Is Ubuntu Still Your Favorite?

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."