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Distro Rankings According to Alexa and Compete

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A website's popularity is often measured by its web traffic or the amount of data sent and received by its visitors. Alexa and Compete are two of the most widely accepted services in measuring a website's traffic data. What if we will use these two web traffic analysis services to measure a Linux distribution’s popularity?

To make this possible, I gathered the homepage address of the current Top 5 most popular distros according to Distrowatch’s ‘Page Hit Ranking’, and then utilized them to gather the web traffic information with the aid of course of Alexa and Compete.

Here are the results:
(click on the graph to enlarge the images)



Here is a chart to clearly see the outcome:


Notice the differences between the current Distrowatch (distro) ranking when compared to the rankings based on the traffic data from Alexa and Compete.

Is a site’s traffic stat a better measurement of a Linux distribution’s popularity? Share to us your thoughts.

PS: You might also want to check out this post -- Distro Rankings and Popularity Ratings through the Years
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4 comments

  1. AnonymousJune 04, 2008

    Fun article, excellent work.

    As to if it is better than distrowatch...
    Well, you measure site traffic as a measure of popularity. Arguably this could mean how much help the average distro user needs. This result could be interpreted that ubuntu users need a lot of hand-holding, whereas PCLinuxOS doesn't...

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousJune 04, 2008

    As a long time PCLinuxOS user and former distro hopper. I can say that I dont go to the website much, its mostly for support.
    I have my hands full running my own websites, keeping up with many websites I develope and working fulltime.
    I want to keep up with the latest in the Linux world but don't require OS specific assistance to do that. In my book PCLinuxOS rules, it allows me to get work done, I dont spend time looking for fixes or tweaks, it just works.

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousJune 07, 2008

    The best distro is Pardus with the contrib-repository:

    http://www.pardus.org.tr/eng/index.html

    http://en.pardus-wiki.org/Contrib_repository

    THE BEST!

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousJune 08, 2008

    interesting...
    btw, linux mint 5 have been just released june 8, 2008.
    will the trend change?

    ReplyDelete