The State of Regional Linux Distributions

[This article was contributed by Ladislav Bodnar]

Many people assume that since China produces a Linux distribution called Red Flag Linux, it must be the most widely used distribution in China. By the same extension, Conectiva Linux is surely the most popular distribution in Brazil and Gelecek Linux is the biggest in Turkey. Right? This assumption couldn't be further from the truth. In fact, the most popular distributions in China, Brazil, Turkey and everywhere else are much the same as in Europe or North America - Red Hat, Mandrake and Debian.

"Which upcoming distribution release do you most look forward to?" asked a recent poll on linuxfans.org, a popular Chinese Linux community web site. Red Hat and Mandrake were the top choices, together generating nearly 70% of all votes. Of course, a poll like this can hardly be considered statistically correct and yes, not everybody has a choice over the matter. Some would even argue that regional distributions make a lot of sense. They usually offer expert support for the local language(s) and writing system as well as email and telephone technical support in the country's language(s). Still, there are indications that they are unable to compete with the big internationally recognized distributions and some of them might not even be around for much longer.

Let's take a look at some reasons supporting the above statements.

1. Business considerations. Many of the regional distributions were created during the "dotcom" boom, when a new company with the word "Linux" in its name seemed like an easy road to instant riches. The task at hand wasn't difficult either. All that these companies needed to do was download the latest Red Hat, modify the installer, set a different default language and put it into a box to be sold by software stores. Unfortunately for them, the anticipated mass conversion to Linux did not materialize and some of these companies have either refocused their efforts or closed down completely. Many of those that are still around have neglected web sites, don't bother with providing post-release security updates (now you know why Red Flag's web site is hosted on Red Hat's distribution) and, with Conectiva being one major exception, don't contribute much back to the community.

2. Community support. As we all know, the commercial support that comes with the purchased box is rather limited so many people turn to community resources. As an example, a Mandrake user will find the vanilla installation lacking many useful applications - due to their questionable legal status in certain countries. That's where a community web site, such plf.zarb.org comes in handy. The applications found on the site can be easily added to the urpmi utility which makes installing all the great multimedia application a single-click breeze. Similar web sites exist for Red Hat (freshrpms.net) or Debian (apt-get.org). Regional distributions often lack such excellent community resources.

3. Download options. Many regional distributions are only able to offer their slow, low-bandwidth servers and very few mirrors (if any) for users to download their products. This is in sharp contrast with fast FTP servers, often found at universities, providing complete and up-to-date mirrors for the major distributions.

4. Language support. The argument that regional distributions provide better language support is fading fast. Debian's language support has always been exceptional, thanks largely to the fact that their developers can be found in all corners of the world. Mandrake has made a lot of effort to support even some obscure languages. Starting with version 8.0, Red Hat has moved to Unicode, a text encoding standard that enables intermixing different writing systems in documents (even at the expense of making a few applications unusable).

5. Availability of learning material. What are the choices for those wishing to learn about Linux? Japan has produced more local distributions than most other countries; yet if you walk into a Tokyo bookstore and look at the shelves displaying Linux books, you'll find rows and rows of Red Hat publications, but only one or two books dealing with the local products, such as Turbolinux. This situation is certainly not unique to Japan.

People new to Linux are frequently astonished to learn that there are possibly two or three hundred Linux distributions, yet they might not realize that less than a dozen of them have any measurable market share. Those created to exist within the realms of national boundaries are increasingly marginalized by the fearless expansion of the "brand name" product. The fact that the Internet lacks borders is even more against them.

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