TechRadar Pro readers have voted for their preferred Linux distro

Linux is steadily building up steam as a viable platform on all sorts of fronts, including gaming as we’ve seen recently, but which is the most popular of all the many distros out there?

The results of our survey from earlier this month (which had almost 900 participants) have now been totted up, in which we asked you to name the three distros you used the most. And the clear winner – king-of-the-hill, top-of-the-list, a-number-one – was Ubuntu which was cited by 24% of respondents.

The popular OS had a clear lead over second-place Mint, which was used by 14.5% of those surveyed. And the bronze medal was just secured by Fedora which snared 10.1%, only a fraction ahead of Debian which finished on 10% bang-on.

The rest of the operating systems lined up as follows, from fifth position onwards: Red Hat (8.8%), Ubuntu Server (8.5%), CentOS (7.3%), Arch (5.9%), and then openSUSE (5.2%). 5.5% indicated that they used another distro not mentioned above (there are plenty of them out there, of course).

Programmed for success

In our survey, TechRadar Pro also asked readers which programming language they planned to learn next. The winner here was Python, and no less than 25.3% of respondents wanted to skill-up in this language.

It was followed by JavaScript on 18.3%, and in third position was C++ which tallied 15% of our vote.

The remainder of the other languages were considerably behind these big three, and ran as follows from fourth position onwards: SQL (8%), PHP (6.7%), Bash and Swift (both tied on 6%), Ruby (5.8%), Go (4.8%), and finally we had C (4.1%).

A big thanks to everyone who participated in the survey!

Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.