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‘Forgotten’ distros stealing Linux developers' mindshare
Although Red Hat leads beauty contest
Money may pour in and out of commercial Linux vendors, but that does little to diminish the enthusiasm for the less well-known distros. Results from a survey of Linux developers seem to prove the diversity of the distro market.
Santa Cruz based Evans Data polled 300 web developers using software libre platforms, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Red Hat takes a huge chunk of mindshare, with 77.2 per cent of the polled using the distro.
SuSE and Mandrake come joint second, a nose ahead of Caldera and FreeBSD. But the fact that the average developer users 2.3 machines explains the plurality of the scene. Debian, the non-profit GPL organization, is used in 17.7 per cent of cases, and Slackware in 12.6 per cent and others in 10 per cent.
Which should prove immensely gratifying to the latter. Money can't buy you love in this business.
Evans Data recorded much data about developer's preferences, but only made a couple of questions public. You've got to pay for the rest. Those distro results can be found here. ®
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