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Desktop Linux Usage Statistics
Ahkorishaan writes "Desktoplinux.com has put up their December 2004 survey results. Debian has fallen from their top rank as preferred Linux distro, and newcomers Thunderbird and Firefox have an impressive showing in their respective genres."
I guess I'm just ignorant. Seems strange that according to their stats that Mandrake makes up the same user base as SuSE and RedHat COMBINED...
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
That's because desktop linux is making gains in the real world. Desktop linux: "It's not just in your parent's basement anymore."
This is in _desktop_ linux usage. Not server, workstation, render farm, etc.
For *the user base*... This is not a general survey of everyone that uses Linux, if you had RTFA you would know that.
When you use linux, you participate in a communist scheme designed to prevent
software professionals from being compensated for their work. So switch back to
windows xp you scumbags.
It's great to see quality products from Mozilla having not only critical acclaim but also (hopefully) emperical usage data demonstrating how quickly these products are being adapted into online users' every day routines. I see good things for 2005 and beyond.
The survey was done on the web site's own readers. Unless we can assume that the readers represent the Linux community as a whole, this survey is largely useless.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
Overall, it does not look so bad for Linux. I wish you all a great week ahead.
given the degree of GUI integration that SuSE provides. It's by far the closest thing to Windows in that sense, and the funny thing is that it's still not really even close to Windows. That is the only way that Linux has a chance of improving marketshare beyond it's current levels, is to increase the trend of providing GUI integration and support. There shouldn't be *anything* that you *have* to do use the command line to do other than very advanced sysadmin tasks.
That said, does anyone know to what extent YaST is being used beyond SuSE?
We complain about Microsoft only surveying their customers and then claiming people think windows is as secure as linux but here we have (potentially) the same problem. Is yoper really the most popular distro, or just the most manipulative?
Sort of... they attributed the decline to increases in use of the more 'user-friendly' Debians like Xandros and Ubuntu. By the way, these results differ signifigantly from another good source of such statistics: distrowatch.org The right sidebar on their homepage tallies vistors' distros.
Real World: "Where marketing makes the IT decisions"
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Chunky Bacon
Its interesting that Mandrake is just as big as the other big 4 (5?) distros, but it sees little mention on /. Is this because it is a "new to linux" linux and because of this is too basic and dumbed-down for most of the /. crowd? In any case, they've got a lot of ambition, and seem to have a stable business model.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Any old user can access the CD-ROM drive, and a masters degree in comp-sci isn't required to get a fucking printer to work. My wife is taking her shiny new Linux computer into the shop tomorrow to have Win-XP installed on it instead so she can actually print some stuff. Oh well. Subtract one Linux desktop user from that total.
Whatchu talking about Willis?
Their final stats indicate about 17% each for Mandrake and Suse, and 15% each for Red Hat and Debian. Basically,
As they point out though, Debian has suffered from creep to these Debian-based distros that are so popular these days. Basically, almost everyone is evenly divided between the big 4, with a strong minority using the source based distros, and everything else attracting dribs and drabs.
This is I think less interesting than some of the other results; 61% for KDE vs. only 21% for Gnome, Mozilla still holding 30% of the browser, the lack of any clear favourite e-mail client.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
They're only showing distributions they surveyed in 2003. A quick visit to distrowatch.com tells me that Ubuntu is #1 by a very large margin. What we're really seeing is lots of users switching from one flavor of Debain to another.
I just cannot understand what's the relation between Linux desktop usage and Firefox/Thunderbird (or for that reason any other browser/email client)...
KDE gained double userbase while GNOME drastically reduced. Wow. Looks like GNOME is really in deep shit now.
Ah, you're right... Obviously I had another case of writing before fully reading. Upon reread that makes much more sense.
Microsoft Sucks, F/OSS Rocks. I get mod points now right?
Distrowatch counts downloads, not installations. People are testing it, but no proof that they are continuing to use it.
While your criticisms are correct, this survey is much better than most. They freely admit how it was done, and that it isn't perfect. Most surveys don't go into nearly as much details, and practically state that they are useful and represent the broader people as a whole.
The numbers also seem reasonable when considering what I know of linux users in general. So I'm willing to believe them for my purposes, which are unscientific. If I needed real results I would hire a qualified independent survey firm to do it right, but that is far more expensive, and there is a reasonable chance that the results would be within the margin of error of this poll.
