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What's the most popular Linux desktop?

desktoplinux.com — The results of DesktopLinux.com's 2006 Desktop Linux Market survey are in, and the votes are all tallied. This first article of a series offers a perspective on how the various desktop Linux distributions fared, and why.

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deviceguru 1 year 331 days ago, made popular 1 year 329 days ago

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tech42er, on 10/12/2007, -9/+3Big surprise: Ubuntu! I use it and I'm happy with it. However, there are other distros that I really like (Freespire, Mepis, and Debian).
- penedo, on 10/12/2007, -33/+8Is there some way to filter out Digg items which mention "Ubuntu"? I'm all for Linux success and competition but the amount of pseudo-Ubuntu-related(*) items here starts to make me feel physically sick when I go through Digg.
  
  (* By "pseudo-Ubuntu-related" I refer to items which could apply to Linux in general but still get "Ubuntu" plastered all over their titles and abstracts).
- gtguru, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9@penedo
  Actually, I don't see mention of Ubuntu anywhere in the title or abstract of this article.
- DoctaStooge, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11this same topic was posted yesterday: http://digg.com/linux_unix/What_s_the_Most_Popular_Linux_Desktop_2
  
  Also, the title is inaccurate as Ubuntu is not a desktop, but a distro instead. The title should read something like "What is the most popular Linux Distro?"
- jasoneisen, on 10/12/2007, -6/+9A new linux distro, "Hakuna Matata", is predicted to take over the Ubuntu market by next year. It's philosophy is much better IMO, and something the market needs right now.
  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakuna_Matata
- trigger0219, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1quote:
  A little closer peek at the data, and some comparison with the Distrowatch page hit list, reveals that "classic" Ubuntu with the GNOME interface is the real winner. Kubuntu, with its KDE desktop, and the educational Edubuntu distributions have their fans, but Ubuntu is what a plurality of Linux desktop users appear to be running today.
  
  yeah, it's there...
  
  and thanks for the ***** wikipedia article that had nothign to do with linux distro.
- blapierre, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6A survey with a self-selected sample, wheeeeeee!!!
  
  In other words this survey means absolutely nothing about which is the most popular Linux desktop.
- hasbeen, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2deja vu?
- rubengs, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Why some people want to filter out Ubuntu?, maybe the word, the philosophy or the community is offensive for some people (would be interesting to know why, maybe is offensive for their values?), when an article mentions Linux is almost impossible to avoid Ubuntu references because is now the most used distro.
chakkaradeep, on 10/12/2007, -4/+3A nice survey, For the Community, By the Community !
- guaigean, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Yes, with probably no realistic numbers. The only people that fill out these kind of surveys tend to be a focused group of advanced or niche users. This neglects the majority of users, which often don't use the same distro as niche users. This would be better titled "Users who actually care or know which distro they use choose Ubuntu" Survey != Fact. Think of the number of users in corporate environments that don't actually care to fill out a survey on this. This survey has little bearing on the actual numbers of computers using a given distro.
stylesP, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2@penedo
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/2310
Veamon, on 10/12/2007, -3/+6Yippie, it was here yesterday.
- xanik266, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Dugg down, if nothing else that this is a repeat article that was here yesturday. Don't get me wront, I'm all for Ubuntu... but I'm not digging repeat after repeat after repeat of articles on it...
ImTheDarkcyde, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4suse is probably my favorite, it just looks good and functions well, what else do you need in an OS?
Mejogid, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14I've never complained about dupes before, but this exact article was on the front page less than 24 hours ago... and this was submitted nearly two days ago.
Intangir, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1ya obvious dupe, of an obvious result ;)
i coulda posted ubuntu would win before the results were even ready
TomPTraynor, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Personally I am not surprised with Mandriva dropping in popularity. We are running it at home on two machines (wife & daughter), but, I changed to PCLinuxOS as Mandriva was getting too slow and bloated for me.

