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Which Linux Distributions Are Dying?

codingexperiments.com — Like everything else, what goes up must come down. This must apply to Linux distributions too, right? So, what’s happening with Linux? Which distributions are growing?

Who dugg this? Made popular Jul 2, 2008

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  • estvir, on 07/02/2008, -12/+85Buried for using Google Trends to try and make a point.
  • KevinJim, on 07/02/2008, -4/+72So... Debian is dying ? That's *****, Ubuntu and Debian every 6 months doing a huge merge at their repos. Ubuntu is a Debian based distro so it's oxymoron, when Ubuntu involves Debian does too and vice versa. And there hasn't Mandriva at the charts... which is really dying.
  • ptFoe, on 07/02/2008, -5/+62The PCLinuxOS stats on Distrowatch are rigged.

    Not to mention the lamest and least creative distribution name.

    No wonder Toyota wasn't happy with suggestion the rename the company to "CarOnRoad"
  • pentium42006, on 07/02/2008, -1/+35If you look at the Fedora / Redhat chart, you can see the spikes every 6th months when a new version of Fedora has been released.

    Also, the article forgot another important Linux Distro, PCLinuxOS. According to Distrowatch, in the past 12 months, PCLinuxOS is ranked number 2.

    PCLinuxOS on GoogleTrends:

    http://dpatterson.x10hosting.com/pclinuxos.png

    Other then that, I must say that it was interesting to see the side-by-side date comparison.
  • mentat0, on 07/02/2008, -1/+31I doubt Debian will be going away. It's the old workhorse that many distros are based upon. It's not designed to be bleeding or even cutting edge because stability is the main focus for servers, which is why many users like myself have switched to Ubuntu for everyday usage. Ubuntu is great for my desktop environment, but I wouldn't think of using it for a server.
  • gullevek, on 07/02/2008, -1/+21Without debian there would be no Ubuntu ...
  • acidkore, on 07/02/2008, -2/+21To paraphrase Andrew Lang, the OP is using Google Trends like a drunk man uses a lamppost - for support rather than illumination.
  • manstein01, on 07/02/2008, -1/+17Buried as lame, and for only including a whopping four distros in the "research."
  • Altotus, on 07/02/2008, -1/+17The article makes a fundamentally silly assertion that the search term counts are associated with interest in the topic. In fact, search term counts reflect the product of the interest in the term, the success rate in satisfying the searcher with the result (did they find what they wanted the first time, or did they need to search again), the information value of the term, and the a priori background knowledge of the search population.

    For example, "Linux" is a good example of a term that should have decreasing search counts despite increased interest. Why? Well, "Linux" is a poor search term because it is promiscuous, brining up volumes of disparate information -- it's basically an unfocused search. Further, today, most people with even a vague interest in Linux have far more specific queries, or know enough to query a specific distribution, or application. Some of those distributions have well-known and canonical sites with resources (for example, redhat.com), so that people looking for information related to that already have resources at hand and no longer need a generalized web search.
  • bignetbuy, on 07/02/2008, -1/+17Buried for using Google Trends and relying on "popularity" to judge a distribution's health. Utterly absurd.
  • cornflakepirate, on 07/02/2008, -0/+15Your image isn't showing the whole story, since there's no scale.

    Sorry, but PCLinuxOS really has nothing on Google trends:

    http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2C+"red+hat"|redhat|fedora%2C+suse|novell|opensuse%2C+pclinuxos&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0

    Not that Google trends really proves anything, I'm just pointing out that your graph is a flawed indicator of PCLinuxOS's popularity.
  • bobbyi, on 07/02/2008, -1/+13Yeah. It's a really bad name and yet not bad enough to be good in some ironic way.
  • doubad, on 07/02/2008, -0/+12Oh no, Windows AND Mac OSX are going extinct too.
    http://www.google.com/trends?q=windows
    http://www.google.com/trends?q=mac+osx&ctab=0&geo= ...
    One day we won't have ANY OS.

