Recently, there were lots of rumors floating around that Linux Mint is dominating over Ubuntu distros. The reports and graphs collected by “DistroWatch” stirred up the arguments even higher.
People supporting this phenomenon, referred to an even bigger increase in Linux Mint’s DistroWatch ranking, a chart derived from the number of hits each distro page on the site receives.
Like a domino effect of misinformation, this week has been chock full of reports by tech news sites that Ubuntu’s market share is declining, being surpassed by the Ubuntu spin-off and close cousin Linux-Mint.
The source of this dramatic revelation is none other than DistroWatch, the site that all Ubuntu haters love to quote, and all Ubuntu lovers love to hate. – Joey sneddon, author OMG! Ubuntu
To talk about the facts, we should notice what Distrowatch is claiming in their graphs and reports. The Data is collected from their own website and the user who visit their pages. Actually they store the information of the visitors who register a hit on their page (which cannot be taken as any official reports or something which can be a source for some conclusion).
Putting aside the fact that Linux Mint’s recent increase in “Page hits” on the site has been helped in part by blog after blog talking about/linking to Mint on Distrowatch as evidence of its rise against Ubuntu. There is no doubt that Linux Mint is attracting renewed attention.
But many in camp Mint/camp anti-Unity claim that the distro is now well on its way to being, if it’s not already, more popular than Ubuntu. One infamous ‘opensource’ site with a notable distaste for Ubuntu’s Unity desktop even assures its readers that:
“There is no way that Ubuntu will cover this distance in the near future, unless they change something dramatically.”
Well, if you are taking a website page hit as an evidence, why not talk about some other websites which can provide better information with Billions of hits per month?
Let’s say “Wikimedia”, can we get relevant information from that site? Well, we investigated a little bit and this is what we found.
To help give perspective to the whole Mint Vs Ubuntu debate lets see what some real, hard stats say.
The stats were posted on OMG! Ubuntu, which is quoted below:
As ZDNet report, the Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report of Operating Systems Visiting wikimedia Pages* in October 2011 show:
* 16,924,000 hits from Ubuntu
* 556,000 hits from Linux Mint
Half a Billion computer using your OS is not a bad stat at all, but it does challenge the often aggressive posturing of many in the anti-Unity brigade that Unity has been nothing short of a disaster for Ubuntu.
If we look fast-forward to look at Wikimedia stats fro December 2011 then things look even brighter for Ubuntu:-
* 29,432,000 hits from Ubuntu
* 624,000 hits from Linux Mint
There’s a hralthy 68,000 hit increase from Linux Mint users – certainly indicating a surge in its use. But look at Ubuntu – almost 13 million hits up from October, which, perhaps not coincidentally, saw the release of Ubuntu 11.10
Linux Mint is definitely, one of the best Distros out there, which comprises huge dedicated developers swarm and a group of loyal followers thoughout the world, but getting on to a conclusion that Ubuntu is loosing it’s ground just because of it’s “co-distro” will not be a reasonable and noble effort.
Source: OMG! Ubuntu, Wikipedia
