Google Trends recently updated their online "popularity" meter and Ubuntu remains the clear No1 Linux distro in terms of search trend. Fedora and Debian seem to be battling for the second position, while SuSE had a small "trend" loss in the 3rd place. Then, we find Gentoo, Mandriva, then Red Hat and Kubuntu. While this trend meter is not an official Linux distro market/mind share, it's considered a pretty good approximation. Meanwhile, Fedora seems more strong in USA, while SuSE in Europe.
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Member since:2007-02-17
I think that used to be true. I've been seeing more and more interest in Ubuntu in the corporate world. My company is generally a windows and solaris house, but we've been seeing more of our unix users using ubuntu. I was extremely surprised to see Ubuntu installed on at least five machines. Our windows admins have also have started testing Ubuntu. I started using Ubuntu sine the first release and I used be a fedora user, I haven't looked back and I tell and install Ubuntu for anyone I know.
Member since:2005-07-08
Member since:2006-06-15
"For instance, Google Trends shows that searches for 'linux' have halved over the last three years"
I think there's another explanation to that. With the amount of online documentation and specialized packages for Ubuntu, I find myself almost exclusively using ubuntu instead of linux as a keyword.
I only use "linux" for the 0.001% of the time where an Ubuntu user didn't write the answer online or didn't compile a package itself.
Actually, I'm using "feisty" most of the time 
Member since:2007-02-17
I agree here. i usually type the error or problem followed by the Ubuntu version I'm using. The reason why is because you are more likely to get answers this way as the community is pretty damn big and almost any issue has been raised at least once. That's another reason Ubuntu is so popular, the community is big and for the most part very helpful. Other communities in distro land are usually full of people who are not as tolerant of newbs as Ubuntu is.
Member since:
2005-09-25
I'm not necessarily denying that Ubuntu is 'the most popular distro worldwide today' - I just don't see any evidence for this based on the link provided. Personally, I would suspect Red Hat would be most popular, since it has probably millions of installations in the corporate world both on servers and on desktops.
I'd agree that Ubuntu is very likely the most popular distribution on hobbyists/linux enthusiasts systems right now (ie. people who read OSNews and Slashdot - but there's a lot of corporate users of linux who've never even heard of you guys), and that it's also quite possibly the most talked about distro, but I doubt the validity of Google Trends to tell us anything meaningful about this one way or the other.
For instance, Google Trends shows that searches for 'linux' have halved over the last three years, and I don't believe for one minute that the market share (or the mind share) of linux has halved in that period, but by your logic that is exactly what we'd have to say.
Distrowatch also shows Ubuntu as the no.1 distribution, but again their figures aren't applicable much beyond the world of open source fans (such as myself).
By contrast, Netcrafts' website rankings place Debian, Red Hat, SLES, Gentoo and FreeBSD ahead of Ubuntu - and who's to say that these figures are any less representative of the true installed base of these OS's?