Monday, November 12, 2007

Distribution Statistics- Ubuntu Tops again

Distrowatch has released some interesting stats about prominent distributions.
First one is the page hit rank (PHR) on the day of the distribution release.
As expected Ubuntu tops the number of page hits on its release date, followed by PCLinuxOS and OpenSUSE.

The Top 10 are

  1. Ubuntu 7.10
  2.  PCLinuxOS 2007
  3.  openSUSE 10.3
  4.  Fedora 8
  5.  Debian GNU/Linux 4.0
  6.  Mandriva Linux 2008
  7. SimplyMEPIS 6.5
  8.  Gentoo Linux 2007
  9.  Slackware Linux 12.0
  10.  Sabayon Linux 3.4


The Other stats relates to the number of people using IRC channel of a distribution.
Here again Ubuntu is way ahead of others. However, there is a huge deviation from PHR and we have Gentoo on second place followed by debian.

The Top 10 in this list are

  1.  Ubuntu    
  2. Gentoo Linux 
  3. Debian GNU/Linux
  4. Kubuntu    
  5. FreeBSD    
  6. Arch Linux 
  7. Slackware Linux
  8. Fedora   
  9. openSUSE   
  10. CentOS

Mandriva occupies 12 place and the current Distrowatch PHR topper PCLinuxOS is at 18th position.
Key thing to note is that Ubuntu had 1,240 users on IRC where as PCLOS had just 32.

The IRC stats collector Marijn Schouten concluded:
"I think that IRC statistics are more representative of current number of users while PHR is more representative of the number of people that are not actually using a distro, but are merely curious as to what sets it apart from the others. Such interest is more fickle than being an actual user of a distro. Therefore I think IRC rank is more representative of the actual size of the community around a distro, which I think is the relevant measure to rank distros by."


Now this does not go well with me. IRC is more for technical users; most of my friends using Linux never log on to any IRC channel. If they have any issue, they Google for it or look at the distribution Forums. My claim to technical users using IRC is further supported by the fact that "geeky" distributions ( Gentoo, Debian, Arch, Slackware and CentOS) and operating system ( FreeBSD) constitute majority of the top 10 list. Not sure how many average users use either of the above listed ones as their desktop operating system. I was a great fan of Arch Linux on desktop, untill I found PCLOS and gave in to ease of use, however, I do not consider myself as average user.

Ubuntu is a distribution used equally by geeks as well as average user. We see too many software being developed on top of Ubuntu, mac4Lin being a very good example. Hence, I assume that those developers contribute to high number of users of Ubuntu in IRC.

If you have a different opinion, please share it.

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2 comments:

Unknown said...

have to agree with u on that one, i haven't used the ubuntu forums yet cos i have found the stuff i want to know already answered. I think the real statistics should be the amount of computers that download updates, that would mean that they are getting used. Obv it would not include computers not connected, but thats a significant minority now anyways.

Abhay said...

Jonathan,
Thats a workable solution, its rather interesting. I did a little research and found that Fedora employs this technique. They publish the number of unique users who update their Fedora install using "yum".
Not sure how we can get the same data for other distors.

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