At the NBA's first 3-point shooting contest, Larry Bird looked at his opponents in the locker room and said, "Who's playing for second?" That's the main question when it comes to Linux distros. Red Hat has had the Larry Bird position for years now, and about all that's changed is who comes after #1.
Recently Evans Data Corporation of Santa Cruz, Calif. asked 300 Linux developers which distributions they would select for a Web server or a Web application server. The obvious answer was Red Hat. Coming in second were SuSE and Mandrake, each with 21.8%. But, as the chart shows, the question for developers really is "Who would you select in addition to Red Hat?" The average number of additional choices was 1.3 (for a total of 2.3 choices). Caldera, Debian and FreeBSD weren't far behind SuSE and Mandrake.
The survey's table of contents is on the Web at Evan's site (http://www.evansdata.com/Linux01TOC.htm).