Debian is currently the fastest growing Linux distribution for web servers, with more than 1.2 million active sites in December. Debian 3.1 was declared stable in July and it appears that both the anticipation of this release becoming stable, and the release itself, have generated new interest in Debian, after some years where it had lagged behind its more active rivals. This growth is particularly noticeable at some of the larger central European hosting locations, including Komplex, Lycos Europe, Proxad and Deutsche Telecom.
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2005-09-26
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A couple of things Anonymous,
1) Debian isn't dead. There are more distro's based on debian than any other distro. Something like 128 distro's. It well out paces other distro's. Debian is an excellent distro.
2) *BSD's are not dead. They are all quite alive. The *BSD is dying (so called) joke is old and dates back to the early 90's; and it isn't funny. The *BSD are excellent *nix replacements.
Give debian or the *BSD's a chance and choose the one that suits your needs.
Disclaimer: I am a *BSD user as well as a debian user.
Member since:2005-07-24
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2005-11-27
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While gains made by Debian are impressive, CentOS has also made very impressive gains. IMHO, CentOS probably grew the most percentage-wise. I believe we will see it grow dramatically over the following years as people abandon old versions of RedHat, SuSE, Fedora, and Mandriva.
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Don't believe that major commercial entities will abandon RedHat, Suse, etc. As major brokerage firms and publicly-held commerical firms adopt Linux, vendor dependancy on updates, crashes, debugging, patches, hardware issues, etc., increases. Major brokerage firms pay millions of $$ $per year for such licenses. Whose going to support CentOS or Debian patches on a IBM BladeCluster Chassis? If you have a gold or platinum support package, you basically have a RedHat or Novell guy sitting on your datacenter to yell at. What, do you think that a Fortune 100 will let you look up some gzipped source file on some guys website so you can download and apply on a server that handles millions of dollars of J2EE transactions? What if it doesn't work? You will be out of a job.
Just look at Red Hat and Novell's stock and you'll see that companies also don't want individual vendor tie-in. Major companies will play one contract vs. another to get the best pricing and support.
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You are partially right in your analysis. There are basically two different type of companies that have different requirements for web servers. On one side, you have the IBMs, the Kaisers, the Nasdaqs, financial institutions, etc. It is true that these companies require J2EE, support contracts, interaction with all sorts of legacy equipment/softare, and someone to hang when something goes wrong. So you are right, these companies will need commercial support, will pay for commercial support, and they will go to IBM, HP, Sun, RedHat, Novell, and Microsoft to get it. But at the same time, the number of these companies are extremely limited. The other type of companies live on razor thin margins. They are technical institutions that can fix their own problems. They deploy thousands and thousands of servers, virtual servers to get the job done. You will find Yahoo, Google, ISPs, universities, snall business. These companies need something free, something stable, and something with a very long lifetime. These number in the millions, and CentOS, Debian, and FreeBSD are perfect for these companies. As I said, you will see the number of CentOS deployments rocket as time goes by.
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Major brokerage firms pay millions of $$ $per year for such licenses. Whose going to support CentOS or Debian patches on a IBM BladeCluster Chassis? If you have a gold or platinum support package, you basically have a RedHat or Novell guy sitting on your datacenter to yell at.
CentOS is aimed squarely at those who don't need or can't afford that level of enterprise support, but would like to run exactly the same software as those who do. It's great for that niche. A major brokerage firm needs a different level of support and they should contract with Red Hat (or somebody).
Debian is a similar story, but who isn't pushing for a bigger third-party support market there? This is exactly what Progeny is about, what the DCCA is all about, what Bruce Perens dreams about, what a lot of things Ubuntu is doing are all about. A distro becomes a common hub supported - for those who are willing to pay for it - by different commercial backers, not just one giant corporation who steers the ship. Some of that is already a reality (tell Mark Shuttleworth or Ian Murdoch what you have in mind and either will write the contract), but obviously we're not all the way there yet.
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2005-07-06
Debian and *compatible* derivatives (there are only 2, Kanotix and Libranet) are the only distros I have always been loyal to.
As to the others:
1)Mandrake/driva: only for a short time as a newbie.
2)SUSE: whilst I find it one of the best distros to install on a newbie's box, I can't stand that a setup tool (YaST of course) is in control rather than myself. Besides 10.0 has refused to work with my hardware, a problem that I don't have with Debian.
Member since:2005-11-11
I use Kanotix myself. Having tried every other flavour of Linux distro, Kanotix was THE distro I finally settled on. Kanotix is based on Debian sid.
Great hardware detection, based on KDE, up-to-date, live CD with HD install (entire thing comes on just 1 CDROM), and can make 100% use of the vast Debian repositories, using apt/synaptic.
Quite an array of Debian software outside of that officially supported as well. (apt-get.org)
Trouble free and just plain good.
Member since:2005-07-06
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2005-07-06
this one's particularly funny:
http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=144331&cid=12095445
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2005-07-06
I thoght Netcraft were the one who have the only-report-the-decline part of the reporting business :]
Anyway, everyone who has ever come closer to linux distros than the average "doesn't recognize my xxx hardware automagically so it s*cks"-joe and has tried more distros than one for more than an hour 
so these people probably know about the fairly many positive characteristics Debian has always had. That is why so many people return to Debian after dozens of different distros, or that Debian has so numerous children distros (hell, there are constantly 5 Debian-related distros in the distrowatch top10, for a long time).
And also, what Netcraft can measure and speak about is merely a fraction of the reality (and that generally, not just on Debian).
Thing is, no matter what reports say, Debian is active, SID is one of the best distros on the desktop (I can tell from many years with debian and knowing fairly many other distros as well), Debian has the largest repository and dpkg/apt is one of the best tools to have.
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The last report from Netcraft was from March 2005 and it told that 791086 active sites used Debian.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/03/14/fedora_makes_rapid_pro...
Now the number is "more than 1.2 million," which clearly shows that Debian Sarge has been a very successful release and people have been happy with it.
Meanwhile, there hasn't been much change in the number of active sites that use RedHat, SUSE, Cobalt or Mandriva. All in all, this latest report shows that Linux's use on web servers has increased during 2005 but the growth has concentrated on non-commercial distros like Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and CentOS.
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