Re: Debian is now the most popular Linux distribution on web servers

[Filipus Klutiero <chealer@gmail.com>]

Le 2012-01-10 05:39, Sam Soltano a écrit :
> Hello Filipus,
>
> I see your problem with the units in the graph. It has been taken from 
> one of our standard reports, where it is explained, but it should have 
> been pointed out in the article too.
>
> This is the complete report: 
> http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_details/os-linux
> The unit is percentage of market share amongst Linux distributions.

Thank you Sam, that makes sense.
> If you change the time frame, you can see older data: 
> http://w3techs.com/technologies/history_details/os-linux/all/q. We 
> don't have data earlier than Oct 2009, that's when we started our 
> surveys.

Thanks.
> That is still not what you want in terms of verifiability. As it says 
> in the article, Debian is used by 9.6% of the websites. We explain our 
> methodology here: http://w3techs.com/technologies. We use the Alexa 
> top 1 million sites as a sample. We do this in order to minimize the 
> impact of spam sites, e.g. someone building thousands of identical 
> "sites" as a link farm, which could cause wild fluctuations.

It would be good to clarify all that. But OK, I get the idea.

Publicity team, looking at the trend from October 2009, we see that 
CentOS and Debian have been pretty close all the time. But indeed, 
CentOS goes above Debian in Summer 2010, and just went back slightly 
below. My question is whether this is a sign of a trend, or just some 
temporary fluctuation. Why does this happen now? The graph shows CentOS 
going over Debian during a 6 months period of huge share growth from 
April 2010 to October 2010, where Red Hat Enterprise Linux almost lost 
as much market share. Can such a quick change be explained?
I'm thinking that presenting the statistic could be interesting, but an 
interpretation would be much better.

For what it's worth, if CentOS is considered the same as Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux, then Debian is still by far in second place.
> hope that helps.
> Sam
>
> On 10.01.2012 03:38, Filipus Klutiero wrote:
> > Le 2012-01-09 17:08, Sam Soltano a écrit :
> > > Hello,
> > >
> > > I'm Sam Soltano, webmaster at W3Techs.com. I thought you might be 
> > > interested to see this: 
> > > http://twitter.com/#!/W3Techs/status/156396819591598080
> > >
> > > Congratulations, and all the best
> > > Sam
> >
> > Thank you Sam,
> > this is interesting, but in terms of verifiability, the graph is 
> > lacking units on the y axis.
> > I would be curious to see a graph over a longer time frame too.