> it seems like more people use ubuntu based distributions. I think it depends which sub-populations you measure. The modern web and social media can make it h

> it seems like more people use ubuntu based distributions. I think it depends which sub-populations you measure. The modern web and social media can make it hard to understand how your anecdata are sourced. I think the marketing behind Ubuntu is a large part of its visibility, expanding into a bit of a vacuum left by Red Hat's turn towards enterprise and away from regular users. This has compounded over the years with more network effects among new users. I'd say that cloud hosting and blogging environments have had more novice user influence than prior enterprise and university-based environments that had more senior-driven inertia. From my POV of academic and scientific computing with a sprinkling of enterprise consultancy, there used to be a strong Red Hat bias in US (maybe North American?) Linux usage with SuSE having a similar role in Europe. When RHEL emerged, this preference was inherited by CentOS and Scientific Linux. I don't know exactly how my own filter bubble developed, but I had little awareness of Debian until the Ubuntu marketing arrived and I read the back story. It was one of those parallel world experiences. Perhaps I knew more about SuSE as "the competitor" due to high-performance computing conferences being dominated by US, western Europe, and East Asia participation back in those days.