Mandriva's CEO got interviewed for the Mandriva club. "Right now, the new 'in thing' is Ubuntu. Of course, the situation is a bit different in this case: one person, with a quasi infinite check book is behind the operation. So they can give the system away and spend whatever is needed. Is this the right way for the open source eco-system? I find it hard to believe. One possible worse case scenario is that Ubuntu's plan is to use money to put all other community-based distros out of business and then start monetizing the installed base. If this were the case, they are doing the easy part: increasing their market share by giving away the product. We have found that the second part is a tad more difficult."
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Member since:2006-01-01
Netcraft measures servers, not desktop installations.
As flawed as distrowatch may, or may not, be Netcraft is a much worse metric for this
The distrowatch page hit counter doesn't measure desktop installations either, it only measures page hits. There are a lot of experienced GNU/Linux users who don't need to consult Distrowatch daily to decide which distro they should choose for their GNU/Linux servers and desktops.
Member since:2005-07-24
Still, it seems odd that "The Most Popular Linux Distro", which is based on Debian, a strong server OS, and which includes Apache, couldn't garner at least 2% on the Netcraft chart.
Anyway, I find it very unclear what distrowatch is measuring. Page hits from newbies wondering which Linux distro to try? Linux fans checking what all the hype is about? People looking for help in fixing their broken Ubuntu boxes? Who knows? My objection is to the idea that Ubuntu/Mandriva/etc distrowatch hits are somehow proportional to Ubuntu/Mandriva/etc users.
My feeling is that the Distrowatch counter is mainly a hype-o-meter.
Member since:
2005-08-18
"Netcraft is also flawed as a measure of OS popularity. But I'd put more faith in it than I would in distrowatch hits for heaven's sake."
Netcraft measures servers, not desktop installations.
As flawed as distrowatch may, or may not, be Netcraft is a much worse metric for this.