The biggest Czech Linux magazine Root.cz organized a survey to find out what distributions Linux users are using on desktops. There were 4423 answers which I think is quite a lot from statistical point of view. And here are the results:
I expected Ubuntu to have the largest user base. But still, such dominance is surprising. Over 50% of all Linux users are using Ubuntu. It’s pretty much Ubuntu… and the rest. And what about Deb vs. RPM? 80% vs 22.4% (note that the total is over 100% because there are users using multiple distributions). It’s even more horrifying. RHEL/CentOS weren’t included, but I don’t think they have a large user base on desktops and their share can’t be bigger than 8% because that’s what “Other distributions” got.
Fedora is doing the best (12%) in the world outside Ubuntu/Debian because we have a quite living Fedora community here and there is a large engineering office of Red Hat which has some impact, too. But face the truth: In terms of user base, Fedora is doing very bad compared to Ubuntu. What can we do about it? Because if we lose user base we will eventually lose contributors, too.
Other distributions with traditionally large user base are doing even worse: openSUSE has only 7.4% and Mandriva, which used to be the most popular desktop distro in the Czech Republic, is pretty much dead – <2%. And users didn’t run to Mageia because Mageia has even less users.
Another interesting results are shares of desktop environments:
A very interesting finding is that GNOME 3 is actually more popular than Unity (19.7% vs 13.6%) which is the default environment in the far most popular distribution – Ubuntu. In fact, only 1/4 of Ubuntu users are using Unity according to the stats. GNOME 3 is also more popular than GNOME 2/MATE (16.5%), so looks like it’s not that bad with popularity of GNOME 3. GNOME-based vs KDE-based environment: 49.8% vs 24.5%. KDE 3/Trinity has less than 1%, so stopping time doesn’t seem to be very appealing to users.
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