CentOS and Fedora 와 Debian and Ubuntu 점유율 37.3% vs. 58.5%

Summary:
Debian has been the most popular Linux distribution on web servers for almost two years when it took over rank #1 from CentOS. Now CentOS lost another rank to Ubuntu, giving Debian-based distributions a solid lead over the Red Hat camp.

At the beginning of 2010, Red Hat combined with its derivatives CentOS and Fedora had 53.2% of the web server Linux distributions, while Debian and Ubuntu combined only had 37.1%. Now that percentages have changed to 37.3% vs. 58.5% and Debian/Ubuntu have a double lead.

Ubuntu is the shooting star and currently gains around 500 of the top 10 million websites every single day. Sites switch to Ubuntu from Debian just as readily as from CentOS and Red Hat, while CentOS is still gaining sites from Red Hat and Fedora, but is losing to the Debian camp.

Ubuntu is also the most popular distribution among the top 1000 sites, ahead of Debian.

While we are at it, let's have a look at other web technologies and how they combine with the various Linux distributions. CentOS is the most popular distribution among Java-based and Perl-based sites, while Debian leads among the sites written in PHP and Python, and Ubuntu leads the sites based on Ruby and JavaScript.

CentOS is slightly more popular than Debian on sites that run the Apache web server while Debian clearly dominates the sites that use Nginx.

There are also significant differences in Linux preferences when looking at individual countries. Debian is the most popular system in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Russia and Eastern Europe. CentOS is leading in Japan, China, India, Vietnam and UK, and Ubuntu in South Africa, Australia, Brazil, Argentina, Sweden and Norway. Red Hat is the most popular Linux distribution on .edu and .gov sites.

Popularity should never be the most important factor when choosing a Linux distribution for a web server, but it is always good to know what other webmasters are doing. So you might want to keep an eye on those charts.