thelinuxlink.net

http://codingexperiments.com/archives/149

This is a very interesting article. The author used Google Trends to find out what's going on with different distros.

One of the most interesting and shocking charts is this one...

That’s right. Ubuntu looks like it’s almost ready to overtake Linux as a search term.

So, what does this tell us? First of all, Ubuntu is pretty close to being considered the face of Linux.

Interesting stuff.

So this info. is just highlighting that certain "terms" are gaining popularity?

If that is the case I guess it would reasonable to point out that it does not actually reflect the growth or decline of use of certain technologies. Since Ubuntu is a version of Linux and is also based on the Debian distribution these numbers only describe what maybe hitting the mainstream.

What I do find interesting from these numbers is how one would normally describe the *nix community - anti-mainstream.

I mean one of the coolest things of *nix is that it normally forces its users to respect and understand the machine they are sitting at. Which just happens to be a small l33t portion of the population. As an example I generally hate to hear (even though it is true) that M$ has 95% of the desktop market. But what portion of the High Performance Computing market does M$ have? I would guess less than 5%. How about the embedded market - again smaller than the *nix variants.

I'm rambling but I think the numbers are interesting only in that it describes what the mainstream public will more likely hear in the future. But I think the post title is a little misleading.