The page-hit counts on give some indication of which distributions are drawing the most interest at the moment, of course, but such measures can't be assumed to gauge who's actually using what or which are preferred overall.
For that, there's nothing like a good, old-fashioned popularity contest--always interesting for comparison, if nothing else--and that's just what Lifehacker published the other day. The declared winner, this time around? None other than , which also happens to be the belle of the ball this week with a major release due on Thursday.
Arch Linux at No. 3
Lifehacker began last week by inviting readers to participate in a poll that asked which Linux distribution they considered the best one. From those 400 or so nominations, they zeroed in on the top five, which turned out to be Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Debian, Fedora, and .
Those frontrunners, in turn, were offered up for voting on the best overall, and Ubuntu came out on top.