it would be interesting if Red Hat bought Corel as is rumored...
DvB
On Wed, 1 Dec 1999, Denis Havlik wrote:
> 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
>
>