I've been personally seeing a lot of Gentoo boxes (specialized servers), but most people I know stick to Debian or Red Hat. I toyed a bit with Mandrake and wasn't very impressed with it, though it did look a bit purtier by default than the other distro's I tried. Interesting to see a good amount of XFCE showings though, I always thought very few people used that, and given that I don't see it default on any distro I am frankly very suprised.
The statistic that interests me (as a Slackware fanboy), however, is Slackware's, which has apparently more than doubled in the last year. But I guess I shouldn't be surprised; if I'm convinced that Slack's the best desktop distro out, it's reasonable to suppose that others might share my opinion. ;-)
Funny... I just booted up the Ubuntu install CD in live mode yesterday and the CD-ROM was right there on the desktop. I plugged in my USB key drive and it showed up on the desktop right next to the CD-ROM icon and I could access everything on it "Just like Windows (TM)." Even recognized the model and brand and everything. Unmounting it was even easier because I just right clicked to get "Unmount" on the drop down menu.
As for printers, I had my printer hooked up but didn't attempt to print. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that it wouldn't have taken much to get that going if it didn't work on the spot already.
YAWN.
No, it doesn't. That's a "page hit ranking" on DistroWatch. All that tallies is how many times that distribution's DW homepage is accessed.
"Distrowatch counts downloads,"
Not even this. They count visits to the "home" page within distrowatch for a given distro.
So take a new distribution with good marketing and you will have your #1 disregarding ENTERILY its user base numbers.
It might not be indicative of the community in general, but if the readership demographics haven't changed much, there might some trends in there that can be extrapolated and compared on a larger scale.
Case in point: Amongst that community, vanilla debian has fallen from its top spot, but if debian is lumped in together with the various deb-based distros, it takes its top spot back. It certainly seems to jive with the attitude that a lot of people here on Slashdot have about debian.
I don't mean to disparage your point. It's just that it'd be really difficult to do a proper survey given how international a phenomenon linux is right now, so we're stuck with these sorts of surveys for the moment...
I think that the article in general is a bit too skewed. You could forgive them the fact that they don't really have a system to check double submits in the survey, or things like that, but some phrases like: "Third, and verging on dangerous over-generalization, open source software is a fast-moving and competitive market. Sharing code really can stimulate business growth." Are quite far from what the article wants to tell: what are the most popular applications in the linux environment. These are the kind of things that make linux users look like zealots, and take away credibility to these surveys. Next time these guys (or anyone who wants to do a similar survey) should stick to what the survey says.
I think that 3,080 in the linux community is probably not the greatest amount to come up with statistics regarding linux usage. I just don't find a survey of 3,000 computer users online to be useful.
What they need is a graph to show the incredible (~25% drop; 4,151 to 3,080) of people taking part in this stupid poll.
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
So why didn't you buy her (or have her buy) a Linux friendly printer? It's not like it's the Kernal Dev's or the Distro Dev's fault that the
proprietary printer bastards won't provide decent Linux drivers. And it's not like it's hard to find a good list of Linux friendly printers,
funny enough: http://www.linuxprinting.org/
has a nice list and that took me only a minute to google. Keep in mind your easy to buy Wal-mart specials are going to be HP or
Lexmark inkjets that have no Linux support, funny how that works.
- Brad
You're a dickhead.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
I find it more than a little strange that the following information gels into one picture.
It's an interesting report, but the statistical significance of the whole thing might be a little suspect.
Well, users visiting that site may be inherent of their distribution/Linux personality. Anyways, this site covers a larger swath of Linux users anyways (~ 140 000 people versus ~ 4 000): http://counter.li.org/reports/machines.php Heh, get counted! http://counter.li.org/
"Want a free iPod?"
"Debian has fallen from their top rank as preferred Linux distro."
What's Debian?
Heh... Well they might have got a bad number from me the other week then. I downloaded Gentoo and did a complete stage 1 install. It took a few days to get the machine into a useful state, but while I was futzing around getting it set up whe way I prefer, it occurred to me that I was coming to dislike the packaging system for all the same reasons that I disliked rpm.
At that point I decided enough was enough and went back to Slackware.
no fedora? or does fedoa == red hat on the survey?
Software Wars
Nobody hasn't mentioned yet that KDE in a year went from 44% to 61%. Every other destkop environment/windows manager lost users in favor of KDE, except XFCE. That's the most interesting result of this poll IMHO, since it is.. well, unexpected.
Oh well, maybe it was good that they didn' include Ubuntu. We have enough nerd advertising as it is, it just bugs me that this survey totally misses one of the fastest growing distros in recent memory....take any results that miss such a large distro with a grain of salt...
