I'd love for you to show those stats, because I could show you stats completely opposite.
Debian may be good, but as far as 'widely used', or 'the most widely used'? I'd have to say not so much. BSD has a better shot at 'most widely used', but that still belongs to the redhat crowd, as evidenced in the poll here.
A breakdown of the options above:
-- Fedora - Unstable, because it is redhat's testing bed . If you're comfortable running a test os on your server, by all means, head there
-- RHEL / CentOS - The same exact thing, released by two different companies at two different cost levels. My own personal choice though,
-- BSD - Too 'security minded', not end user friendly at all, from what I've seen. There needs to be a ballance between security and usability, something that the BSD crowd has completely forgotten about.
-- Debian - Not bad, but not widely used at all
sorry I didn't see your response earlier, and I have in the meantime changed to the mandriva server setup, and I like it, for now
but it seems, by far ubuntu wins with debian a far second, as listed here
but even these numbers will change in the next few months
Quote:
Thursday, August 07, 2008: The Open Source Census, a global, collaborative project to collect and share quantitative data on the use of open source software, has identified more than 275,000 open source installations on more than 2,000 machines. While Firefox has been ranked as the most installed open source project, Zlib, Xerces, Xalan and Wget are the second, third, fourth and fifth, respectively. Participants span a wide variety of company sizes, geographies and industries.
The Open Source Census has revealed some interesting facts and found data that is contrary to common held ideas regarding the popularity of various open source projects.
Ubuntu (45 per cent) and Debian (14 per cent) are the most used Linux distributions. More than half of the open source software found has been on Windows machines, and the number of unique installed open source packages ranged from 22-62 per machine.
Perl (45 per cent) is the most common open source development language while Ruby, PHP and Python have 29 per cent share. Hsqldb (45 per cent) is the most common database, because it is bundled as the default DB with many open source software components; MySQL (27 per cent) is twice as common as Postgres (12 per cent). And more than 65 per cent of participants are located outside of the United States.
This is a clear indication of increasing adoption of GNU/Linux and Free Software.