Last summer, I published results of survey organized by the biggest Czech Linux portal where Fedora was the 3rd most popular Linux distribution. Today, the second biggest Czech Linux portal ABCLinuxu.cz published results of a very similar survey. Shares are slightly different, but Fedora was again the 3rd most popular distribution. The TOP10 is:

1. Ubuntu 37.09% (53)
2. Debian 18.78% (17)
3. Fedora 18.39% (12)
4. Linux Mint 14.03% (10)
5. Arch 13.36% (9.5)
6. (open)SUSE 11% (7.4)
7. Gentoo 8.68% (6.7)
8. Mageia 2.51% (<2)
9. Slackware 2.20% (<2)
10. Mandriva 1.18% (<2)

The number in brackets indicates shares from the survey done by the other portal in summer. Shares are slightly different, but order on the first seven positions is the same and there are the same distributions in TOP10. The other portal – root.cz – is read by broader audience while ABCLinuxu.cz has more die-hard Linux fans among their readers. You can see that Ubuntu has a much larger share outside the core Linux user base. On the other hand, at least in the Czech Republic, it has lost some core Linux user base because in 2010, Ubuntu had 44.3% in the same survey. Over 18% for Fedora is a good result. It’s definitely on the rise in the Czech Republic which is not such a big surprise because we promote Fedora quite a lot and the largest engineering office of Red Hat also has some impact.

What’s interesting is distro popularity among groups of people with different length of Linux experience:

As you can see, Ubuntu is very popular among Linux newbies. Almost 60 percent of them choose Ubuntu to be their first Linux experience. Quite surprisingly to me, Fedora is the second most popular distro among newbies. Fedora has pretty much the same popularity through all groups, but it’s especially popular among newbies and then among people with >15 years of Linux experience. I suppose those are mainly users that started with Red Hat Linux.

There were also other categories:

Server: Debian 50.92%, CentOS 23.61%, Ubuntu 16.22%, RHEL 13.79%, Gentoo 8.87%, (open)SUSE 7.24%, Fedora 5.55%, Arch 4.81%, Slackware 3.33%. So Fedora is much less popular on servers.

Enteprise: RHEL 75.68%, SUSE 22.77%, Oracle 4.94%, Mandriva 1.55%. RHEL is dominating this category.

The survey also showed that the Linux user base is getting older. 43% of people who participated in the survey are over 30 and only 25% of them are students.