Open Source Sushi
You're a dickhead.
The best part about that post is that it's marked "Score:4, Informative".
when I started using KDE part time.
It's ...@ziffdavis.com, is that a site to be trusted , particularly using such small survey numbers to extrapolate?
They also pat themselves on the back on their serving "early adopters" (maybe in their dreams). Upon seeing the address I dropped all interest in critiquing their methods and numbers. I was even going to suggest a method to survey using less unreliable input, i.e. to at least cross check the supposed usage with what could be read off the web logs. Moreover, while one vote per IP seems to make sense, here we would have 5 different machines running behind a router with a firewall - only one external IP address. Four are running various versions of Linux. Consider the two I use: a dual boot using Fedora Core 3 and one having only Linux Mandradke 10.1, the other two with Linux has Man(whatever) Spring 2005 on both with the second unit in this pair to lose its Windows XP for a combination with FC3. These units are split evenly between KDE and Gnome, I think three have Thunderbird as the email app and all five machines are using differing versions of Firefox ranging right now from 1.0.1 to 1.0.3. Furthermore, only the straight Windows XP unit runs Word and even that one has a copy of Star Office 7. All the others have OOo and I believe they are all 1.1.3 though that could change soon.
The site Desktop Linux is too taken with itself to be recorded the respect it seems to be getting with multiple citations of their too small set of dubiously obtained statistics.
Perhaps the clichés is in order: "Move On, there is really nothing of substance to see here."
"First, DesktopLinux.com readers are early adopters, and will quickly ditch previous favorites for new offers such as Thunderbird and Firefox. Being at the top one year is no guarantee of being at the top in the next."
Take the collected data for what it's worth. I got something useful out of it. I have been running IceWM on my steam powered Thinkpad. I had never heard of XFCE. I think I'll give it a look. See. Just keep an open mind and learn. Unless you see people taking the wrong things way too seriously, don't get upset. It doesn't matter that much.
had the info of the distribution.
( KH TML,+like+Gecko)+(insert Distro)
you could collect via some website
it would be less skewed i guess.
Mozilla/5.0+(compatible;+Konqueror/3.3;+Linux)+
Well, that is the problem, isn't it? In our middle class village of 2000, RiteAid stocks digital cameras, a Lexmark printer/scanner/fax, as well as a selection of ink jet cartridges, mostly for HP.
So that's still terribly inaccurate, but proves the point: Obviously, the non-commercial distros are strongly underrated in the study.
Sorry ignorant , but its called Mandriva now.
... etc ... etc ...
....
...
...
...
...
...
...
;-)
- Real Distro have a real installer !
- Real Distro have tools to help you configure it but the tool dont remove you the choice and availibility to edit everything by hand!
- Real distro have paid employee contributing code to GNU/Linux not just some people that play with it and contribute nothing!
- Real Distro are LSB compliant and aimed at beeing free and GPL !
- Real distro as a real community who dont let its
distribution maker get 20k in debt like Gentoo with robbins or on FSF support like Debian whas !
- Real distribution offer real support !
- Real distribution have a GUI + Distribution system !
- Real Distribution are rpm based as it is whats LSB compliant because it is superior !
Real distribution come with all the tools you need with the source code for those tools and with the software and instruction that enebale you to make a complete distribution from scratch , and even live cd !
- Real Distribution ship more then one kernel and officialy support them !
- Real Distribution can be the smallest one in recorded history ( mandriva install on 64 MB ) or the fully loaded all desktop all server all solution !
- Real distribution ship with more then just one softwar eto do the job they offer the choice among many.
etc
Mandriva is the real Distribution , when you will be able to meet what it does and offer then come talk ! otherwise your lies are easily proven as such.
-----
A new Warrior enter the scene
Son of two Glorious hero of GNU/Linux
He as the heritage and speak the same language
Everyone on the scene already fear its name !!!
Like the phoenix , it cannot die , and raises from is ashes
true champion like MUHAMMAD ALI it too is going to be The Greatest after everyone get is new name
This warrior as a good heart , you can share it with everyone close to your heart.
This warrior is a hard worker , he can do way more then just the desktop.
This new warrior will protect your right and liberty as did is ancestry.
there is something GNU about this new warrior
this warrior include tools to develop it and work on it
this warrior is Cheaper , better , faster , better looking , secure.
He is the greatest GNU/linux warrior the world as ever seen!
