Is Ubuntu Still Your Favorite?

by Susan Linton - Nov. 23, 2011Comments (8)

Linux About once a year I like to poll visitors to my little Website about their current favorite Linux distribution. It's not scientific or anything but it seems to be fairly accurate in depicting trends. Surprisingly..., or not, Ubuntu is bucking trends elsewhere to top my latest poll.

While Ubuntu may be leading at this point, Linux Mint is so close that we could say it would be a statistical tie. Ubuntu is currently running %18 of the vote and Linux Mint has %17. Arch, PCLOS, and Debian are carrying the middle while Mandriva/Mageia, Gentoo, and Slackware are in low single digits. But two others are showing worse than that.

Compared to a poll taken in November 2010, Ubuntu is down %3 and Mint is up %6. Interestingly, openSUSE is down %7. Arch has remained fairly steady at %11, up just %1 from 2010.

The exact results are:

Arch - 11% (114 votes)

*buntu - 19% (194 votes)

Fedora - 6% (59 votes)

Mdv/Mageia - 3% (29 votes)

MEPIS - 1% (9 votes)

Mint - 17% (178 votes)

openSUSE - 9% (97 votes)

PCLOS - 12% (121 votes)

Sabayon - 1% (11 votes)

Debian - 11% (110 votes)

Gentoo - 3% (30 votes)

Slackware - 3% (31 votes)

other - 5% (48 votes)

Total votes: 1031

Royal Pingdom conducted more in-depth research on the topic of Ubuntu versus Mint rankings. They contend that Ubuntu is down 47.2% while Mint is up 105% in recent months according to Distrowatch Page Hit Ranking. But no matter the method they used to test, Ubuntu is shown to be losing users while Mint continues to gain. Royal Pingdom summed it up with, "it's time for Ubuntu to take notice."

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by an anonymous user on Nov. 24, 2011

Yes, Ubuntu is still my favorite and it will always be.

0 Votes

by an anonymous user on Nov. 25, 2011

Usel both Ubuntu and Milt and like both

Don't think it's good ide tö start sär between diffrent dist. It's still Linux underneath

0 Votes

by Ben on Nov. 25, 2011

openSUSE is my Favorite.

I used to run Fluxbox, but I've recently switched back to KDE 4.7.3.

The biggest advantage for openSUSE is the Build Service, and IMO their community, although not as big as Ubuntu, seems to be better.

0 Votes

by marius timu on Nov. 26, 2011

Not a lot of people know about opensuse,and a lot of people are misguided from 2006 novell-microsoft deal to not use it;as it turns out opensuse is the best distro period,nothing can match yast,and there are few distro that are desktop agnostic like opensuse,sad there is so much ubuntu hype going on !

0 Votes

by ds on Nov. 27, 2011

I use Slackware, because it's very flexible.

0 Votes

by an anonymous user on Nov. 29, 2011

Unitiy is crap.

I will try Mint but I will also install OpenSuse, which I think will come strong in soon future and be more popular than Mint.

Open Susue get me of what I think an OP is all about. One can feel the completeness on the move in right direction.

I feel Ubuntu has abused my trust. Every release which has come out, I feel more and more confused. That is bad.

0 Votes

by an anonymous user on Dec. 04, 2011

no.

Unity is a tablet interface I am not using a tablet I am using a Desktop computer. Are the people at Canonical on crack? Who uses Linux? -- who??

Was there some up-tick of tablet users installing Ubuntu on their tables, please somebody tell me that whats happening. no..

no.

NO to (Ubuntu, unity)

dropping Gnome 2.xx

dropping package manager

O yes Linux Mint

0 Votes

by an anonymous user on Dec. 08, 2011

Ubuntu is also still my favorite but I dislike the unity and I turn it off. I am pretty sure if they would not have changed to unity they would look better...

0 Votes