'Which is the most popular Linux distro' is a question that has been raging like for ever. Ubuntu remained on top of the charts ever since its official launch in 2004. But the resurgence of Linux Mint as DistroWatch's most popular distro has stirred up a lot of debates. Redditor TyIzaeL conducted an unofficial Linux Distro survey on r/Linux. Thousands of redditors participated in that survey and results have just been released. Here's how it looks.
Linux Distro Survey 2012
The survey became quite a sensation in Reddit and received a lot of involvement from redditors using Linux. But these surveys are far from accurate. To put things into perspective, author himself puts forward an interesting Slashdot inspired disclaimer:
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
- Ubuntu and Arch Linux are the clear winners in this category, earning 30% and 23% of the total responses respectively. In total there were 60 unique Linux distributions mentioned in this category. The top 10 distros accounted for 91% of responses.
- In total there were 105 different distributions mentioned in this category, with the top 10 included in 84% of responses. Ubuntu still managed to grab the top spot closely followed by Debain and Arch Linux.
- In this category, Ubuntu and Debian accounted for 22% and 18% of /r/Linux responses. The survey also shows that 26% of /r/Linux respondents don't use Linux on a server.
Top Desktop Environment/Window Manager
- No surprises here, Gnome 2.x still rules the roost. 43% of respondents prefer a GNOME-based environment (37% if you don't count Unity) and 13% prefer KDE.
- GNOME3 and Unity together earned 44% of all responses. It should also be noted that a silent 29% didn't express any hate, instead choosing not to respond to this question. Speaking of Unity, read our review of Ubuntu 12.04 running latest Unity.