Most popular Linux distros

even they say that those aren't accurate metrics, just search hits.

oh and if your going to nutshell describe a distro, it might be a good idea to actually look over the description first. You blew a couple and the documentation even on distrowatch shows that the author didnt even make a cursory glance at it.

I'm not sure where the stats can be found, but Fedora does have a pretty good handle on the actual number of users who update their installations. You'd think that other distros would be able to collect similar data.

I think that the problem for many big distro's like Debian is that there are many, many mirrors. That makes getting stats hard. Also, Debian is used widely as a server. You can bet that big companies running many servers maintain their own mirror repository.

We shall never know how many people use which distro, unless every Linux box is connected to the internet and has a 'phone home' feature, that's for sue.

@Azerthoth - they didn't just look at Distrowatch: In the first paragraph, there's the phrase "Looking at a number of online lists, including the popular Distrowatch site, a general idea of which Linux versions are most popular emerges."

that and 2.95 will get you a cup of coffee

DistroWatch's hit counter only measures people who visit DW pages for a specific distribution. That skews for desktop users and hobbyists. The net results is that professional distributions, like Red Hat Enterprise Linux, are grossly undercounted. Does anyone really believe that RHEL is less used than Vector Linux? Fedora, which ranks second, is the desktop choice of many Linux professionals who support Red Hat on the server or even the corporate desktop. The idea that it is half as popular as Ubuntu because it has half the hits on DistroWatch is laughable.

Those counter numbers have also been manipulated in the past and that has been acknowledged by Ladislav who took steps which reduce, but don't eliminate, the chance for further abuse.

Yes, DarrenR114, DistroWatch was only one list he used. The fact that he used it at all and named it specifically points to seriously inaccurate data.

@Caitlyn,

How do you know that DistroWatch was the only list used, when the author specifically indicates otherwise?

Which sites were they?

http://www.xkcd.net/285/

Maybe because the list and the distro-watch list are in perfect point for point harmony for the default (6 month) view.

Darren, sorry your arguing a battle that was lost before it started.

> How do you know that DistroWatch was the only list used,

She never said it was. She said "DistroWatch was only one list he used". She didn't say "Distrowatch was THE only list he used", which is how you seem to be taking it.

@jdixon has it right. In other words, DarrenR114, I said precisely the opposite of what you think I said.

@caitlyn,

I misread what you typed.

Mea culpa.