For those of you who haven't been to DW in a while they are having issues but the mirrors still work fine so if just www.distrowatch.com isn't working for you try http://distrowatch.serve-you.net/ and you should be fine. In the last few days I saw that PCLOS was getting close to Ubuntu on teh rankings, and today PCLOS is now #1. (PCLOS -- 2522 hits vs Ubuntu -- 2517). This gave me the great idea to well...quickly analyze whats going on on the chart.
1. PCLOS 2007 --- Why now? Don't get me wrong, I think its a great distro and if somebody likes KDE PCLOS is actually better in many respects than Kubuntu..much better. However it has been some time since the 2007 release and there is little word on the next version. Lets not forget that its almost a 1-man-show with Texstar leading the way so release cycles are slow. Typically hits on distrowatch go up as a release is coming... there is no release, so why a sudden spike in hits?
2. Ubuntu --- Long time #1 finally took a back seat... granted its in mid-cycle right now so nothing interesting going on thus not a lot of new hits.
3. openSuse --- i am surprised its this high...why? I am gonna go ahead and say its because of newbs and those who don't know better. Of course its rapidly approaching release date...there is a new beta every 2 weeks so that is perhaps generating traffic.
4. Fedora --- same as suse..i am confused as to why its this high. again probably because there are betas coming out every few weeks and thus generating traffic.
5. Sabayon --- in the last few months it moved up a LOT. distro is gaining a lot of popularity with its frequent releases and pretty sweet features. gentoo for the common man!
6. Mint --- moved up a lot recently too from the 40s to top 10. Interesting enough. Perhaps this justifies Ubuntu's fall from grace. Those who would previously have gone to ubuntu are now splitting off to the Mint camp thus actual ubuntu hits = ubuntu + 3/4(mint) (you'd think the other 1/4 is genuine mint fans).
7. Debian --- always a favorite among long time users. with its wide range of supported architectures and huge repos i am not surprised its hanging on in the top 10.
8. Mepis --- I am not exactly sure where this distro fits in. Its a debian-based KDE centric distro that recently flopped over to Ubuntu as its base. I assume Mepis to Kubuntu is what Mint is to Ubuntu... essentially the same at its base with some custom programs, scripts and tweaks to make it a little better. Last I tried mepis it suffered from poor stability and horrible memory leaks.
9. Mandriva -- since Mandrake 10 which was the peak of its popularity mandriva has been on a decline. IMO from the "big 3" (rh/fedora, (open)suse, mandriva) commerical distros this would be the best...but just my opinion..which doesn't seem to be the opinion of the distrowatch population b/c mandriva is ranked the lowest of all 3. in either case last i heard they are pissed off that the french gov chose ubuntu over them...
10. Damn Small -- this is interesting. I would venture to say people love live-cds / live-usb and a full productive distro @ 50mb is something of a curiosity to say the least. Perhaps a share of this traffic is from people still on dial-up who are interested in linux and simply can't download the standard 700mb isos for traditional cds. just a guess.
anyway....just my 2 cents on whats going on in the DW world.
1. PCLOS 2007 --- Why now? Don't get me wrong, I think its a great distro and if somebody likes KDE PCLOS is actually better in many respects than Kubuntu..much better. However it has been some time since the 2007 release and there is little word on the next version. Lets not forget that its almost a 1-man-show with Texstar leading the way so release cycles are slow. Typically hits on distrowatch go up as a release is coming... there is no release, so why a sudden spike in hits?
2. Ubuntu --- Long time #1 finally took a back seat... granted its in mid-cycle right now so nothing interesting going on thus not a lot of new hits.
3. openSuse --- i am surprised its this high...why? I am gonna go ahead and say its because of newbs and those who don't know better. Of course its rapidly approaching release date...there is a new beta every 2 weeks so that is perhaps generating traffic.
4. Fedora --- same as suse..i am confused as to why its this high. again probably because there are betas coming out every few weeks and thus generating traffic.
5. Sabayon --- in the last few months it moved up a LOT. distro is gaining a lot of popularity with its frequent releases and pretty sweet features. gentoo for the common man!
6. Mint --- moved up a lot recently too from the 40s to top 10. Interesting enough. Perhaps this justifies Ubuntu's fall from grace. Those who would previously have gone to ubuntu are now splitting off to the Mint camp thus actual ubuntu hits = ubuntu + 3/4(mint) (you'd think the other 1/4 is genuine mint fans).
7. Debian --- always a favorite among long time users. with its wide range of supported architectures and huge repos i am not surprised its hanging on in the top 10.
8. Mepis --- I am not exactly sure where this distro fits in. Its a debian-based KDE centric distro that recently flopped over to Ubuntu as its base. I assume Mepis to Kubuntu is what Mint is to Ubuntu... essentially the same at its base with some custom programs, scripts and tweaks to make it a little better. Last I tried mepis it suffered from poor stability and horrible memory leaks.
9. Mandriva -- since Mandrake 10 which was the peak of its popularity mandriva has been on a decline. IMO from the "big 3" (rh/fedora, (open)suse, mandriva) commerical distros this would be the best...but just my opinion..which doesn't seem to be the opinion of the distrowatch population b/c mandriva is ranked the lowest of all 3. in either case last i heard they are pissed off that the french gov chose ubuntu over them...
10. Damn Small -- this is interesting. I would venture to say people love live-cds / live-usb and a full productive distro @ 50mb is something of a curiosity to say the least. Perhaps a share of this traffic is from people still on dial-up who are interested in linux and simply can't download the standard 700mb isos for traditional cds. just a guess.
anyway....just my 2 cents on whats going on in the DW world.