For the Gnome/KDE debaters I really didn't care what I use (I kind of prefer XFCE), but, my wife likes KDE so I standardized all of our machines to that so my support work is easier.
- billyboobs34, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Your daughter likes Linux?... How old is your daughter? ;-)
- TomPTraynor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1My daughter is eight. She originally had a Windows box herself, but, when seeing what we were doing wanted to have it too (we made her machine dual boot). She actually gets in and out by herself and when we asked her why she wanted it her reply was 'it has more cool games than Windows'. I don't know what they use at school, but, she had no problems finding OpenOffice on her machine and was writing a letter to Santa last Christmas.
- billyboobs34, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2"She actually gets in and out by herself"
  Have her look me up in ten years and I can help her out with that...
  /joking
  
  Seriously though, it's really cool that she's into Linux even if only for the games.
gregharmon, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6ubuntu - 29.2%
debian - 12.2%
OpenSUSE - 10.1%
Gentoo - 9.6%
Fedora - 7%
totorototoro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1was there ever any doubt?
- billyboobs34, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Of course there is no doubt. Ubuntu is for Linux n00bs and there are a lot more Linux n00bs than Linux experts.
- WackyT, on 10/12/2007, -4/+2Linux experts?
  Now that's a good one.
  An expert likes to help a community grow and flourish.
  A "Linux expert" is more like the French when asked a question.
- billyboobs34, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2...that makes absolutely no sense to me, but thank you for your reply.
mobilehavoc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Wow a dupe from an article posted yesterday on the front page...WTF????
0v3rk1ll, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Well, I really like the philosophy behind Arch, which I think is a great distro. But I'm also happy with OpenSUSE's amazing progress (and its SUPER derative). All in all good news, just use whatever distro you feel is best for you. :-)
ChristianD, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4While we all know Ubuntu was going to win, in truth, SLED trounces the Debian spawn. If you look at the ubuntu message boards, many of the topics are just how tos on how to add much of the same functionality found in SLED. Now I'll probably get Dug down for saying so, but I Think SLED is the future of Linux, because while it is listed as an Enterprise Distro, we can all see the Desktop multimedia components that are front and center; and since when did an Enterprise Distro need that much eye candy. Yes, today SLED needs SMART to really make it Grandma friendly, but if you had to give your kid sister a computer with one of the two Distributions and you knew you'd be leaving and couldn't help her figure out anything, which do you think she'd figure out the quickest with her windows background.
- billyboobs34, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3SuSE and Fedora are both really nice looking and clean cut. Great for a professional environment or as a desktop machine at home.
  
  I wish they came standard with Apt
- mv36, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1It has the RPM hell.
  
  Emerge and apt-get are the way forward.
mc4_a, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Marked as a dupe...it was on the front page with the same title and description just yesterday. Granted this one was submitted first.
- WISPGuy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0This just gives those of us who were MIA yesterday a chance to view this important news item. :-)
QuimZ, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2@ billyboobs, grow up, you should be happy that Ubuntu is drawing a crowd to Linux at all

The last thing the Linux community needs is another turd burglar calling people out for using Ubuntu. It's an excellent way for people to start using Linux, the more support the better, if it had been around years ago, I would have used it for my first Linux experience.

Seriously go to an Apple store and buy an Imac because you'll fit in better with that crowd.
- billyboobs34, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2...and AOL was a great way for people to start using the Internet. That didn't ostracize AOL users one bit.
  
  /sarcasm
WISPGuy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I guess I live in a hole. I hadn't even heard of Ubuntu until a few weeks ago. (Or maybe I did but didn't take note.) I have been using Red Hat, Trustix, and SUSE for most of my professional career. I had a brief and disappointing romance with Slackware back in college. So it is surprising to me to see Ubuntu on top. I have been using Debian 3.1(Sarge) for server builds in the last year. I love 'apt'. I currently run SUSE 10.1 on my laptop and I have to agree with most of the comments here that SUSE has come a long way. Can anyone give me a good reason to try Ubuntu, other than 30% of Linux users use it?
- billyboobs34, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Stick with SuSE if it's running fine for you. Ubuntu is a distro that's totally free of copyrighted stuff or stuff that may potentially be used against it (like MP3 support etc.). You could always try it in a virtual machine. IMO it's not quite good enough to use as your main distro due to some of the obvious faults in the default build.
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What's the most popular Linux desktop?

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