    I think these trends shouldn't be taken so seriously. The way I see it, is that the distros are being better made so less searching is necessary to fix them. Then the spikes are there for the reason of distribution upgrades. I don't see any reason to get concerned about any of these distros.... well maybe PCLinusOS, that one is sure to fall ;)
  • Grjemo, on 07/02/2008, -5/+14I really think Linux does need a face like Ubuntu to attract new users. There is still the choice of other distros for others.
  • Vegabondsx, on 07/02/2008, -1/+10nmnnotmynamenmnnotmyname, you complain Ubuntu users act this way, but yet this is how you act yourself in your response...
  • cutlerite, on 07/02/2008, -0/+8I beg to differ. When Ubuntu is searched more than boobs, you know you have a winner.

    http://google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2C+boobs%2C+&cta ...

  • tcpip4lyfe, on 07/02/2008, -0/+7Just for the record Slackware is a hell of an operating system.
  • slifty, on 07/02/2008, -1/+8Woh woh woh... arrogant linux users? Say it ain't so!
  • doublebummer, on 07/02/2008, -0/+7Exactly. Using the same logic, we could say that Ubuntu has more bugs then Linux as a whole: http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu+bugs%2C+linu ...

  • elnerdo, on 07/02/2008, -1/+7I've found that Ubuntu users are the least-offensive of linux users. Ubuntu people are generally newer and less experienced with linux, so they usually have a more open attitude. Classic linux people, on the other hand, tend to be elitists who don't actually WANT anybody else to use linux, despite telling everyone that it's great.
  • manstein01, on 07/02/2008, -5/+11Rigged? And you know this how?

    Have you ever tried the distro? Besides the crappy name, it's a pretty good distro for the small developer base.
  • leejarratt, on 07/02/2008, -0/+6Ubuntu is my father.
  • NJank, on 07/02/2008, -0/+6No. No. That's not true. That's impossible!
  • quidpro, on 07/02/2008, -1/+7Meh. It's the search terms that are dying. Completely different animal. This article is terrible because it claims to understand that, yet continues to present the data as though it is somehow related.

    Got an Ubuntu problem? Most likely you'll search "ubuntu nvidia compiz" or something along those lines...etc etc...so does that mean I can assume that ubuntu has more problems than other distros? Sure. It'd be wrong, but just as valid as this other crud.
  • BadAsh71, on 07/02/2008, -1/+7While I believe the author's stats are crap, I do personally believe that there is a little bit of "thinning the heard" going on in Linux Land.

    For those around during the time of Jimmy Carter you will get this little pun.... we have more Linux Distros than Carter has pills :-)

    There are way too many different distributions of Linux out there and that is a good and a bad thing. It is good that anybody and his brother can take a copy of Linux, configure it the way he/she likes it and then slap a name on it and toss it up on the Internet.

    There have been a lot of great niche distros made this way, however, in the long run, only a handful really matter in the big scheme of things.

    Is Debian dead? As a "name", maybe. Based on Google Trends yes, it is dead because not so many people search for "Debian"... a lot of Linux newbies probably don't know what "Debian" is... however, they have heard about Ubuntu.

    Yes, Ubuntu is based on Debian and yes, they seed their changes back into Debian so yes, Debian is still growing but it is not in the limelight, Ubuntu is.

    As a Linux fan living in a Microsoft world (I'm a developer), the way I see it, there is only a handful of Linux Distros that matter:

    * Ubuntu
    * SUSE and OpenSUSE
    * Fedora

    Everything else is just a lot of something else.

    Yes, Linspire is nice and made for the home user but it is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian (kind of a 6 degrees from Kevin Bacon). Every 6 months when a new version comes out everyone is talking about Ubuntu, not Linspire and not Mepis.

    Fedora has the RedHat fans happy but with a name like "Sulfur" you might as well have called it Nova (Does Not Go -Spanish Translation). I guess some people just don't learn from prior marketing mistakes. Sulfur is nasty to smell so even the most die hard Fedora fans have told me they expected that release to suck and some have even switched due to problems they have encountered in that release.

