Results of the 2013 /r/Linux Distro Survey | Hacker News Reader

Linux Distro Survey

constantmayhem.com

60 pointsbandris56 comments

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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... .

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

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

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.

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

hehe :P I still choose Ubuntu as my server's distro :P

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

aur.

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.

> they report everything upstream

... and then a member of the Arch community writes a really nice document about alternatives and work arounds and fixes and puts that on a wiki somewhere.

The Arch documentation is a jewel, and I very much hope they manage to continue that tradition.

You missed my lame attempt at a joke, haskell's unofficial slogan is "Avoid success at all costs!"

Archlinux is doing amazingly well by sticking with the "Arch Way", even when it has user visible side effects (lol haskell). This success is evident from distrowatch, this survey, and others.

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".

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!

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 :)

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.

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

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)

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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... :)

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

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

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

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

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).

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.

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

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