Linux Popularity

[rbmorse]

Anandtech does not meet my news needs. I can learn more talking with you guys.
Linux Popularity. Redhat is currently supporting way over 12 million installs.
Ubuntu I have no numbers on them but my best guess is they probably have well over 30 million installs.

Installs is a lousy metric because it doesn't give you a clue as to what people are actually using. How many of those installs have been abandoned?

XP, Vista, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, Fedora, SuSE, Linspire, Mandrake, sidux and Kubuntu can all count me as an install, but I spend 99% of my time in Ubuntu (GNOME) and the rest in Vista(64). All the rest have been wiped.

[Hephasteus]

Installs is a lousy metric because it doesn't give you a clue as to what people are actually using. How many of those installs have been abandoned?

XP, Vista, FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, Fedora, SuSE, Linspire, Mandrake, sidux and Kubuntu can all count me as an install, but I spend 99% of my time in Ubuntu (GNOME) and the rest in Vista(64). All the rest have been wiped.

That's not install metrics or browser metrics. The 12.5 million that redhat is supporting are people who are actively using them and are currently right now actively getting patches on their system.
You could guess a couple more million still using like older core 4 and core 7 installs as those are not getting patches any more. There is software that demands core 4 to run and people will only update to minimal requirements. There is also software that demands the kernel from core 7.

Now of those 12.5 million most are on the oldest supported platform and not actively testing the latest and greatest but the active latest platform testers has grown dramaticly since core 10 started it's cycle.

Community noise from fedora is dwarfed by ubuntu. If Ubuntu came out and claimed 60 million users. I would be hard pressed to try to mount a dispute of that claim.

Fedora has been working on a more efficient patching system for couple years now and it's finally rolling it out. They'll probably be piping a few dozen less terrabytes of data this year from it. Now even if half of those users are transition phase from windows dual booting back and forth waiting out software that works like they want it under linux etc it's still impressive growth.

[rbmorse]

Red Hat claims 12 million active installations? I'll have to go look for that one. The rest is mere speculation.

[deanjo]

Red Hat claims 12 million active installations? I'll have to go look for that one. The rest is mere speculation.

11 million of those are Google servers ;D

[rbmorse]

Red Hat executive vice president Paul Cormier said in a presentation that the company currently has over 2.5 million paid subscriptions for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux offerings.

This is closer to my understanding. And, it's an impressive accomplishment.

Datamation had an article last year http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osr...g-in-Linux.htm making some dubious claims about Fedora installations. Even by their methodology I'm good for six of those without accounting for different IPs resulting from being a DHCP client of two of my ISPs. None of the Fedora's I downloaded are active.

Frankly, they lost me as soon as they claimed the possibility that Fedora has more seats than Ubuntu.

[Hephasteus]

So you don't wear yourself out and get google eyes.

http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner...-10-nears.html

"When combined with other actively used Fedora distributions as of Feb 16, 2009, Fedora's counting method reports 12,188,598 Fedora Linux installations across Fedora 7,8,9 and 10 releases."

If that's not getting close to 13 million now I'll kiss your butt on the post office steps and give you an advertising budget to promote the event.

The uncorking that everyone was expecting out of linux in 2004 and 2006 is happening now.

Redhat's 2.5 million RHEL customers has to have grown because they hammered their 1Q earnings report.

The 8 million user claim from ubuntu is surprising because thier community is a monster compared to Red Hat.

There has to be dozens of boxes patching from behind untangle boxes. They are going to have to look for duplicate update packes on same ip's to get a better number.

[rbmorse]

13 million would give Fedora about 1.2% of all PCs in use, globally. Quite impressive, if accurate.

[ap90033]

So wouldnt that mean that there are around 1,274,000,000 PC's that dont run Linux? So like 1.3 Billion?? WOW THAT IS A LOT of PC's... Kind of makes 13 mill look small... Like me saying i make $30 an hour but david letterman saying he makes a $1,000,000.00 an Hour. LOL

Well I guess we are only talking fedora here but you get my drift.

[Hephasteus]

So wouldnt that mean that there are around 1,274,000,000 PC's that dont run Linux? So like 1.3 Billion?? WOW THAT IS A LOT of PC's... Kind of makes 13 mill look small... Like me saying i make $30 an hour but david letterman saying he makes a $1,000,000.00 an Hour. LOL

Well I guess we are only talking fedora here but you get my drift.

Well a good 100 million of those are still running linux in server farms completely in house supported. Which is why Microsoft has so much trouble breaking into that market because all they want is you to drop off the source code and walk away.

[sc3252]

Anandtech is just a right wing political site that has some technology benchmarks on the side. Just about every news post or article that they run has something to do with big government or slanted articles about taxes. Its really sad, I used to go there for technology news, but ever since I have noticed that their articles/reviews have around 50 comments each and their news articles have around 300+ about gun rights, or evil Obama wanting to tax you.
I am not saying that people shouldn't express their views about this crap, but why does it have to be on tech sites. Is Fox news + blogs not enough?