Wikimedia traffic analysis...Ubuntu 70 times more popular than Mint?
So Mint apparently is the most popular distro according to Distrowatch (and has been for sometime now)...but something seems VERY wrong with those stats. Ubuntu has/had such a huge market share of Linux that for Mint to overtake Ubuntu, one of two things had to happen...(1) Ubuntu users had to jump ship en masse, which judging by this forum/IRC/news activity has not been the case, or (2) Mint is attracting millions of new users to Linux, which considering they do no marketing whatsoever, that would be hard to believe.
So I check out the monthly Wikimedia stats, which are probably are much more reliable way of measuring popularity...and, excluding Android and "Linux Other", Ubuntu is 24 times more popular than the 2nd place distro (Fedora) and 70 times more popular than Mint. Below, I only listed distros that registered at least 0.01% of the requests.
Code:
Distro Requests Percent
Ubuntu 1,004 M 0.71%
Fedora 49.1 M 0.03%
SUSE 30.8 M 0.02%
Debian 17.9 M 0.01%
Linux Mint 14.7 M 0.01%
Of course, all this begs the question: is there a reliable measure of Linux distro usage? Clearly Distrowatch is flawed as it can be easily manipulated by the media, bot nets, the Distrowatch site itself, etc...
"The Linux philosophy is laugh in the face of danger. Oops. Wrong one. Do it yourself. That's it." --Linus Torvalds
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