The State of Linux Distributions: an analysis of what the Distrowatch rankings tell us

Posted by Libervis on May 14, 2006 4:45 AM EDT
Nuxified.org; By Charles H. Schulz
Mail this story
Print this story

"I have always been interested in Linux distributions and how they evolve, not just technically, but also in terms of their popularity and their -wanted or unwanted- position among the Linux users and on the broader market. In this regard, the Distrowatch web site is a fairly effective tool at tracking linux distributions no matter how small or short-lived they are. I think the site's online tool is actually the best one so far, and it has, in my opinion, produced the best stats concerning Linux distributions.."

I have always been interested in Linux distributions and how they evolve, not just technically, but also in terms of their popularity and their -wanted or unwanted- position among the Linux users and on the broader market. In this regard, the Distrowatch web site is a fairly effective tool at tracking linux distributions no matter how small or short-lived they are. I think the site's online tool is actually the best one so far, and it has, in my opinion, produced the best stats concerning Linux distributions, unless you consider the NetCraft surveys but these are confined to the web servers' world. Distrowatch takes all of them, servers, desktop, set top boxes, and now has come to include OpenSolaris and BSD Unixes. It spans over 100 distributions, although there are more, (but then these are dead or fairly underground distros).

What I would like to do here is to give the interested readers a rather personal outlook on how the Linux distributions have evolved in terms of popularity, which are hot ones, why, and what I noticed behind the daily weekly and monthly ranking of Distrowatch. I have been able to uncover some interesting patterns, and ones that are not often talked about.



Full story: http://www.nuxified.org/?q=the_state_of_linux_distributions_...

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: Editorial; Groups: Community, GNU, Linux

« Return to the newswire homepage

This topic does not have any threads posted yet!

You cannot post until you login.