A year on, we're back with statistics on the distributions running here. Debian is growing the most, while the others' shares are falling.
About a year ago, we published the shares of distributions running on our servers. At the time, we had 847 members running 1112 separate VPSes. A year later, we have 993 members and 1332 VPSes.
With 220 new running servers, it's time to see whether the proportions have changed and which systems grew fastest. Here's the current picture:
| Distribution | Share | Count | Absolute annual change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Arch Linux | 0.83% | 11 | -4 |
| CentOS | 13.1% | 174 | +62 |
| Debian | 51.6% | 683 | +90 |
| Fedora | 0.9% | 12 | -1 |
| Gentoo | 3.3% | 44 | +2 |
| OpenSUSE | 0.7% | 9 | +3 |
| Scientific | 5.9% | 66 | -21 |
| Ubuntu | 24.5% | 324 | +80 |
Most distributions are stagnating or declining slightly. New members are almost exclusively deploying Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS. Debian gained the most servers in absolute terms (90), followed by Ubuntu (80) and CentOS (62). Together, these three run on over 89% of our servers, strengthening their position by several percent since last year.
Scientific Linux has fallen the most, but is probably being replaced by the more popular CentOS. Both are based on RHEL and are compatible, so the switch makes sense.
Some other distributions aren't included in the ranking: Devuan, Alpine Linux, Slackware and Void Linux. Together, they run on only nine servers, with Alpine leading at four installations. Devuan is still in beta; it may spread once a stable, fully supported version is released.