Linux popularity atlas

29th August 2008

Researchers from the company Pingdom, analyzing and supporting efficiency of various sites around the world, held an interesting analysis of the popularity of the Linux operating system in different countries of the world. The whole world atlas was a result of this study, showing the popularity of the system in a given region.
For their study, authors have chosen 8 most common distribution kits: Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Red Hat, Mandriva, Slackware and Gentoo. The popularity criterion was the number of requests containing the word “Linux” and the name of a distribution kit coming from the given country. Such data can be provided, for example, by the service Insights for Search of the Google search engine.
It turned out that the strongest interest for Linux was showed in India, Cuba and Russia. Then Czech Republic, Indonesia and Bangladesh follow, respectively. The first western country in this list was Germany. It is curious enough, that in the United States Linux become a solid leader in California and conservative Utah.
It should be noted that the obtained results can not be considered as an objective analysis of the situation with the Linux popularity - too many subjective factors were selected as prerequisites. Nevertheless, collected data may be fairly close to characterize the demand for open operating systems and solutions based on them in different regions of the planet.