A few days ago, I blogged on the popularity of Debian, using Alexa ranking graphs. They showed Debian ahead of the other distributions in terms of web page accesses. Ubuntu definitely was the top growing domain there, but it didn’t reach Debian yet, and there was no drop to suggest that Debian was actually losing users to Ubuntu.

Here is another chart for you: (Note that it has a referrer block, if you are reading my blog via some planet I’m not aware of, I can add you to the whitelist that is allowed to refer to the image. I added this because some images from my photoblog were heavily linked from myspace and similar sites.)

Debian Popcon Graph

This is a chart from the Debian popularity contest statistics. Submitting data here is entirely voluntary; the data is used to determine which packages to put on which CDs in the CD set.

The chart contains four lines, the top line is for bash; pretty much every system has bash, so this is very close to the number of submissions to the popularity contest database. Note that this number has doubled within one year.

Sarge was released in June 2005, and thats where the graph changes significantly. Up to then, popularity contest was a rather uncommon package, but sarge promoted its use somewhat IIRC. So lets look only on the post-sarge part of the graph. Ubuntu Dapper was released in June 2006. Any effect? No.

The other lines are gnome-session (green), kwin from KDE (blue) and openoffice.org-base (red). KDE is at about 25%, Gnome at about 50% and Openoffice goes up to 50%. This suggests that a significant amount of Debian installations are actually desktop machines (I remove popcon on all my servers, where I’m more concerned with not having too much software on it). For KDE and Gnome, these values have been quite constant. When only counting “active” users, Gnome drops to about 25% (same for OO.o), and KDE to around 10%. VIM would be at 35%, same for apache.

I don’t claim these numbers are accurate; it’s probably more interesting to compare Gnome vs. KDE and similar things. The total number of submissions (represented by bash in this graph) shows that Debian is quite healthy.

Oh, and of course I’d like to invite you to install popularity-contest and contribute your software choice to optimizing the CD layout for etch.