Results of the 2013 /r/Linux Distro Survey

http://constantmayhem.com/ty-stuff/linuxsurvey/2013.html

by bandris • 13 years ago

60 56 13 years ago

constantmayhem.com

pavanky4• 13 years ago

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

kristaps• 13 years ago

I was indeed surprised by those numbers, thanks for explaining.

nXqd2• 13 years 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.

mixmastamyk2• 13 years ago

With all the regressions, I never feel bored by ubuntu. ;)

codemac2• 13 years 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.

sirclueless2• 13 years 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.

praptak• 13 years 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".

dschiptsov2• 13 years 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!

Aardwolf2• 13 years 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 :)

pavanky4• 13 years 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.

JimmaDaRustla2• 13 years ago

I'm Arch Linux and I've never been on /r/linux, and I'm on Reddit everyday ;)

Ologn• 13 years 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/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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

Do Linux based spiders and crawlers count? If so, has that skewed the results in a meaningful way?

padraigm2• 13 years ago

Whether they count or not, I would expect to see "regular" users to be orders of magnitude more common than web crawlers.

pyvek• 13 years ago

Unless the web crawlers are intentionally spoofing their user agent to identify as browsers, I don't think that they are counted.

streptomycin• 13 years ago

A lot of Linux distros don't expose the distro name to the browser these days, for security reasons. Ubuntu still does, though. That's why "Linux Other" is so high now (double Ubuntu) when it wasn't a couple years ago http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-03/Squ... .

mixedbit• 13 years 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?

martius2• 13 years 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.

laumars4• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

c0m4• 13 years ago

Debian unstable seems to be about at the same place as Ubuntu. I use it to get a minimal system, where 95% of the support forums answers for ubuntu is still valid.

k_bx• 13 years ago

Ubuntu is at least interesting because of they're efforts in patching kernel and other stuff to work with hardware properly.

ffreire2• 13 years ago

The advantages being that >50% of the help documentation (and forum posts) cover some derivative of Ubuntu. You also have the added benefit of installing software through PPA's which are essentially mini-repositories that 3rd parties maintain (i.e. back in Ubuntu 10.04 VLC was stuck on an older version that would not play 10-bit MKV files properly, so I simply installed their beta-channel PPA and everything worked perfectly).

I also know of several colleagues that use and enjoy Ubuntu (because Unity notwithstanding, the distribution is pretty solid) with an alternative environment like xmonad.

My experience with Debian is limited to servers, but I'd imagine a lot of the creature comforts of Ubuntu are missing on Debian when used as a personal OS.

nodata2• 13 years 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...

mixmastamyk2• 13 years ago

I was a bit surprised to see Xubuntu just trailing Fedora.

aleprok• 13 years 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.

laumars4• 13 years 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• 13 years 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.

nodata2• 13 years 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

laumars4• 13 years 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... :)

padraigm2• 13 years ago

The results are only representative of /r/linux readers, not linux users as a whole.

UnoriginalGuy• 13 years 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.

pavanky4• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

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

Aardwolf2• 13 years ago

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

dschiptsov2• 13 years ago

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

bigiain• 13 years 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• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

2nd world was a political term, not economical. it disappeared with the fall of the soviet union.

nvr219• 13 years ago

They should have included a t-shirt size question [1]

[1] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DnNIRkWn-Pg/SW-sUKlnLBI/AAAAAAAAAQ...

dredmorbius2• 13 years ago

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

JimmaDaRustla2• 13 years 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.

Results of the 2013 /r/Linux Distro Survey

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