Finding a quick solution for your problems in any distribution is the main reason to make you rely on it. Therefore, the major distributions have many ways to provide support to their users. Among them, IRC support provides a way to communicate quickly and more interactively with users.

In this article, I will make a comparison between the popular linux distributions in IRC support. I am not going to talk about how many questions have been answered, or how helpful the answers are; instead, I will focus in two things: how many nicknames each time are in the channel and the channel activity.

The comparison process

I use OpenSUSE 11.2 as an operating system and Konversation as IRC client. I choose the official channels of the most widely used linux distributions: OpenSUSE(#suse), Ubuntu(#ubuntu), Kubuntu(#kubuntu), Debian(#debian), Fedora(#fedora), and Mandriva(#mandriva).

The time zone in my country (+4 GMT) may affect the comparison, but I tried my best to reduce this factor. The comparison lasted for six days, from 08/01/2010 to 13/01/2010. I monitored all channels all the day; I chose three to four times randomly to write new data.

To determine the channel activity, I reviewed the last hour logs to see if there were any questions or answers. If yes the channel was active; otherwise the channel was not active at that time.

The result

After I collected the data, I made the next chart to show how many nicknames in each channel there were over the six days.

Ubuntu has the largest number of nicknames 1430on average. The second distribution was Debian: 970 on average. Fedora, Kubuntu, and OpenSUSE had 525, 282, and 261 respectively. Mandriva has the smallest number of nick names, 117 on average.

In many cases, the number of nicknames doesn't matter; the important thing is finding a solution for your problem. In this regard, the next chart may show us some interesting results.

The number 14 represents the number of entries in my database. Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian get 13/14; Kubuntu 12/14, OpenSUSE 11/14, and Mandriva gets 9/14.

The conclusion

The numbers of IRC nicknames may reflect the actual number of the users for each distribution. Ubuntu, the most popular distribution, has the largest number of IRC nicknames over the six days. Mandriva has the smallest number of IRC nicknames. The activity of channel is an important thing and all distributions show that you can find an active support channel any time you want help.

( I thank Mr Garry Dickson for his help in proofreading this article. Thanks Garry)