
Results of the 2013 /r/Linux Distro Survey - bandris
http://constantmayhem.com/ty-stuff/linuxsurvey/2013.html
======
Ologn
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...](http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm)
)

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.

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

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

~~~
Flimm
But web crawlers generate orders of magnitude more traffic than regular users.

~~~
dredmorbius
True, but if you're tracking users, you'll normalize for that (tracking
cookies, bot exclusion, IP, etc.). It's somewhat nontrivial, but most web
analytics packages will give you a decent first cut.

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

~~~
codemac
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
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.

~~~
mapleoin
_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.

~~~
sirclueless
True, though I think the "Push for it to get fixed" part is more important
than you are giving credit for.

Bugs from Arch are urgent, simply because all their users are stuck waiting on
the fix which means affected users will be interested in updating and
communicating about the upstream report. Also they are probably on an
unpatched recent stable release, which makes a good baseline -- either the bug
was fixed in master since the recent release, or it is still present and real.
There's little question whether a bug is caused by a distro-specific patch or
not, because Arch linux packages are more or less thin build scripts around
unpatched sources. You find things like .desktop files and systemd unit files
in the Arch package repo, but not many source patches that might introduce
unreproducible bugs.

It's easy to see why running Arch is painful for a sysadmin: You get stuck
with all the variance in maintenance quality of upstream packages with not
much recourse other than building a fixed package from source yourself
(thankfully this is pretty easy with Arch's build system). On the other hand
it's easy to see why this is great for the linux ecosystem: A popular distro
running recent unpatched stable binaries means a lot of testing of releases
soon after they come out, which surfaces upstream problems faster and
encourages faster maintenance cycles and better upstream releases that benefit
everyone.

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

------
mixedbit
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?

~~~
dan1234
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
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.

------
UnoriginalGuy
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
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.

------
JimmaDaRustla
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.

------
nvr219
They should have included a t-shirt size question [1]

[1] [http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DnNIRkWn-Pg/SW-
sUKlnLBI/AAAAAAAAAQ...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DnNIRkWn-Pg/SW-
sUKlnLBI/AAAAAAAAAQA/POsHb5_gGzs/s1600/linux+t-shirt+growth.JPG)

------
nodata
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...

~~~
ralfn
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.

~~~
laumars
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... :)

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

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

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

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

