[sf-lug] LINUX/FOSS distros in work environments (was: ps -A | grep timidity)

[Michael Paoli]

Guestimation off the top of my head (there are probably some better "hard"
statistics to be found out there "somewhere"):
Red Hat and SUSE still lead the "commercial" space,
Red Hat more so in US,
SUSE more so in EU
... but with SUSE percentage going up, relative to Red Hat, in US in more
recent years.
Other distros, most notably FOSS (LINUX and others) are continuing to
gain in workplace environments (in both both numbers and relative
percentages) - most notably Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS.
I've also seen a bit more of BSD flavors in work environments in
recent years.

Also, the mix is different when comparing commercial work environments
vs. other work environments (e.g. public sector, non-profits).  E.g.
at least some public sector (such as academia, government research)
will often have much higher percentages of FOSS (e.g. Debian) over
commercial (e.g. Red Hat) distributions.  Such is also found at least
a fair bit in rather budget constrained environments (e.g. non-profits).

Anyway, those are best guesses off the top of my head; hopefully
(>)>~=70% accurate.

Quoting Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>:

> Quoting jim stockford (jim at well.com):
> 
> >     at this point it seems things have changed from three
> > years ago: debian seems more popular in commercial
> > environments and ubuntu flavors are maybe the most
> > popular choice generally, much more popular than
> > three years ago.
> 
> FWIW, I am still seeing nothing but RHEL/rebuilds and SLES in 
> significant corporate settings.  Debian/Ubuntu do have some 
> presence in some clusters amd lots of Web servers / fileservers /
> nameservers, etc., especially those run by smalleQr businesses as
> opposed to Fortune 500.  
> 
> Disclaimer:  There's a large amount of extrapolation and guessing, 
> and probably some carrying forward of outdated information, in the
> above.  It's a very difficult thing to have a well-rounded view of.
> Also, I'm not even attempting to estimate what's the state of affairs
> outside USA/Canada.