Top Linux Distributions, 2012

This is taken from the DistroWatch page hit rankings. In other words, it's counting click-throughs on a Linux enthusiasts site. That generally won't count business/corporate/government users or non-techie users. Ladislav Bodner admits his rankings aren't terribly meaningful except as a measure of interest by people who frequent his website. That's hardly a reasonable method for deciding "which distro is on top". Red Hat, for example, has a billion reasons to laugh at these numbers.

It's still interesting, but I confess I am meanly happy to see Ubuntu sink in the Distrowatch rankings.

@tuxchick,

> I confess I am meanly happy to see Ubuntu sink in the Distrowatch rankings.

TOTALLY agreed! Furthermore, I note how the people who constantly insist how very MEANINGLESS and SKEWED the DistroWatch rankings usually are, happen to be the very supporters of those distros ranked relatively LOW in these rankings!! Funny how often this keeps happening. And I see other examples of this here, besides just Baboontu .....such as *cough* *cough* Rosa ;)

My own 2c

Funny, I'm pretty sure that was an attack on me. I don't run ROSA. I do give it as an example of something far better than Ubuntu or a distro good for newbies. I still run SalixOS and openSUSE on my systems. openSUSE has been in the top 10 for about forever. Also, look at how ROSA has been steadily climbing the DWW rankings.

FWIW, I've never used he word "unfair" to describe the rankings and I'm quoting Ladislav when I use "meaningless". Just because you disagree with something or don't like someone doesn't mean their whining.

Distrowatch rankings have some meaning. They are somewhat of an indicator of interest in a given distribution or project.

The projects themselves should have a very good indication of their actual use: Debian, for instance should know how many people are hitting its servers for security updates. Unless I'm mistaken, security patches come straight from Debian's servers and not from the mirrors that contain the rest of the software. If everything is mirrored, it would be harder to figure out.

The ironic part of this thread is that it is over a week old and yet I see that it has been viewed over 500 times already (and no, NOT AT ALL just by me!!) Ironic because it's currently among the TOP most-visited half-dozen threads in page Hits Per 14Days in the latest discussions here, and its actual TOPIC discusses the popularity and meaning of page hits on DistroWatch ;)

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