new daylight savings time

[Benjamin Franz]

On Sat, 24 Feb 2007, William Hooper wrote:

>
> Benjamin Franz wrote:
> [snip]
>>> Fedora has always been very clear about the life cycle of each release.
>>>
>>
>> Clear, yes. Smart, no.
>>
>>
>> It is clear from watching Google Trends
>> <URL:http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2C+fedora+%7C+fc6+%7C+fc5+%7C+f
>> c4+%7C+fc3%2C+RHEL+%7C+redhat+%7C+red+hat%2C++suse%2C+debian&ctab=0&geo=a
>> ll&date=all> that Fedora (and even maybe Redhat itself) is dying.
>
> But has Netcraft confirmed it?

Netcraft reports _web servers_. Not _machines in use_. And doesn't break 
the servers down by Linux distribution in the statistics anywhere I can 
find. But since you want numbers from them: 342 sites are reported as 
containing 'ubuntu' in their host name. 211 are reported for 'fedora'.

> More seriously, I see a graph that says Ubuntu must be really bad because
> more people have to use Google to search for help than they do for Fedora.
> What do you see?

I see a graph where a steadily growing number of people are searching for 
information (of any type) relating to Ubuntu while a slowly decreasing 
number are searching for information (of any type) relating to Fedora, 
Redhat, SUSE or Debian.

Whether people are searching for help or some other information, they are 
doing so for _Ubuntu_.

Even _if_ those were mostly requests for 'help', what that would tell you 
is that month on month more people are looking for help relating to Ubuntu 
than are looking for help relating to Fedora. Help requests come largely 
from _new_ users, ergo that would imply there are substantially more 
Ubuntu new users than Fedora new users. If the street vibe on Ubuntu was 
_bad_, you would see a downward trend in the numbers as word of mouth 
spread. Instead you see a strong absolutely relentless upward trend over 
the last 2 and 1/2 years.

Alexa reports fedoraproject.org had its traffic rank spike around 2000 
back in mid-October with the release of FC6 , and the current 3 month 
average is around 14,000. For ubuntu.com, it spiked around 1000 in 
late-October with the release of 6.10 and the current 3 month average rank 
is around 3,600.

Looking in the logs for the big (covering several hundred web sites, none 
of them in any fashion related to linux or even computers so it reflects 
just what the general public is using for their daily web browsing rather 
than specifically tech-heads visiting a linux distro site) webserver I run 
at work this is what I show for the month of February. I extracted these 
from roughy 15 gigabytes of raw access_log based on the User Agent 
matching either Ubuntu or Fedora (non-case sensitive) and excluded all 
hits from IP ranges controlled by my own company to avoid any biasing by 
in-house browsers. There are only three people at the company who use 
Linux _at all_ and they all browse from known fixed IP addresses (even 
from home), which are easily excluded from the numbers:

Distro     Hits    Unique IPs   Hits/IP address
=======================================================
Ubuntu    23770       270            92.4
Fedora    14319       155            88.0

Beginning to see the pattern?

Don't mistake me for a Ubuntu fanboy/evangelizer pushing their favorite 
desktop: The only Ubuntu installs I have right this second are a test 
install I did to a VMWare instance in my office and I am in the middle of 
an experimental install to see if I can get the disk partioning layout I 
want on a Ubuntu 6.x installation. If it succeeds cleanly, I'm going to 
finish my rebuild of my house backups server using it. If not, it will be 
FC6 (32 bit because the 64 bit version of FC6 remains a bit iffy for my 
taste) or CentOS4, again 32 bit.

I like having all the toys in Fedora - there are 2594 packages installed 
on my home FC6 64-bit machine according to rpm -qa (I believe that beats 
anyone else's numbers in the 'how many packages you have installed' part 
of this thread by a substantial margin).

I have about a decade's worth of experience installing, maintaining and 
operating RH based systems. I'm damn good at it. I find the Ubuntu 
installer to be annoyingly difficult to make do what I want it to do for 
disk partitioning with regard to RAID and LVM.

But I can recognize the the direction and the meaning of the trends when I 
look at the numbers.

-- 
Benjamin Franz

"It is moronic to predict without first establishing an error rate
  for a prediction and keeping track of one’s past record of accuracy."
                     -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled By Randomness