Posted in
Main on November 23rd, 2011 by Pingdom
Don’t panic Ubuntu fans but your favorite desktop Linux distribution has fallen to fourth place in DistroWatch’s latest ranking.
Ubuntu has been overtaken by Fedora, Mint, and openSUSE. Mint now holds the number one spot in all of DistroWatch’s rankings going back at least a year, which leads us to wonder why.
One reason behind this reversal of fortune for Ubuntu could be the change of default interface in version 11.04 or “Natty Narwhal”, released in April 2011. With the new Ubuntu came Unity, an interface previously seen in Ubuntu Netbook Edition, and Gnome was relegated to an option.
There has been quite a bit of controversy surrounding Unity. Now it seems like Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, may be paying the price for the change. Let’s look at the numbers.
Read more
Posted in
Main on November 19th, 2008 by Pingdom

All Linux distributions have their own home base: their homepage. How well is this homepage taken care of and how well does it perform? To answer these questions we have monitored the uptime and load time of the homepages for 16 Linux distributions for a month.
And since it is a question we can’t resist asking: how do they compare to the homepages of corporate OS giants like Microsoft and Apple? We included those in this survey so that we could answer that question as well.
Read more
Posted in
Main on September 11th, 2008 by Pingdom
A benefit of open source software is the ability to take the code base of an application and develop it in a new direction. This is, as most of you probably know, called forking, and is very common in the open source community. For example, many Linux distributions can be traced back to either Debian, Fedora or Slackware.
Much of the open source software that is in popular use today was born from other projects. We thought it would be interesting to take a look at the history of some of these software forks and find out WHY they happened in the first place.
Read more
Posted in
Main on August 21st, 2008 by Pingdom
The Linux landscape is constantly changing and has a strong community of both developers and users. But where is Linux the most popular, and where are the different Linux distributions the most popular? To try to answer these questions, we have looked at data from Google with the highly useful Insights for Search, which gave [...]
Read more
Posted in
Main on June 18th, 2008 by Pingdom
We here at Pingdom have been talking about why we don’t see that many women in Open Source, and were actually about to investigate it further and possibly write a blog post about it. However, when we started to actually look around we were happily surprised. There are lots of women involved in Open Source! [...]
Read more
Posted in
Main on March 20th, 2008 by Pingdom
In time for Easter we thought that we should list a few funny and geeky Easter eggs. Easter eggs in software don’t do anything good besides being funny which we of course like. So here we present a few selected ones that we think are funny. Mac OS X Leopard, Blue Screen of Death Start [...]
Read more