A tale of two distros: Ubuntu and Linux Mint

“December 2011 ? 4,100 for Linux Mint and 1,821 for Ubuntu ? are
based on hits on the DistroWatch web site pages, so they don’t
indicate the number of actual users. As DistroWatch itself says:
‘The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted
way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other
free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They
correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to
measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the
number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed
each day, nothing more.’

“By contrast, the Wikimedia Traffic Analysis Report – Operating
Systems shows that in October 2011 there were 16,924,000 hits on
Wikimedia pages from computers running Ubuntu and 556,000 hits from
those running Linux Mint (Wikimedia notes that due to server
outages these numbers are approximately 7 percent too low). By
December 2011 these figures had risen to 29,432,000 and 642,000
respectively.

“It’s arguable that these Wikimedia statistics, based on
requests from software agents of operating systems actually in use,
reflect the true popularity of the two distributions far more
accurately than the DistroWatch rankings. If that’s the case, then
Ubuntu clearly remains firmly in command of the market share.
However, the DistroWatch figures do indicate a substantial recent
increase in the level of interest in Mint.”

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