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Linux Distro Survey

60 points by bandris 14y ago

pavanky 14y ago
/r/linux has a huge archlinux bias (which includes me). So take those results with a grain of salt.
- kristaps 14y ago
  I was indeed surprised by those numbers, thanks for explaining.
- nXqd 14y ago
  But there is no doubt that Arch Linux community is an interesting one. Ubuntu bored me and I had a great time playing with Arch :) And those numbers surprise me as well.
  - mixmastamyk 14y ago
    With all the regressions, I never feel bored by ubuntu. ;)
    - nXqd 14y ago
      hehe :P I still choose Ubuntu as my server's distro :P
- codemac 14y ago
  Well.. It was the /r/linux survey? Arch seems to have the Haskell problem: avoiding success at all costs. Although, many see this as a feature and not a bug.
  - sirclueless 14y ago
    How so? In that it makes breaking changes often? I like its model better than other distros: rather than duplicating effort backporting bugfixes to make old versions stable and secure, they report everything upstream and push for it to get fixed there. I understand not wanting to sysadmin a large number of Arch machines though.
    - martius 14y ago
      I'm an Archlinux user, and BC aren't happening that often (seriously). Some big moves (likes switching to systemd) required some work, but still ran smoothly. For my own computers (including the laptop I work with) it's almost perfect.
      - laumars 14y ago
        Normally I'd agree with you, but the last 12 months have seen some pretty disruptive changes (the glibc update caught me out more than systemd had). Arch is far from perfect, and I'm not convinced I like the direction it's heading in (re systemd), but that's a plauge for the wider ecosystem than an Arch-specific issue. However Arch definitely find a nice balance between "hands on" and "lazy administration" for desktop users. Sadly though, systemd was the last straw that saw the start of my migration away from Arch on the servers (now a balance of FreeBSD and Debian; depending on the requirements of that server). As with everything though, it's all personal preference. So I expect plenty of people to have a different opinion (and different experiences as well).
        ffreire 14y ago
        What's worked for me has been to read the archlinux.org homepage before I upgrade (maybe once every few days). If there are any breaking changes they are listed along with the recommended method for handling them. If I somehow fat finger a command and it doesn't go smoothly then all I have to do is jump in #archlinux and my issue is resolved in under an hour. YMMV of course but I've found the entire Arch experience to be pleasant and it fits my work flow, but I understand that it doesn't fit everyone's.
    - mapleoin 14y ago
      they report everything upstream and push for it to get fixed there That's what most ditros do. Fedora and openSUSE anyway. While we wait for upstream to fix the issue and release a new version, we prefer to have a working package, though.
      - 14y ago
  - praptak 14y ago
    Yeah, count me in the feature-not-a-bug camp. It is avoiding popularity rather than success. And I parse it rather as "avoid some nasty costs that could boost popularity" not as "spare no costs when actively decreasing popularity".
  - dschiptsov 14y ago
    Yeah, systemd and grub2 are Haskell-ish way of making everything in a "proper way", "not for everyone".))) But, see, you can almost type-check your tens of grub2 confs!
- Aardwolf 14y ago
  Where does this /r/linux bias to Archlinux come from? I use Archlinux, but never visit reddit, hacker news and slashdot already waste enough of my internet time :)
  - pavanky 14y ago
    I am not sure why, but /r/linux has a unusually high number of archlinux users compared to other samples around the internet. It is second only to Ubuntu there. May be it just speaks about the kind of people on reddit also using Linux. May be arch linux is _underrepresented_ everywhere else.
- JimmaDaRustla 14y ago
  I'm Arch Linux and I've never been on /r/linux, and I'm on Reddit everyday ;)
Ologn 14y ago
As Wikipedia has an Alexa rank of 6, and is the most popular web site I know of that gives an occasional survey of its server logs, I tend to look at it for information on web clients. Like their October 2012 report ( http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOpera... ) For Linux client systems that use Wikipedia, Linux kernels with Android dominate. There's about 7 Android clients for every 1 Ubuntu client. There's about 45 Ubuntu clients for every Fedora and SuSE client. There's 2 Fedora users for every Debian user. And so on - less used Linux clients are listed on the report as well. Netcraft used to have a decent survey of which web servers were running Linux, but I don't see any recent reports from them on that. With the rise of EC2 and PAAS/IAAS I would guess the Amazon Linux AMI would be one of the new VPSs/instances/"servers" that is around more nowadays.
- arocks 14y ago
  Agree. Probably the only valuable statistic here would be of user preferences. Again, it reflects the biases that reddit users might have. But it is likely that they are more techsavy than the average population and likely to be an opinion leader among their peers.
- daniel-levin 14y ago
  Do Linux based spiders and crawlers count? If so, has that skewed the results in a meaningful way?
  - padraigm 14y ago
    Whether they count or not, I would expect to see "regular" users to be orders of magnitude more common than web crawlers.
    - Flimm 14y ago
      But web crawlers generate orders of magnitude more traffic than regular users.
mixedbit 14y ago
