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Comment by chatman | Hacker News Reader

Redhat is at the top, Canonical nowhere to be found.

In fact, the article addresses your point directly:

Canonical contributed 548 changes in the period studied in today's report and would have cracked the top 30 if the foundation hadn't included "none" and "unknown" in the rankings. The maker of Ubuntu has been criticized for years for not contributing more to the kernel (and recently clashed with Intel over patches submitted to the company's graphics driver), but Zemlin [Linux Foundation Executive Director] isn't upset. "I am not at all mad at them. I think they do good work," he said. "You just kind of choose what's important to your org and where you can add the most value to the project and how it intersects with your business. They choose to focus a lot of their time and energy at higher levels of the software stack."

Actually unaffiliated programmers are at the top.

Canonical's contribution is more to the desktop and OS itself than to the kernel. The majority of desktop installations are either Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based, and Ubuntu is quickly becoming the server of choice as well.

Ubuntu is leading GNU/Linux adoption worldwide, which in itself is a huge contribution to the ecosystem, as it gets more programmers interested in various open source projects.

> Ubuntu is quickly becoming the server of choice as well

Source?

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/is-ubuntu-becoming-a-b...

A quick Google search will produce this information. Furthermore, I think a survey of new server deployments would be even more in Ubuntu's favour, though gathering such information is no doubt difficult.

In the article it does mention that Ubuntu is the most popular distro for Amazon deployments...

The article cites Cloud Market's data on AMIs, which indicate how many AMIs have been derived from the Ubuntu base AMIs, rather than actual deployment numbers. It's an interesting indicator...

Having been on the inside (EC2) and seen the numbers, I can confidently say that Ubuntu's AMIs are the most popular AMIs deployed on EC2. The stock AMIS take the top spots by an overwhelming majority, and most of the lower spots are filled with derivatives of the original Ubuntu AMIs.

Ubuntu's been working hard in the server/cloud space for a while, between the JeOS effort and subsequent, excellent tools for building customized installations around it. It's not just a brand or that makes them popular; with Ubuntu you get a sane system, style, and toolset for your system images.

Some anecdotal evidence - our university is running free Linux VM's for research purposes (so, non-graphical remote servers), people can choose what they want, and the majority seem to choose Ubuntu; with CentOS being second place.

> The majority of desktop installations are either Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based, and Ubuntu is quickly becoming the server of choice as well.

Unless you are using unity, I don't see why a distribution should be called ubuntu based instead of debian based. A lot of "Ubuntu derivatives" are not based on unity.

Sure Ubuntu has a betteer installer and pretty themes, but the base is undeinably debian.

Ubuntu has made more modifications than simply the Unity DE. Is Linux Mint (the regular edition) fully compatible with Debian? Does a Debian server have the same features as an Ubuntu server?

> Unless you are using unity, I don't see why a distribution should be called ubuntu based instead of debian based.

Because Ubuntu is more than Unity. I mean, by the "Unity or its not Ubuntu-based" standard you propose, Kubuntu (which is exactly Ubuntu -- sharing all the same repos -- with the KDE desktop and apps installed by default) wouldn't be an "Ubuntu-based distribution".

Heck, Ubuntu Server, since it doesn't have a default DE at all, wouldn't be an "Ubuntu-based distribution", either.

Well you'll have to show me what Ubuntu has that Debian does not. Kubuntu, I suspect, is only named because it was originally sponsored by Canonical. Nothing more.

> Well you'll have to show me what Ubuntu has that Debian does not.

Ubuntu maintains a set of repositories for each version of Ubuntu, which (even when the same--by name--software is in Debian's official repositories, will often be different versions or otherwise different contents than Debian repos).

Kubuntu uses entirely software from the Ubuntu repos from the corresponding version number (e.g., Kubuntu 12.04 uses exactly the same set of repos as Ubuntu 12.04.) You can, in effect, switch from Kubuntu to Ubuntu, or vice versa, just using the apt package manager without changing the base repositories, just installing and removing the right packages from the ubuntu repos.

The difference between Kubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 12.04 is entirely in which packages, from the Ubuntu "precise" repositories are installed by default. The difference between either and any version of Debian is much greater.

The whole "unity or you have to call it 'Debian-based' instead of 'Ubuntu-based'" idea is nonsense.

If you're going to be so nit-picky then distinctions between distros become meaningless.

Your choice of distro really just boils down to your package-manager preference.

Surely you're joking, right? For one, Ubuntu has a desktop and server version along with a LTS version and the repos are totally different. The filesystem layout is little different between the two. I'm sure there's more like init differences, differences in installation and configuration, kernels, and stuff in /etc, but I haven't used Ubuntu in quite some time.

> Sure Ubuntu has a betteer installer

Highly debatable. "Most accessible" installer perhaps, but as far as I am concerned, Debian's netinst has yet to be beat. Style isn't exactly high on my list of priorities during installation, it's not like that is something I do to show off in coffee-shops.

You are right, that is what I meant. Something a person fairly new to Linux can use.

Ubuntu also has a mini iso if you really want the net install. For most people, the net install will take significantly longer than a regular install as each package has to be unpacked individually.

http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/raring/main/installer...

I've been using linux mint for a couple years now, and I have the feeling that mint is growing more than ubuntu.

Do you have any data to back up that feeling?

If you trust distrowatch's pagehits then yes, it's significantly beating/overtaking ubuntu. http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

And Mageia is 5 times as popular as Red Hat too, right? ;)

Canonical is probably primarily focused on recreating the Mir wheel and other Unity/Ubuntu Phone/etc. I doubt a whole hell of a lot of that goes upstream.

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