketshare.
I would think that the place things get interesting is where the race between IBM and HP in the developing world (Indonesia, Malaysia, Middle East, India) brings a linux with them. Increasingly, IBM is bringing SuSE with them, while HP signs deals with whatever local distro is the flavour of the day (Turbo in Japan and China, Red Flag in China, ? in Korea).
davejenkins.com |
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.
Community-driven Linux distribution provider Debian held on to the third spot with a 15.9 percent market share rating, up a half percentage point.
and
For Netcraft, the fastest growing distribution this time around is Gentoo Linux, which showed a rate of 49.5 percent. But that's growth toward a 1 percent market share.
THAT means Gentoo's growth is around .5 percent MARKET SHARE which is around Debian's. A draw if you ask me.
Relative percentage doesn't make sense considering all new distributions around.
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....
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,
Excuse me, but just when in the fuck did it become chic to pepper language with inappropriate and meaningless apostrophes? Lately, I've seen apostrophes misused in:
The infamous "it's" instead of "its" (to show possessive, as in "the animal defended its home"-- most people nowadays would write "the animal defended it's (sic) home", which means "the animal defended it is home", which makes no sense)
Plurals ("sunglass'" (sic), "pizza's" (sic), etc.)
At the end of "its" (bizarrely)-- i.e. its' (sic), which is not a word at all and probably never was
...And now, I see you using it as part of a verb. "See's"? WTF up with that? "See is"?
God, am I getting fucking sick of idiocy like this. Why the fuck do I even bother writing proper English any more, when even relatively intelligent people like you mangle the language like cheese through a grater? And if you're from a non-English-speaking nation: I apologize. Actually, you're probably American, since the WORST and MOST BIZARRE manglings of English seem to originate from America, and in fact from people born in America, who have been learning English all their lives. Go figure.
Anyhow, I'm fucking sick of this. Who the fuck started this "when in doubt, throw apostrophes at it" shit?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Windows still top desktop distro.
;)
All this proves is that the old maxim "there's no accounting for taste" is truly universal in its applicability.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
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.
I think you just need a hug mate.
Friends don't let Friends use Internet Explorer.
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.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
I think you missed an apostrophe's in there somewhere
"Who the fuck started this "when in doubt, throw apostrophes at it" shit?"
It dates back to the old testament, Exodus, chapter 8.
- - - - - - - -
AND the LORD spake unto Moses, Go unto Pharaoh, and say unto him, Thus saith the LORD, Let my people go, that they may serve me.
2 And if thou refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite all thy borders with apostrophes:
3 And the river shall bring forth apostrophes abundantly, which shall go up and come into thine house, and into thy bedchamber, and upon thy bed, and into the house of thy servants, and upon thy people, and into thine ovens, and into thy kneadingtroughs:
4 And the apostrophes shall come up both on thee, and upon thy people, and upon all thy servants.
5 And the LORD spake unto Moses, Say unto Aaron, Stretch forth thine hand with thy rod over the streams, over the rivers, and over the ponds, and cause apostrophes to come up upon the land of Egypt.
6 And Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt; and the apostrophes came up, and covered the land of Egypt.
7 And the magicians did so with their enchantments, and brought up apostrophes upon the land of Egypt.
8 Then Pharaoh called for Moses and Aaron, and said, Entreat the LORD, that he may take away the apostrophes from me, and from my people; and I will let the people go, that they may do sacrifice unto the LORD.
9 And Moses said unto Pharaoh, Glory over me: when shall I entreat for thee, and for thy servants, and for thy people, to destroy the apostrophes from thee and thy houses, that they may remain in the river only?
10 And he said, To-morrow. And he said, Be it according to thy word: that thou mayest know that there is none like unto the LORD our God.
11 And the apostrophes shall depart from thee, and from thy houses, and from thy servants, and from thy people; they shall remain in the river only.
12 And Moses and Aaron went out from Pharaoh: and Moses cried unto the LORD because of the apostrophes which he had brought against Pharaoh.
13 And the LORD did according to the word of Moses; and the apostrophes died out of the houses, out of the villages, and out of the fields.
14 And they gathered them together upon heaps: and the land stank.
Linux is the kernel, and the TCP/IP stack is in the kernel. So you can't tell from a TCP/IP connection whether a host is running Redhat, Slackware or Debian.
What the survey site is probably doing is looking at information tags within the Server: field of the HTTP response headers. Redhat does advertise itself there in the vendor-supplied Apache packages, but some other distros don't. Slackware's Apache packages will return nothing more descriptive than 'Unix' in the Server string.
So not all distros will reveal themselves, and anybody can easily prevent this information from being shown period with a simple Apache configuration directive. I think that's a good idea to do on your own servers, by the way. Give attackers the least info possible at your setup.
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 have 10 Identical servers, one happens to be not used for anything except logging, so on that machine I compile all the updates using the --buildpkg option, so I have a binary pkg I can share between all 10 of my machines. It saves me a ton of time, and I dont have to hunt for outdated rpms.
keanmarine.com
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.