    SUSE and OpenSUSE are around because of Novell and the Mono Project. Unfortunately the majority of all .NET Developers that want to try out Mono switch to SUSE or OpenSUSE because at times that was the only way to get things like MonoDevelop to work. I think SUSE is getting better but make mine Ubuntu :-)

    As for any Linux Distributions "dying"... maybe, maybe not but there are definitely some that have gained much more attention but like everyone else has pointed out, the stats used for this article are not really worth all this discussion... certainly not a long ass response like mine :-)
  • inactive, on 07/02/2008, -0/+6I feel the results are false on distro watch for pclinuxos has anyone tried it? its lame
  • HerbSolo, on 07/02/2008, -1/+6yeah - thats BS. - As mentioned above, Ubuntu is based on debian, so really when Ubuntu is used, the debian usage grows.
    It shows one thing: the ubuntu-support on the web is good and getting better, if you use ?Buntu and you come up with a question you'll usually try ...buntu+Keyword, Ubuntu+Keyword, Debian+Keyword, Linux+Keyword - in that order.
  • quasipolymath, on 07/02/2008, -0/+5Seriously. "Well according to google trends, searches for 'wheel' are going down and searches for 'car' are on the rise. I think it's pretty clear that cars are on the rise and nobody is much interested in wheels anymore."
  • OrangeTide, on 07/02/2008, -0/+5debian will be around as long as the tens of thousands of geeks keep using it. it's pretty simple really.

    this whole "is dying" thing makes this seem like a popularity contest. Oh no, my distro is dying, I must not be as cool as the other computer nerds.
  • arjie, on 07/02/2008, -0/+4Ah, I thought everyone would recognise the reference to the age-old "BSD is dead" trolls that were obviously wrong. My point being people have been calling different things 'dead' for a long time, but with Free software so long as you have someone (even just one person) working on something, it is most certainly not dead.

    The BSD is dying trolls were wrong, and anyone claiming that Debian or Slackware are dying are just as wrong.
  • volcompimp, on 07/02/2008, -6/+10Any real Linux user will look at this and see that this guy is a moron. Sorry Ubuntu/Fedora/Mandriva/Knoppix/etc users you don't count. (That's about 90% of you)

    Google analytics has absolutely nothing to do w/ a distros growth. That just shows how many techno weenies are viewing their website.
  • ell0bo, on 07/02/2008, -1/+5Well... I've been using Ubuntu server, and Ubuntu Desktop. So far I haven't had a single problem with Ubuntu server, but as far as I can tell it's damn near just Debian with the Ubuntu sticker on it.
  • vexingmodstwo, on 07/02/2008, -1/+5It's a branding thing. Ubuntu is taking over in terms of searches because the name is out there. This guy needs to take a marketing class.
  • SilverSeraph, on 07/02/2008, -1/+5Where is Mandriva [Mandrake] ?
  • elementop, on 07/02/2008, -0/+4Sigh...dude, seriously -- drop the arrogant attitude. It's people like you that keep others from even trying Linux.

    I've used Slack, Gentoo, Knoppix, Caldera (yech), CentOS and Red Hat. Do *I* count, even though I have (and still do) use Knoppix? Each Linux distro fills a niche, so use the right tool for the job. If that's Knoppix or Ubuntu, more power to you; at least it's a Linux machine. If Gentoo is best for what you need, you get props for figuring out what is, in my experience at least, one of the more difficult distros to set up. But the fanboi arguments get old enough with OS-X/*BSD/Windows/Linux split. Let's not fracture the Linux community, too.
  • ondrasoukup, on 07/02/2008, -0/+4that is utter *****!

    measure a distro popularity by...how many people google it ? how about having a running server on debian and that's it...it runs, apt-get upgrade from time to time and if you need a new one, you just deploy your image and customize it ?

    I love ***** who write but don't actually use the stuff they write about...

    and...where is gentoo ? arch linux ? centos - we use that at work, just image a drive, edit hostname and ip configuration and a sales management server for one shop with VPN back to HQ with oracle db which it mirrors is ready.
  • jackusage, on 07/02/2008, -0/+4I agree, Debian won't really die unless Ubuntu does, because Ubuntu is dependent on Debian. Mandriva is dying though.
  • elementop, on 07/02/2008, -0/+3Quote: "Because almost all Ubuntu I know (and my friends share the same opinion so i'm not alone) ... consistantly [sic] annoy the hell out of people with the 'I use Ubuntu/Linux so I'm better than you' attitude."

