For the last year or so Ubuntu has been king of the page count hill but, data from the last seven days shows it’s been overtaken by openSUSE, aka SUSE Linux. Data from the past 30 days shows the two distros almost neck and neck, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see SUSE ultimately overtake Ubuntu.
This is an interesting development. I suspect visitors to Distrowatch.com are largely desktop Linux users, which explains why Ubuntu has topped the chart for so long, since even before its server efforts got underway.
And the owner of SUSE Linux, Novell, is working hard in the desktop Linux area. It initiated the XGL/Compiz project, for example, which brought eye candy to the Linux desktop. It has partnered with RealPlayer to bring licensed Windows Media codecs to its SUSE Linux project. It created a way for proprietary drivers to be distributed to users, such as Nvidia/ATI drivers (see here for an example of how Nvidia is using the technology).
A lot of this is politically incorrect, of course, and will raise the hackles of GPL purists. But there’s a strong argument that this kind of thing is just what the Linux desktop needs right now.
In contrast, it’s possible to argue that Ubuntu has gone from being very hot to decidedly tepid. As I reported recently, although it contains some fabulous “under the hood” improvements, the forthcoming release of Ubuntu is more likely to make users yawn than get excited. In terms of user experience, it looks and feels almost exactly the same as the previous version.
Good work continues to be done by the Ubuntu developers, and Ubuntu remains my distro of choice simply because of its high quality, but it comes as no surprise that SUSE Linux is overtaking it in the battle for user’s hearts and minds.
