Maximum PC

I saw this article at Netcraft:

http://tinyurl.com/4uy2r

It seems that Redhat's market is getting smaller while other Linux distros such as Debian, SuSE, Mandrake, and Gentoo have been gaining market shares in the ISP world. It's not a significant loss for Redhat, but nonetheless, other distros are making their marks.

One thing to note is the presence of SuSE and Mandrake - usually known as desktop distros making their way in the ISP, webhosting scene. I'm not surprised with Debian's presence, but Gentoo has made a mark for itself. Gentoo's clearly making a name for itself, first with Portage, now as an ISP solution. Very nice, and I must admit myself that I, too, am running Gentoo on my personal web server (my Gentoo LAMP box). I was really taken with Mandrake being used in hosting websites.

My guess is that people use what they know, and more and more people are starting out on Mandrake (and SuSE) than RedHat nowadays. It used to be that RedHat was seen as "THE LINUX", but now even newbs know they have a broader base to work from.

That site just indicates to me that linux is just getting more popular.

When you have 1.5 million, like they're claiming, there is going to be a time when your charts showing these will flatten out.

I am curious though as to how the enterprise solution is holding up, or if it's effecting things at all. Honestly, I know of like two places using that product, so I have a feeling this is effecting things to some extent.

Each distribution had growth numbers, so Linux as a whole is definitely getting more popular. Looks like RedHat just grew more slowly than the others, which may just come with the territory with such a huge install base -- the numbers "look" smaller for RH.

Not hard to believe...

I just installed Suse 9.1 in VPC 2004 and it is VERY easy to set up and use...most user friendly distro I've yet to work with...

I still think RedHat has the edge over Mandrake, but it could be better.

Die DeadRat Die

The Gentoo spike is interesting, but you cannot trust those results (bad statistics NetCraft)....


For all we know, Caldera or even LFS might have greater market share than all of the others combined.

It in interesting, but it's not a significant enough number. Bad numbers are a possibility, but I'll give Netcraft the benefit of the doubt, and assume that the numbers are fairly accurate. What's interesting is that Redhat is beginning its losing streak and it won't be too long before distros like Gentoo, Slack, Debian, LFS start making rounds. I think that SuSE and Mandrake numbers will flounder a bit, they're great distros, but the former 4 have good speed but documentation might be sketchy at best.



OMG! Caldera? Do people even use that? I can understand LFS, being able to write your own distro and utilize it for your network is great, but Caldera, I thought that died out a while back?

I doubt that, AnandTech had a review on Windows XP, SuSE Linux, and Fedora Core 2. FC2 lost by a significant margin, even in 64-bit mode. SuSE and Windows were about neck and neck.

The point is that Fedora is not as good of a distro as it once was. I remember using Redhat 6 and that was the next best thing since sliced bread. SuSE and Mandrake will give a n00b the same functionality of Fedora inside a more stable, more optimized crust. Other than that, distros like Gentoo, Debian, Slack, and LFS will offer even more for a price. I think that FC2 is and has become the Linux-guru's favorite enemy, albeit FC has some redeeming qualities (documentation, large community), it simply lost to the other distros since the Linux core is becoming more mature, and kernel 2.6 is reaping better performance. With those two, SuSE and MDK are doing a good job of delivering a reliable Linux system that's fast, yet FC is still too slow and the developers are still compiling for 386. I mean, c'mon, SuSE and MDK are compiled at 586.

I just said that to make a point about the poll being flawed. I mean, if only 25% of people had submitted ethnicity information for the census, you'd probably be a bit skeptical if it came out that 20% of the population is Native American, right?

Why do you think Suse is going down? Novel and Sun both build off of Suse.

Not necessarily going down, as in crapping out, but reaching a steady set of numbers. Actually, I take that back, with Sun and Novell building off of SuSE, I expect those numbers to go up Posting at 3:00am makes me say things backwards

I found Suse 9.1 professional to be the best use of bloatware design ever i an OS installer. OSX installer is great and pretty and does not take for ever to load nor does the one for windows longhorn. But Suse 9.1 Yast installer is the worst one yet. But I do know of people that use Suse for Server Applications and had amazing uptime on them.

Biggest reason I went Gentoo is SuSE's bloat, but I never had a problem with its uptime. I've used MDK and FC, wasn't impressed, SuSE is the best n00b distro I've seen thus far. But for me, it's Gentoo all the way.