After two years, we're back with our regular statistics on the Linux distributions running on our virtual servers.
We'll compare the current data with the distribution statistics from our previous count.
We currently host 2301 virtual servers belonging to 1559 members. Our vpsAdmin can track and continuously collect information about which distributions run on the servers and their specific versions. The administration system therefore shows the actual situation and lets us follow trends. These take a long time to emerge, because changing a distribution isn't straightforward and takes a strong reason.
As usual, the long-standing favourites Debian and Ubuntu lead the ranking, together running on 70.6% of our virtual servers. That's four percent less than two years ago. Another large group consists of three distributions from the same family: CentOS, Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. Together, they account for 10.9%. Adding all five distributions gives us 81.5% of all installed virtual servers.
Changes in development have split part of CentOS's share between Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux. Only 37 servers out of a total of 184 have migrated to one of the new Stream variants. The remaining users are staying on older CentOS versions for now. Rocky Linux is winning this tug of war between distributions, with 45 servers, while AlmaLinux runs on 24.
Interest in NixOS has been growing for a long time, and it once again shows that it still has room to grow. In two years, it has jumped from 130 installations to 216 and is starting to catch up with the three-distribution family mentioned above. If we counted each distribution separately, NixOS would already be third, behind Debian and Ubuntu.
Alpine Linux, Arch Linux, Fedora and openSUSE have grown slightly, but their numbers are very small, so every additional installed server makes a difference. By contrast, Devuan and Void Linux haven't been particularly attractive choices for users over the long term.
The previous steep decline of Gentoo has stopped, and the distribution remains at similar numbers. You'll find all the figures in the following table:
| Distribution | Share | Count | Abs. change | Rel. change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AlmaLinux | 1% | 24 | +14 | +58% |
| Alpine Linux | 1.9% | 45 | +15 | +33% |
| Arch Linux | 2% | 48 | +13 | +27% |
| CentOS | 8% | 184 | -23 | -12% |
| Chimera Linux | 0% | 1 | - | - |
| Debian | 38.9% | 897 | +37 | +4% |
| Devuan | 0.4% | 10 | +1 | +10% |
| Fedora | 1.5% | 35 | +9 | +25% |
| Gentoo | 1.3% | 31 | -3 | -9% |
| GNU Guix | 0% | 4 | - | - |
| NixOS | 9.4% | 216 | +86 | +66% |
| openSUSE | 0.7% | 17 | +6 | +35% |
| Rocky Linux | 1.9% | 45 | +20 | +44% |
| Slackware | 0.0% | 1 | +1 | +100% |
| Ubuntu | 31.7% | 729 | +84 | +11.5% |
| Void | 0% | 4 | +2 | +100% |