Distro Marketshares

**JoergJaeger** · 30-Jul-2010, 14:48

Hi,
a couple of days there was a blog entry from novell where it said that according to IDC Suse beats Ubuntu.. well kinda like this.
My question related to this is, does it really matter which distro has more users? Do distro's compete with each other in a market sense? Or is it just for the statistics sake.
Since i can not see this statistic (i think it was pay) i am more puzzled. And not sure if it by download or real use.

**jdmcdaniel3** · 30-Jul-2010, 14:58

Distro download counts seem to indicate the present interest, mainly from new users, for a certain product. Top contenders will always have more interest than lesser known ones, but the downloads also follow whom ever has the most recent release. As openSUSE just came out with version 11.3, the most interest nod would go to SuSE for now. While the exact numbers don't matter all that much, very low numbers all of the time would not be good as it shows little interest in your Linux distribution for some reason.

Thank You,

**richard-g** · 30-Jul-2010, 15:00

Probably in the corporate world?

**gher1941** · 31-Jul-2010, 17:03

Could you please provide the link to the blog entry - just curious. Thanks in advance

**JoergJaeger** · 31-Jul-2010, 17:19

NOVELL: Novell News � Blog Archive � Don’t buy the hype

I got it with my feed reader.

**ken_yap** · 31-Jul-2010, 17:24

When they mention Novell, they are probably talking about enterprise deployments. I can certainly believe that SLE and RHEL run on a lot of industry servers, just look at the experience wanted on job ads.

**jdmcdaniel3** · 31-Jul-2010, 19:21

Distrowatch is a place to look for non-commercial Linux activity, if you have never looked there before, check it out.

DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

Thank You,

**hendersj** · 31-Jul-2010, 19:51

On Sun, 01 Aug 2010 01:36:01 +0000, jdmcdaniel3 wrote:

> Distrowatch is a place to look for non-commercial Linux activity, if you
> have never looked there before, check it out.

Distrowatch lists as a disclaimer on their site that the only thing they
measure is the popularity of the pages for a particular distro, not the
popularity of the distro itself. Basically they run a page counter for
different distros (but the pages do have a lot of useful information on
them).

Jim

--
Jim Henderson
openSUSE Forums Administrator
Forum Use Terms & Conditions at http://tinyurl.com/openSUSE-T-C