Mandriva ! Mandriva ! Mandriva ! Mandriva ! Mandriva !
is Name is Mandriva !
because Linspire whas taken
As someone said, distrowatch is based on hits, not downloads or users. Most likely ubunto is clicked on because everyone sees it, then runs to google to figure out wtf it is.
I remember doing that a few months ago actually.
Neither OS is a toaster but getting a printer to work only requires that one be able button a shirt and read at the 6th grade level.
Back in 1999 or so, he'd post links to opinion polls in other sites that were related to Linux, and tell people to go over and vote. Essentially, he'd cause poll results to be slashdotted.
'Tis a pity, yes, 'tis, that your village has no internet access or UPS / FEDEX deliveries.
/. ?
Oh, hold a second! So just how did you manage to post to
It certsinly is more difficult for those who can't/won't take a little time to read, think, and understand.
On everything I've seen that says what distro's the most popular, nothing's really the same.
What gives here ?
Thunderbird and Mozilla are not Linux distributions ?
If you can't install Windows XP on a standard desktop computer, there isn't much hope for you when it comes to using Linux (or Windows, for that matter).
She would get a better deal by marrying someone who is Linux literate. Either that or figure out how to conceive a child and let him/her set up the printer.
You're kidding, right? You're trying to prove something with an equally unscientific set of numbers, and numbers that include 59.77% unknown???
It's this simple, people: You can't rely on a survey's results unless it is truly random and doesn't allow for multiple votes (as yours does) or any sort of ballot box stuffing.
Articles like this should never be posted, as all they do is generate way more heat than light among the people who never took a serious stats class (or slept through the one they did take).
So... what was your point again? Oh yeah. Being a Debian apologist, gotcha.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
until you elitist geeks get over yourselves, linux ain't gonna be mainstream. windows has many faults, but making simple things harder than they really need to be isn't one of them. there's no good reason for printing to be a royal pain in the ass, other than to make the uber-geeks feel somehow superior to mere mortals. as for the "take a little time to read, think, and understand" there's a lot of things i'd love to rtfm about, but i can't find the fucking manual. there's way too many linux docs scattered across way too many websites. when you do manage to find something after a lot of time, it's either hopelessly out of date or written in pure geek-speak. you wanna be mainstream? then get your shit together and be mainstream.
I have no trouble reading from or writing to my DVD-R/W.
SuSE auto-detected and installed my Kyocera printer, which is more than I can say for when I'd previously installed Windows on the exact same hardware.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I hate the argument that Linux isn't ready yet....... or until...... this or that.
Linux is never going to be perfect folks! Stop eluding yourself thinking that it has to be perfect to be accepted. Or that in 2 or 3 years it will be "just right" and Joe Average will slobber all over it.
The more users that get converted now, the more folks will sit up and take notice. The more that take notice, the more that flock to linux. The more that flock to linux, the more the developers take notice and eventually be forced to make software for that market.
But it will never happen with "in two or three year's time" attitude. I heard this attitude 2 or 3 years ago. And also 2 or 3 years before that. Ad infinitum. (Actually only 1998-ish.)
There will always be a learning curve.
With all the spyware/malware problems with Windows - now is the time to strike. Don't think Microsoft is resting on their laurels - maybe (probably) they won't fix the problem - but as the software they bought recently (last year?) and redubbed MS AntiSpyware it shows they will come up with a solution that's good enough for most users as to excuse them not to switch (Let's face it: people are lazy when it comes to change.)
Requiring a Comp.Sci. Degree for Linux just because you couldn't get the printer to run? Save the 200 or so dollar XP installation and buy a compatible computer!
You have to be kidding me with ease of use.
Windows users practically need a degree to get rid of all the spyware/bloat/malware on their computers now, let alone hack the mystical registry when a program doesn't play nice when removed.
Read this:
http://kmself.home.netcom.com/Rants/spyware.html
And then decide if you really want Windows.
Let me say - I meant buy a compatible printer, not computer. Sorry about that.
Slashdot should run all these polls. Then u can use the stats. There would probobly be a larger respons on /. then on desktoplinux.com. It could be interesting to know how /.ers compare to desktoplinuxers.
-EL
What's the matter here? I'm seeing a lot of Slashdotters arguing whether this statistics are worthless because it represents the users of that particular website. But it's almost certain that when the statistics exceed the 10 thousand surveyed users it pretty much represent a whole community (That's why they are statistics!) And it represents it more, since it's a desktop Linux website, it doesn't represent a particular window environment. I don't understand why all the whining. People get mad when what they use "isn't winning". NEWSFLASH: Shut the fuck up, take a Xanax and relax pal, this is not a race, and it is merely a survey. Be happy, the overall growth that they show is good; it means more people have adopted Linux in their desktop.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
huh funny how the site says HP has good driver support and the even list lexmark...
