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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.
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.
Priceless Photos
Gamblers Forum
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.
Wait, I thought X was the windowing system!? God damn you linux, why must you be so confusing! screw you guys, I'm going back to windows.
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
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.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
I think you missed an apostrophe's in there somewhere
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.
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.