If I'm not interested in using Unity, are there any advantages of installing Ubuntu and using it with non-default graphical environment, or is it better to just go with Debian?
- martius 14y ago
  Packages are upgraded more often, I think. It's supported by a company called Canonical, but I'm not sure it adds value. The community is larger and you may find online resources more easily.
  - laumars 14y ago
    I love the idea of Ubuntu (not that it hasn't happened many times before) and have a great deal of respect for Mark Shuttleworth for basically funding Canonical out of his own pocket. However he (and Canonical as a company) make some terrible design decisions (Unity, premature adoption of Pulse audio, and -most recently- Ubuntu going solo with display managers). I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if Shuttleworth sees himself as the "Steve Jobs" of Linux and with the direction they're taking, I think Ubuntu will be like Android/Linux (ie still "Linux", but largely incompatible with the traditional desktop Linux ecosystem). Hopefully I'm wrong. But Shuttleworth has done little to give me confidence.
- grapjas 14y ago
  Ubuntu is less strict on the non-free thing. Either way it doesn't really matter since you can use PPAs from ubuntu on debian and vice versa. Obviously the same goes for .deb I think ubuntu LTS gets packages from wheezy and normal ubuntu from sid.
- dan1234 14y ago
  Debian takes the super stable approach, which means packages aren't always at the latest version. Ubuntu favours more frequent updates. I like Debian for servers but I'd probably go with Ubuntu or Mint for desktops if I ran a linux desktop.
  - 14y ago
nodata 14y ago
I never even heard about this survey. The results seem... wrong. "Crunchbang" is more popular on servers than OpenSUSE, and Red Hat doesn't exist...
- mixmastamyk 14y ago
  I was a bit surprised to see Xubuntu just trailing Fedora.
- aleprok 14y ago
  If Red Hat does not exist then what is this www.redhat.com ? Anyway he is using RHEL (Red Hat enterprise Linux) in the survey results not Red Hat.
  - laumars 14y ago
    He didn't say Red Hat is fictional, he said he can't see Red Hat in the graph (and that was only because he was looking at the wrong graph). I can see why you might have misunderstood him though. "Does not exist" could be read both ways.
- ralfn 14y ago
  Are we looking at the same results? I dont see crunchbang even listed for servers (which woudnt make any sense, cause its just debian). I do see RHEL (the expensive version" as well as CentOS (the "gratis" version) in the list. Just the name Red Hat, isnt a distrobution. Its the name of a company. Fedora, RHEL and CentOS are.
  - nodata 14y ago
    I think I misread the graph "What Linux distro do you primarily use on your non-server computers?" which shows a legend of: * Non-server users * Server users
  - laumars 14y ago
    CentOS isn't run by Red Hat. I wasn't sure if that was implied by your post or just listed as a reference of distribution names. So just in case it was implied... :)
UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
I think the author should have expressly forbidden Android and or Chromium from this. I bet a lot of the "other" responses are either of the two. I could have answered "yes" to the non-server question because I have an Android device.
- pavanky 14y ago
  You can download all the raw data. It is linked in his post. There are 2 users for Android, 1 user each for Chrome OS and Chromium OS. That is not a lot. There are however a lot of people using a lot of niche distributions.
janerik 14y ago
Great to see i3 mentioned there. i3 was the first tiling window manager I used. I got involved in the development pretty early, I am still using it and try to help where I can (even though I don't write code for it)
- mateuszf 14y ago
  It's nice, still for me it's not even half useful as the long time ago abandoned ion3.
Aardwolf 14y ago
Interesting stuff. I would really like to see a breakdown of the "Other" category for "What is your favorite Linux graphical environment?".
dschiptsov 14y ago
CentOS has a huge community in so-called third world - Russia, etc..
- bigiain 14y ago
  I have a suspicion that WHM/cPanel servers are propping up CentOS's numbers on servers (I've got 5 WHM/cPanel servers all running CentOS, my non-WHM servers run Ubuntu).
- polshaw 14y ago
  Interesting (maybe?) tidbit, in the days of coining 1st/3rd world nomenclature, the then USSR was in fact the 2nd world. But it is fair to say they have slipped a bit since those days.
  - zalew 14y ago
    2nd world was a political term, not economical. it disappeared with the fall of the soviet union.
nvr219 14y ago
They should have included a t-shirt size question [1] [1] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DnNIRkWn-Pg/SW-sUKlnLBI/AAAAAAAAAQA/POsHb5_gGzs/s1600/linux+t-shirt+growth.JPG http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DnNIRkWn-Pg/SW-sUKlnLBI/AAAAAAAAAQ...
dredmorbius 14y ago
Take the results with a large helping of salt. Self-selected user surveys are very highly prone to sampling bias.
JimmaDaRustla 14y ago
I use Arch for my laptop (just recently) and Arch and Ubuntu on my servers. I was forced into Ubuntu, but I was very pleasantly surprised at the methodologies and documentation available to implement the services and processes I needed. Arch is very much the same - not afraid to make changes if it has a benefit in the long run. As for setting up Xorg and a window manager/desktop manager/login manager on my laptop was finally super easy. Looks like it has come a long way in the past couple of years...surprised Linux Mint is still giving me troubles.

