On Sat, 24 Feb 2007, William Hooper wrote:
Benjamin Franz wrote:
[snip]
Fedora has always been very clear about the life cycle of each release.
Clear, yes. Smart, no.
It is clear from watching Google Trends
<URL:http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2C+fedora+%7C+fc6+%7C+fc5+%7C+f
c4+%7C+fc3%2C+RHEL+%7C+redhat+%7C+red+hat%2C++suse%2C+debian&ctab=0&geo=a
ll&date=all> that Fedora (and even maybe Redhat itself) is dying.
But has Netcraft confirmed it?
Netcraft reports _web servers_. Not _machines in use_. And doesn't break
the servers down by Linux distribution in the statistics anywhere I can
find. But since you want numbers from them: 342 sites are reported as
containing 'ubuntu' in their host name. 211 are reported for 'fedora'.
More seriously, I see a graph that says Ubuntu must be really bad because
more people have to use Google to search for help than they do for Fedora.
What do you see?
I see a graph where a steadily growing number of people are searching for
information (of any type) relating to Ubuntu while a slowly decreasing
number are searching for information (of any type) relating to Fedora,
Redhat, SUSE or Debian.
Whether people are searching for help or some other information, they are
doing so for _Ubuntu_.
Even _if_ those were mostly requests for 'help', what that would tell you
is that month on month more people are looking for help relating to Ubuntu
than are looking for help relating to Fedora. Help requests come largely
from _new_ users, ergo that would imply there are substantially more
Ubuntu new users than Fedora new users. If the street vibe on Ubuntu was
_bad_, you would see a downward trend in the numbers as word of mouth
spread. Instead you see a strong absolutely relentless upward trend over
the last 2 and 1/2 years.
Alexa reports fedoraproject.org had its traffic rank spike around 2000
back in mid-October with the release of FC6 , and the current 3 month
average is around 14,000. For ubuntu.com, it spiked around 1000 in
late-October with the release of 6.10 and the current 3 month average rank
is around 3,600.
Looking in the logs for the big (covering several hundred web sites, none
of them in any fashion related to linux or even computers so it reflects
just what the general public is using for their daily web browsing rather
than specifically tech-heads visiting a linux distro site) webserver I run
at work this is what I show for the month of February. I extracted these
from roughy 15 gigabytes of raw access_log based on the User Agent
matching either Ubuntu or Fedora (non-case sensitive) and excluded all
hits from IP ranges controlled by my own company to avoid any biasing by
in-house browsers. There are only three people at the company who use
Linux _at all_ and they all browse from known fixed IP addresses (even
from home), which are easily excluded from the numbers:
Distro Hits Unique IPs Hits/IP address
=======================================================
Ubuntu 23770 270 92.4
Fedora 14319 155 88.0
Beginning to see the pattern?
Don't mistake me for a Ubuntu fanboy/evangelizer pushing their favorite
desktop: The only Ubuntu installs I have right this second are a test
install I did to a VMWare instance in my office and I am in the middle of
an experimental install to see if I can get the disk partioning layout I
want on a Ubuntu 6.x installation. If it succeeds cleanly, I'm going to
finish my rebuild of my house backups server using it. If not, it will be
FC6 (32 bit because the 64 bit version of FC6 remains a bit iffy for my
taste) or CentOS4, again 32 bit.
I like having all the toys in Fedora - there are 2594 packages installed
on my home FC6 64-bit machine according to rpm -qa (I believe that beats
anyone else's numbers in the 'how many packages you have installed' part
of this thread by a substantial margin).
I have about a decade's worth of experience installing, maintaining and
operating RH based systems. I'm damn good at it. I find the Ubuntu
installer to be annoyingly difficult to make do what I want it to do for
disk partitioning with regard to RAID and LVM.
But I can recognize the the direction and the meaning of the trends when I
look at the numbers.
--
Benjamin Franz
"It is moronic to predict without first establishing an error rate
for a prediction and keeping track of one’s past record of accuracy."
-- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled By Randomness
