Debian and SuSe are growing faster than Gentoo

[pranyi]

At least on the server market, according to Netcraft:

http://www.internetnews.com/ent-news/article.php/3313211

"In percentage terms, Debian was closely followed by Germany's SuSE Linux with 23 percent growth to 296,217 installations in the six month period, followed by Gentoo's 19.5 percent growth to 24,229 installations."

[EzInKy]

Still, the Gentoo numbers are quite impressive for a distro many have been labeling as an ubergeek toy B-).

[myuser]

Gentoo has not matured enough yet.

And matured here is meant in a number of ways:

User base - people have to be familiar with the ins and outs of the system from a disaster recovery perspective. To install it on a server you have to know the fastest way to get back to a stable position. Time is money on server installs, generally.

Gentoo has not been around that long, the others have. Whilst this is not the be all and end all, it helps a lot with the psychological acceptance of Gentoo. Another argument along the same vein, is the future of Gentoo (without a long past this future is less secure), could Gentoo vanish? is a question that goes thru' the minds of someone specing a server.

The more I see of Gentoo though, the more I come to appreciate that Gentoo may very well be the deluxe server install of choice. Deluxe here is meant in a number of ways. Deluxe in speed and stability (the stability that comes from installing from near scratch and having to confirm the application works, without just blind installation. And speed from compiing for a specific system and architecture). Deluxe also refers to having a server farm of sorts for compilation and personell capable of installing at such a low level and running a complex system without 'distro nets' (n.b. of course you have nets - but you have to install them).

For Gentoo to really shine, it needs (and it needs more than any other distro) exceptionally good documentation. It is great to see strides being made in this direction - we just need more of it. In fact, I would go as far as to say if you cannot contribute from a coding perspective and wish to contribute, documentation would be an ideal position to greatly improve the distro. Sites beyond gentoo.org describing installation from a different perspective would be just as valid.

[Evangelion]

Gentoo is a new distro that hasn't been extensively tested on servers, what do you expect? And besides, this doesn't talka bout desktops or other servers besides web-servers
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[SeeFue]

A 20% growth rate for a "more difficult" (I use "" because that is the perception, although not necessarily the truth) distro is not too shabby. Also, comparing it to Suse which is a commercial distro is a little like comparing apples and oranges. Comparing it to Debian is a better match.