60 points by bandris 14y ago

pavanky 14y ago

/r/linux has a huge archlinux bias (which includes me). So take those results with a grain of salt.

kristaps 14y ago
I was indeed surprised by those numbers, thanks for explaining.
nXqd 14y ago
But there is no doubt that Arch Linux community is an interesting one. Ubuntu bored me and I had a great time playing with Arch :) And those numbers surprise me as well.
- mixmastamyk 14y ago
  With all the regressions, I never feel bored by ubuntu. ;)
  - nXqd 14y ago
    hehe :P I still choose Ubuntu as my server's distro :P
codemac 14y ago
Well.. It was the /r/linux survey? Arch seems to have the Haskell problem: avoiding success at all costs. Although, many see this as a feature and not a bug.
- sirclueless 14y ago
  How so? In that it makes breaking changes often? I like its model better than other distros: rather than duplicating effort backporting bugfixes to make old versions stable and secure, they report everything upstream and push for it to get fixed there. I understand not wanting to sysadmin a large number of Arch machines though.
  - martius 14y ago
    I'm an Archlinux user, and BC aren't happening that often (seriously). Some big moves (likes switching to systemd) required some work, but still ran smoothly. For my own computers (including the laptop I work with) it's almost perfect.
    - laumars 14y ago
      Normally I'd agree with you, but the last 12 months have seen some pretty disruptive changes (the glibc update caught me out more than systemd had). Arch is far from perfect, and I'm not convinced I like the direction it's heading in (re systemd), but that's a plauge for the wider ecosystem than an Arch-specific issue. However Arch definitely find a nice balance between "hands on" and "lazy administration" for desktop users. Sadly though, systemd was the last straw that saw the start of my migration away from Arch on the servers (now a balance of FreeBSD and Debian; depending on the requirements of that server). As with everything though, it's all personal preference. So I expect plenty of people to have a different opinion (and different experiences as well).
      - ffreire 14y ago
        What's worked for me has been to read the archlinux.org homepage before I upgrade (maybe once every few days). If there are any breaking changes they are listed along with the recommended method for handling them. If I somehow fat finger a command and it doesn't go smoothly then all I have to do is jump in #archlinux and my issue is resolved in under an hour. YMMV of course but I've found the entire Arch experience to be pleasant and it fits my work flow, but I understand that it doesn't fit everyone's.
  - mapleoin 14y ago
    they report everything upstream and push for it to get fixed there That's what most ditros do. Fedora and openSUSE anyway. While we wait for upstream to fix the issue and release a new version, we prefer to have a working package, though.
    - 14y ago
- praptak 14y ago
  Yeah, count me in the feature-not-a-bug camp. It is avoiding popularity rather than success. And I parse it rather as "avoid some nasty costs that could boost popularity" not as "spare no costs when actively decreasing popularity".
- dschiptsov 14y ago
  Yeah, systemd and grub2 are Haskell-ish way of making everything in a "proper way", "not for everyone".))) But, see, you can almost type-check your tens of grub2 confs!
Aardwolf 14y ago
Where does this /r/linux bias to Archlinux come from? I use Archlinux, but never visit reddit, hacker news and slashdot already waste enough of my internet time :)
- pavanky 14y ago
  I am not sure why, but /r/linux has a unusually high number of archlinux users compared to other samples around the internet. It is second only to Ubuntu there. May be it just speaks about the kind of people on reddit also using Linux. May be arch linux is _underrepresented_ everywhere else.
JimmaDaRustla 14y ago
I'm Arch Linux and I've never been on /r/linux, and I'm on Reddit everyday ;)

