Dear BB, Many thanks for the ~100 responses I received - I appreciate the time you have all taken to respond. Here are the results so far, which I will assume represent a statistically valid sample. To be clear though - what follows is not a recommendation for what systems are good! I have also not broken this down into exact numbers, since I was working from fuzzy input.
Top rank: Ubuntu 8.x - this was clearly popular with people who maintain their own machines Rank 2: RHEL4 / Centos 4 (~ same thing) and RHEL 5 / Centos 5 (ditto) - combined approximately same as Ubuntu - very popular with large labs, corporate environments. Rank 3: SuSE 10.3 / Fedora 9 / Fedora 8 Rank 4: SuSE 10.1, 11 / Mandriva Last rank: Debian / Fedora <= 6 / SuSE < 10 / Ubuntu <= 7 Ubuntu 8.x + RHEL / Centos 4 + 5 was significantly over half of the responses. SuSE systems may have come out higher if it wasn't for the large numbers of different versions being used out there - this diluted the results a little. "All fedora versions" and "all SuSE versions" would give Ubuntu 8.x a run for it's money, but that just indicates how popular ubuntu is. Make of this what you will - it has certainly been an eye opener for me. Best wishes, Graeme