    sed "s/Ubuntu/[any other Linux distro]/g" and your sentence would probably still be true. To be honest, it probably holds true for *any* operating system. For better or worse, people (well, geeks anyway) seem to get pretty territorial over their pet O/S.
  • OrangeTide, on 07/02/2008, -1/+4distros die when their maintainers abandon them. If someone loves their distro, no matter what the majority of the world thinks of it, the distro will continue to be updated and improved.
  • inactive, on 07/02/2008, -0/+3what about slackware? i don't hear much about it anymore
  • javaroast, on 07/02/2008, -0/+3The Carter's pills reference has nothing to do with Jimmy Carter. It refers to Carter's Little Liver Pills http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTL038371.html

    Debian isn't dead. It's running far to many servers to be dead. Your list of relevant distros only makes sense if you only consider the desktop. Server distros are also very relevant, so you miss distros such as SuSE, Debian, RedHat Enterprise, Centos
  • harmil, on 07/02/2008, -0/+3Not only do I not agree that it's interesting, I actually think you have it backwards: anything that was interesting was ignored by the blogger in question.

    Google trends is based on the searches that people do ON GOOGLE. That's an important element of this data. Google was, in 2004, not as widely used as it is today. So, what you see in the charts is the adoption of Google searching as a mainstream tool in everyday life as well as whatever you were searching for. This becomes clear when you look at the Linux chart (overlayed with Ubuntu). In that, you can see that the news reference volume for Linux has been steadily growing, but the search volume has been dropping. Why? Because the user-base of Google is growing and the new user-base is, on average, less technical. There are probably just as many people searching for Linux, but as a fraction of all searches (which is what I think trends shows), it's much lower.

    These charts are interesting, only in that Ubuntu seems to have touched a nerve with the new, less technical crowd (as one would suspect). Other than that, it's not at all interesting in the way that the blogger thought it was.

  • maninalift, on 07/02/2008, -0/+3Debian as well as being a top server distro is a favourite of academia and is likely to stay that way until the current generation of university computer techs die out. they are a loyal bunch.
  • mlwarrior, on 07/02/2008, -1/+4why?
  • quidpro, on 07/02/2008, -1/+3That was beautiful. Anybody got a tissue?
  • tnoy, on 07/02/2008, -0/+2http://www.google.com/trends?q=mandriva&ctab=0&geo ...
  • svensko, on 07/02/2008, -0/+2Yes, when I saw the lack of Arch and Gentoo I just [x]ed without reading.
  • balaknair, on 07/04/2008, -0/+2*Applause*

    Way to make a point

    PS: " A man is not dead while his name is still spoken"
    As long as Debian derivatives like Ubuntu(and Ubuntu derivatives like Mint) exist and do well, it's absurd to say Debian is dying. The more developers you have for any of these projects, the more developers you have in effect for Debian(it's not a one way street, the growth of one benefits each of the others). That's the beauty of FOSS. As long as the other distros exist, Debian will continue to do well.
  • BassJunkie, on 07/02/2008, -0/+2I personally don't trust these stats. I don't know enough about how google calculates these search terms but I know from personal experience when trying to sort a problem I will normally drop ubuntu in with the problem so I get ubuntu related articles appear. Will this then count towards to the popularity? Besides nowadays it's a pretty safe bet that you can find the website of the distro you want my tacking .com or .org on the end of the name, if you need google to find ubuntu's website I don't think you should be using a computer!!
  • BrandonMills, on 07/02/2008, -3/+5But Ubuntu refuses to one-up itself, so really the field is wide open to take Ubuntu's position from itself.

    Mainly, Ubuntu, while not as stubborn as traditional Linux distros, is still stubborn. They're apparently willing to die as a distro in order to try to make Brown popular. Ubuntu may look decent when customized, but out of the box, I still think it's fairly fugly.

    Linux guys just can't admit when they're wrong about something. They always ramble on about "Well, if you don't like it, feel free to customize." That's just it, guys. Most users aren't going to customize. It's gotta look great out of the box. You should really just model the inferface after Mac OS X at this point, because really that is what consumers want. ( No, not your average geek. Again, consumers. If you're an average geek, you shouldn't be running Ubuntu anyhow. Graduate to a big boy distro already. )
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