Ologn 14y ago

As Wikipedia has an Alexa rank of 6, and is the most popular web site I know of that gives an occasional survey of its server logs, I tend to look at it for information on web clients. Like their October 2012 report ( http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOpera... ) For Linux client systems that use Wikipedia, Linux kernels with Android dominate. There's about 7 Android clients for every 1 Ubuntu client. There's about 45 Ubuntu clients for every Fedora and SuSE client. There's 2 Fedora users for every Debian user. And so on - less used Linux clients are listed on the report as well. Netcraft used to have a decent survey of which web servers were running Linux, but I don't see any recent reports from them on that. With the rise of EC2 and PAAS/IAAS I would guess the Amazon Linux AMI would be one of the new VPSs/instances/"servers" that is around more nowadays.

arocks 14y ago
Agree. Probably the only valuable statistic here would be of user preferences. Again, it reflects the biases that reddit users might have. But it is likely that they are more techsavy than the average population and likely to be an opinion leader among their peers.
daniel-levin 14y ago
Do Linux based spiders and crawlers count? If so, has that skewed the results in a meaningful way?
- padraigm 14y ago
  Whether they count or not, I would expect to see "regular" users to be orders of magnitude more common than web crawlers.
  - Flimm 14y ago
    But web crawlers generate orders of magnitude more traffic than regular users.

mixedbit 14y ago

If I'm not interested in using Unity, are there any advantages of installing Ubuntu and using it with non-default graphical environment, or is it better to just go with Debian?

martius 14y ago
Packages are upgraded more often, I think. It's supported by a company called Canonical, but I'm not sure it adds value. The community is larger and you may find online resources more easily.
- laumars 14y ago
  I love the idea of Ubuntu (not that it hasn't happened many times before) and have a great deal of respect for Mark Shuttleworth for basically funding Canonical out of his own pocket. However he (and Canonical as a company) make some terrible design decisions (Unity, premature adoption of Pulse audio, and -most recently- Ubuntu going solo with display managers). I wouldn't be the slightest bit surprised if Shuttleworth sees himself as the "Steve Jobs" of Linux and with the direction they're taking, I think Ubuntu will be like Android/Linux (ie still "Linux", but largely incompatible with the traditional desktop Linux ecosystem). Hopefully I'm wrong. But Shuttleworth has done little to give me confidence.
grapjas 14y ago
Ubuntu is less strict on the non-free thing. Either way it doesn't really matter since you can use PPAs from ubuntu on debian and vice versa. Obviously the same goes for .deb I think ubuntu LTS gets packages from wheezy and normal ubuntu from sid.
dan1234 14y ago
Debian takes the super stable approach, which means packages aren't always at the latest version. Ubuntu favours more frequent updates. I like Debian for servers but I'd probably go with Ubuntu or Mint for desktops if I ran a linux desktop.
- 14y ago

nodata 14y ago

I never even heard about this survey. The results seem... wrong. "Crunchbang" is more popular on servers than OpenSUSE, and Red Hat doesn't exist...

