Results from the 2006 Desktop Linux Survey 15,000 voters... still, self-selected. Anyway --> ''...Ubuntu, with 29.2 percent of the vote, has been the hottest community Linux since early 2005. While this Linux has had its problems lately, such as the update fiasco on August 21st and 22nd, users continue to download, install, and love it.
And, why not? It's an excellent distribution. It's not just users who think this; reviewers have also labeled it the Desktop Linux Champ.
A little closer peek at the data, and some comparison with the Distrowatch page hit list, reveals that "classic" Ubuntu with the GNOME interface is the real winner. Kubuntu, with its KDE desktop, and the educational Edubuntu distributions have their fans, but Ubuntu is what a plurality of Linux desktop users appear to be running today.
In a distant second place, with 12.2 percent, we find Ubuntu's ancestor, Debian. Close behind it, there's openSUSE with 10.1 percent of the users. If you included in openSUSE's totals its corporate big brother, Novell's SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) numbers, 2.9 percent, the SUSE-twins would be in second place with 13 percent.
After this, we come to what I think of as the first surprise in our survey. Gentoo took fourth place with a total of 9.6 percent. Gentoo, to me, is a Linux expert's Linux. I know many serious Linux users who work with Gentoo to better understand Linux, but almost no one who uses it as their first choice for day-to-day work.
In fifth place, we find Fedora, Red Hat's community distribution. Fedora, while still somewhat popular with 7 percent of the vote, seems to have lost some of its charm to users in the last year.
...'' http://desktoplinux.com/articles/AT5816278551.htmlDoes it matter, so long as there is some arbitrary population of users? Is ubuntu up there, with basically the same stuff in it as Fedora, due to PR alone? Should Fedora compete, does it having any meaning with a Free OS?
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