Hi, everybody.
I thought this might interest You - i have just posted this story on
LinuxPR and Slashdot (no idea if they are going to accept it. Sorry for
the html:
++++++++++++++++++
<P>
<a href="http://www.linux-mandrake.com">Mandrake</a>, a distribution
rather similar to <a href="http://www.redhat.com">Red Hat</a>, but
explicitely targeted at home-users has been a subject of many Press
releases, including those talking about "best selling distribution" during
the last six months.
However, as usuall in the Linux universe, it is
allmost impossible to find out what is a real impact of the Mandrake
compared to other distributions.</P>
<P>One of the rare places which tries to follow the world-wide development
of the linux-use is the <A href="http://www.linuxcounter.org">Linux
counter</A>, a non-profit organisation dedicated to counting the linux
users, and gathering of the general Linux-related statistics. While this
info certainly lacks accuracy (registering is voluntaryly and less than 1%
of users actually register), it is the best <strong>freely
available</strong> statistics on linux usage.</P>
<P>Among other things, Linux-counter offers the info on <A
href="http://www.linuxcounter.org/reports/machines.html">spread of the
Linux-distributions</A>. Abouth a month ago, I started to follow the
growth of the "Mandrake" distribution - at that time, ca. 1.7% of the
registred machines were running the Mandrake. This is obviously not really
impressive, but still this has made the Mandrake into sixt-strongest
distribution following the Slackware (historical reasons), RedHat, Debian,
Suse and DIY. No other distribution exceedes 1% of the registred base.<HR>
In the meantime, however, Mandrake had the second-fastest absolute growth
(approximately 1/2 of the Red-hats growth), and by far the largest
"relative growth" of all the distributions.
In only one month, the number of registred "Mandrake" machines grew by 27%
- for comparison, number of Red-Hat machines grew by only 3%! Obviously,
Mandrake-s model of "simple to use" Linux has been very successfull and
has a very strongly growing userbase. If Mandrake succeedes in sustaining
the current growth rates for the next six months, it will become a very
powerfull "player" among the Linux distributions. </P>
++++++++++++++++++++
Because of the Corel-hypo, I just took a look at Corels userbase - it is
currently non-existing, but i suppose it is growing rather fast, too.
I am not sure if their growth is sustaineable, though - from what I hear
the distribution is rather crappy and they still do not understand the
Open-Source developement model. In particular they have completely
pissed-off the KDE-developers and debian-people aren't really happy
either.
In case someone is interested in numbers, here it is, for all the
distributions with more than 0.1% of the registred machines:
66876 values
535 0.80% distribution:Caldera
1514 2.27% distribution:DIY
115 0.17% distribution:DLD
# OK, this is all debian, so kill me.
12884 19.32% distribution:Debian
2340 3.51% distribution:Debian ==DEBIAN-VERSION==
111 0.17% distribution:Debian potato
162 0.24% distribution:LinuxPPC
1287 1.93% distribution:Mandrake
595 0.89% distribution:Other (registrands choice)
19417 29.12% distribution:Red Hat
4249 6.37% distribution:S.u.S.E
415 0.62% distribution:SLS
20605 30.90% distribution:Slackware
68 0.10% distribution:Yggrdrasil
2579 3.87% distribution:Others (sum of smaller distros with less than
0.1% users)
cu
Denis
