Favorite Distributions for Spring 2013

Folks sure do enjoy trying to figure out which is most popular or the favorite Linux distribution. For years it was Ubuntu and lately, it's been Mint. Mageia shows second at Distrowatch.com's Page Hit Ranking, but others are desputing their ranking reflects real usage. A new Website has begun to try and tract actual popularity, but nothing is as fun me as a poll. Yes, it's time once again for Your Favorite Distributions, Spring 2013 edition.

My poll just began on March 16 but already we're getting an idea of how things are shaping up. I changed the field of contenders a bit this time, so any historical comparisons would be skewed. So, let's just look at this year's leaders:

In order of number of votes, most first:

1. Linux Mint 24%
2. *Ubuntu 18%
3. openSUSE 12%
4. Other 9%
5. Arch et al. 8.1%
6. Debian 8%
7. Sabayon/Gentoo/Toorox 6%
8. Fedora/Red Hat/CentOS 5%
9. Mageia and Slackware 3%
10. Puppy/Bodhi 1%
11. free *BSD 1%
12. MEPIS/Knoppix 1%
13. OM/Mdv/ROSA 0%

Distrorank.com's top 13 this week:

1. Ubuntu (1.000)
2. Mint (0.921)
3. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (0.622)
4. Arch (0.483)
5. Debian (0.417)
6. Gentoo (0.305)
7. Fedora (0.257)
8. Puppy (0.180)
9. PCLinuxOS (0.168)
10. Slackware (0.110)
11. Damn Small Linux (0.090)
12. CentOS (0.080)
13. openSUSE (0.065)

And this week on Distrowatch.com, some new distros were getting attention:

1. Mint
2. Ubuntu
3. openSUSE
4. Debian
5. Mageia
6. Fedora
7. Manjaro
8. Arch
9. Kali
10. Puppy
11. PCLinuxOS
12. SparkyLinux
13. Slax

Well, no matter who takes the polls or how they measure, Mint, Ubuntu, and openSUSE seem to the most popular Linux distributions at this time.