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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.
I'm sure 2004 is the year of Linux on the Desktop!
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.
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.
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,
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
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.
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.