Linux popularity by the cold, hard numbers
As I have always said, “Numbers talk and hoo-ha walks.” Now “hoo-ha” is a polite term for what comes out the back end of a bull. In this case, it directly relates to opinions. The more important the project, the more violent I get when I hear, “I think that…” First of all, unless you can communicate with Deity, your opinion is as interesting as used toilet paper. What option is the most likely to succeed statistically? What do the trends say? Listen to the numbers.
OK, that all said, it isn’t news that Ubuntu is incredibly popular. What I thought was interesting, however, is something I saw on Alexa. Evidently, more people are visiting opensuse.org lately than are visiting ubuntu.com. Again, this has nothing to do with opinions or mine is better than yours. I just thought that with the incredible popularity of Ubuntu, it was interesting to see this fact.
Maybe it is in response to Shuttleworth, or maybe it is people flocking to opensuse.org to see what all the fuss is about. Unfortunately, I do not have the numbers for that.
Anyway, here is the graph (click for a bigger version):
This simply denotes traffic, not necessarily popularity. If you look at Google Trends, for example, there is still quite a bit more searching online for Ubuntu than SUSE:
What’s really crazy is that Debian gets the most traffic, yet is almost the least searched.
K, well, there you are. I’m out of here.
