[Wolves] advice on version of Linux to install

[chris procter]

>>>> Debian itself is the most used server os next is Ubuntu

>>>>  and following on shortly behind that is RHEL and Centos so that should
>>>>  cover you nicely.
>>>
>>>  Citation needed :)
>> 
>> 
> http://w3techs.com/blog/entry/debian_ubuntu_extend_the_dominance_in_the_linux_web_server_market_at_the_expense_of_red_hat_centos
>> 
>>  As per your request
>
> And there is the classic problem with data and the analysis thereof. That site 
> draws its information from webcrawlers basically looking at WEBSERVERS it makes 
> no mention of Fileservers which is possibly the lions share when it comes to 
> support contracts.
> 
> There are far more FILE and MAIL servers out there than WEBSERVER boxes. So 
> effectively that chart is a load of old twaddle.

Its not twaddle, but you do have to be very careful about interpreting it. 

For a start it shows the percentage of web *sites* run on a given linux version. If multiple sites are hosted on a single webserver that server will count multiple times, or a single site runs on a cluster (very likely for a good number of the "top 10 million websites" ) then multiple physical servers count as a single site.

Then theres the question of how accurately do those sites report their OS, iirc microsoft.com used to report it was running on linux due to the setup of their load balancing infrastructure.

It also gives you no idea about how many internal webservers there might be supporting these sites such as database servers, and other environments (uat, development boxes etc) that are used to test changes before they go live.

Oh and they dont define what criteria they use for "top 10 million websites", I assume they mean by hits (how would they get this info?), but they could mean "top 10miliion sites w3techs.com staff like"

And then we add in Pete's "theres more to life then webservers" point, I can think of one company that uses solaris webservers but has tens of thousands of internal database/file/application servers.

So while its a interesting graph and it does look very nice from Ubuntu's point of view I dont think it tells us a lot about the "most used server distro"

Statistics are fun :)

None of which is actually that important to the question. Probably the best answer is what most people do, pick a distro, play with it, switch to something else, play with that, repeat until you find one you prefer, then try to convince everybody that your answer is *obviously* the best and anyone who thinks otherwise is wrong :)


chris