Distrowatch.com Stats at Robert Pogson

Okay. No one is quite sure what x hits per day for a distro means on DistroWatch.com but that won’t stop me from expressing an opinion…

I added up the current hits per day for the top 310 distros in the “more statistics”, 12 months section. The total? 34248 distro hits per day.

If a newbie reads about 5 distros before choosing one, that could mean that 7000 newbies switched to GNU/Linux each day for the last year. That’s 2.5 million converts in a year. These are mostly geeks, of course. Ordinary folk just take their software pre-installed. Assuming there are 20 ordinary folk adopting GNU/Linux per geek, that is 50 million converts. Of course geeks might lead a few to GNU/Linux or they might help them buy a PC pre-loaded with GNU/Linux.

The world is becoming a better place, one convert at a time.

Sadly, I noticed Debian has dropped a notch behind Mandriva,OpenSuse, Mint , Fedora, and Ubuntu. I guess some of us are too busy using the software to make converts. I will have to take up some slack. I will give lessons in installing Debian and .deb packages this semester and I have a stack of blank CDs I can burn. I could get 20 converts easily, not to mention the inevitable spread of GNU/Linux on the LAN here.

My Mission

My observations and opinions about IT are based on 40 years of use in science and technology and lately, in education. I like IT that is fast, cost-effective and reliable. I do not care whether my solution is the same as yours. I like to think for myself.

My first use of GNU/Linux in 2001 was so remarkably better than what I had been using, I feel it is important work to share GNU/Linux with the world. I have been blessed by working in schools where students and school systems have benefited by good, modular software easily installed in most systems.

I have shown GNU/Linux to thousands of students and hundreds of teachers over the years and will continue in some way doing that until I die in spite of the opposition.