mixmastamyk 14y ago
I was a bit surprised to see Xubuntu just trailing Fedora.
aleprok 14y ago
If Red Hat does not exist then what is this www.redhat.com ? Anyway he is using RHEL (Red Hat enterprise Linux) in the survey results not Red Hat.
- laumars 14y ago
  He didn't say Red Hat is fictional, he said he can't see Red Hat in the graph (and that was only because he was looking at the wrong graph). I can see why you might have misunderstood him though. "Does not exist" could be read both ways.
ralfn 14y ago
Are we looking at the same results? I dont see crunchbang even listed for servers (which woudnt make any sense, cause its just debian). I do see RHEL (the expensive version" as well as CentOS (the "gratis" version) in the list. Just the name Red Hat, isnt a distrobution. Its the name of a company. Fedora, RHEL and CentOS are.
- nodata 14y ago
  I think I misread the graph "What Linux distro do you primarily use on your non-server computers?" which shows a legend of: * Non-server users * Server users
- laumars 14y ago
  CentOS isn't run by Red Hat. I wasn't sure if that was implied by your post or just listed as a reference of distribution names. So just in case it was implied... :)

UnoriginalGuy 14y ago

I think the author should have expressly forbidden Android and or Chromium from this. I bet a lot of the "other" responses are either of the two. I could have answered "yes" to the non-server question because I have an Android device.

pavanky 14y ago
You can download all the raw data. It is linked in his post. There are 2 users for Android, 1 user each for Chrome OS and Chromium OS. That is not a lot. There are however a lot of people using a lot of niche distributions.

janerik 14y ago

Great to see i3 mentioned there. i3 was the first tiling window manager I used. I got involved in the development pretty early, I am still using it and try to help where I can (even though I don't write code for it)

mateuszf 14y ago
It's nice, still for me it's not even half useful as the long time ago abandoned ion3.

Aardwolf 14y ago

Interesting stuff. I would really like to see a breakdown of the "Other" category for "What is your favorite Linux graphical environment?".

dschiptsov 14y ago

CentOS has a huge community in so-called third world - Russia, etc..

bigiain 14y ago
I have a suspicion that WHM/cPanel servers are propping up CentOS's numbers on servers (I've got 5 WHM/cPanel servers all running CentOS, my non-WHM servers run Ubuntu).
polshaw 14y ago
Interesting (maybe?) tidbit, in the days of coining 1st/3rd world nomenclature, the then USSR was in fact the 2nd world. But it is fair to say they have slipped a bit since those days.
- zalew 14y ago
  2nd world was a political term, not economical. it disappeared with the fall of the soviet union.

nvr219 14y ago

They should have included a t-shirt size question [1] [1] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DnNIRkWn-Pg/SW-sUKlnLBI/AAAAAAAAAQA/POsHb5_gGzs/s1600/linux+t-shirt+growth.JPG http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DnNIRkWn-Pg/SW-sUKlnLBI/AAAAAAAAAQ...

dredmorbius 14y ago

Take the results with a large helping of salt. Self-selected user surveys are very highly prone to sampling bias.

JimmaDaRustla 14y ago

I use Arch for my laptop (just recently) and Arch and Ubuntu on my servers. I was forced into Ubuntu, but I was very pleasantly surprised at the methodologies and documentation available to implement the services and processes I needed. Arch is very much the same - not afraid to make changes if it has a benefit in the long run. As for setting up Xorg and a window manager/desktop manager/login manager on my laptop was finally super easy. Looks like it has come a long way in the past couple of years...surprised Linux Mint is still giving me troubles.