DistroRank at Robert Pogson

DistroRank

Published by Robert Pogson February 26th, 2013 in technology. 3 Comments

For what it’s worth, here is yet another ranking of popularity of GNU/Linux. I took the survey and noted that my bunch of PCs are undercounted because it’s a “unique IP address” system.

Linux Rankings (Score):

1. Ubuntu (1.000)

2. Mint (0.734)

3. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (0.634)

4. Arch (0.420)

5. Debian (0.377)

6. Fedora (0.288)

7. Gentoo (0.292)

8. PCLinuxOS (0.178)

9. Puppy (0.174)

10. Damn Small Linux(0.101)

via DistroRank – Linux and BSD popularity tracking.

The rankings are reasonable based on my own understanding of the effectiveness of having real salesmen (Ubuntu) or global reach of huge repositories (Debian). Don’t take the numbers too seriously but take it as yet more affirmation that there are a bunch of great distros. Don’t waste too much time choosing one. It’s usually easy to change if you revise your choice later. Just backup /home and/or /var and install another distro.

- Robert Pogson

3 Responses to “DistroRank”

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1 kozmcrae Feb 26th, 2013 at 5:30 pm

“Just backup /home and/or /var and install another distro.”

Assuming /home is a separate partition which it should be. Some installations don’t stress that. One issue that I haven’t seen addressed is how much room you really need for the root directory. I’ve only seen what the minimum is (about 6 gigs). That would leave you with constant disk full errors. With disk sizes today I would want nothing less than 25 gigs for my root directory. I should mention that I include /var in my root directory.
2 dougman Feb 26th, 2013 at 5:47 pm

For / I only give 10GB, never needed more then that.

I have been riding on Mint 9 for a long time, no malware, no viruses with a free Pentium D an office gave me. New drives, new video card, 15 mins later a new OS up and running.

Just started using Mint 13 and all I need to do is migrate a few hundred GB from the mounted drive to my active ~ partition.

With 13, I am good till 2017 and can still continue using it into the 20′s if I wanted too.

I may upgrade to Samsung SSD’s this year, haven’t decided on it yet.
3 ram Feb 27th, 2013 at 6:35 pm

My company uses mostly Knoppix on internet connected machines for browsing. Some of these report back that they are Android through the browser. This stops some sites from trying to send heaps of unwanted multimedia content down our (thin) pipe.

Of course, no online poll sees our cluster of Linux machines used for our real work: engineering computations and media creation.

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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.