Having followed a link to an article on distroworld.com (which unfortunately turned out to be fairly boring) I found myself browsing the current list of what they (and many people including myself do see them as an accurate statition of *NIX usage) report as the most popular Linux distributions and *NIX based derivatives. I can`t say I was overly surprised to see one of the half way Linux distro’s at the top (although I was surprised it was Ubuntu, being a newcomer to the ultra-easy to use Linux distros category.) What I did find surprising was the next four, namely Mandrivia, SuSE, Fedora, and Mephis. For people who have watched the numbers on Linux popularity, including myself, this represents quite a reversal. It seems that just yesterday, the likes of Redhat/Fedora and company didn’t even graze the top 5. Now the distro’s that once took their place (namely Slackware, Gentoo, BSD, and so on) rest amongst the lower numbers.
My first interpretation of this was that, although it would sicken me quite a bit, a lot of the old time Linux users, who have been devoted users of the “Real Linux Distrosâ€[tm] have gone soft and started falling for the seduction of ultra easy to use interfaces and click and drool package managers. However as I read the more detailed statistics, specifically the rate of usage change, I found that this was not true. Slackware (my personal favorite) and FreeBSD (which I also love immensely) have basically maintained the same user base, and Gentoo has even been gradually increasing in popularity. This struck me as kind of funny, until I read the statistics on the top 5. WOW! These guys have been growing in popularity at insanely high reported rates. Rates that maybe just a year ago would have discredited distrowatch.
So then… how to take this information. I myself could write a book (and I actually did consider doing this once) on why I don’t think Linux (or rather the current computer user base) is ready for mainstream, however I do acknowledge the opinion that more widespread Linux use could cause an evolution in the user base, a kind of meet half way in the middle type scenario.
Well, we’ll see what we’ll see… and hopefully all turns out well.
Anyway, that’s enough babbling from me,
Cheers!
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