You're kidding, right? You're trying to prove something with an equally unscientific set of numbers, and numbers that include 59.77% unknown???
You missed the point: Even if ALL unknowns were commercial distributions, there would still be more "Other" distributions than claimed in the article.
It's this simple, people: You can't rely on a survey's results unless it is truly random and doesn't allow for multiple votes (as yours does) or any sort of ballot box stuffing.
The method does not count hits, but IP addresses on a website. Yes, there may be some double counts through re-connecting dial connections or weird old proxies, but that would only be noise: The fact that the statistic remains stable over multiple months is a strong indication that an accurate amount of samples was chosen.
The rest is accurate unless you believe that a significant number of users fakes their distribution name in the identification string.
I repeat, when I say that I believe that the numbers are accurate enough then I am talking about the fact that the use of non-commercial distributions is underrated, I am not trying to make any other implications.
that was GREAT!! you shudda got a 5+ mod! ;)
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
She would get a better deal by marrying someone who is Linux literate. Either that or figure out how to conceive a child and let him/her set up the printer.
Or someone who is Windows literate. There's no excuse for sending a pc into a store to get XP installed on it. Any monkey can do it. Any monkey can get a printer working on SuSE, Knoppix, UbuTTu, Mandrake, etc.
This Anonymous Coward = bill gates jr.
Does anyone else remember when bill made the following comments:
"..noone will ever need more than 256k memory.."
during the release of windoze 2000 (i think), while on stage, the piece-o-crap crashed upon trying to boot. billies reply? " these things happen..". maybe he waz trying to break-us-in on what to expect from this fraudulant os.
more recently: "..linux is a form of communism..".
of course i'm paraphrasing mostly. but how can the newspapers, etc still quote this criminal every time he makes a prediction!?
It is bill gates's (proven) criminal deeds that immitates communism with it's monopolistic destruction of our economies.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
Err... gentoo's portage resembles ports ins the bsd world and possibly apt-get in the linux world. Lets see how much it resembles rpm:
RPM - portageThats all i can think of now but it doesn't seems like rpm resembles portage very much.
yes >
Yes, many Hardware on the major Distros "Just works" out of the box nowdays, while on Windows Systems you have to go and switchs cds, reboot, repeat, for most hardware. Also with hotplug, dbus and hal projects many periferals, like usb, work like a charm :)
Gnu/Linux may have less drivers and/or have less support from the hardware companies but what is there works and it works better than in Windows IMO(for my hardware at least).
If we're gong to continue to allow the average user to connect his computer to the Internet then we're going to have to take some more drastic steps to insure the safety of everyone on the net. The computer will no longer be able to just assume that the person running it knows what he's doing -- we've alreadly seen that this is not the case. The computer is going to have to be smart enough to prevent the user from shooting himself (And everyone else) in the foot. The computer will have to detect attacks, drop privs for day-to-day use, sandbox applications (Especially mail, web and IM) and detect fraudulent web pages and E-mail.
Now I think that all this should be possible, but it will take an incredible amount of cooperation and savvy between all legitimate internet-based businesses, app developers and OS developers. It's either that or force all those users to actually learn how to protect their computers and identities prior to allowing them to connect to the Internet.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I help businesses impliment Linux-based solutions. Debian is a find distro btw, but it is not terribly marketable to many types of businesses at the moment. Yes there are venues for support but there is no single vendor for people to contact in the event where they need emergency support.
So, businesses tend (at the moment) to go for vendor-centric distros. There are exceptions. For example, every ISP I have ever talked with uses Debian for their servers and for good reason. Maybe they will use it on the desktop too. But... These are the minority, and they are also the businesses which are most entrenched in the FOSS world. Other businesses are just beginning to make that transition.
In the end, I think that Debian stands a great chance of being the final distro left standing even in business use, but this will require a long transition period where vendors help migrate people to the new FOSS way of thinking.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
guess I'm just ignorant. Seems strange that according to their stats that Mandrake makes up the same user base as SuSE and RedHat COMBINED...
man, you're not kidding! All the desktop linux users that I know (and all the people that they know) the are either running gentoo or Fedora on their desktop.
Perhaps it's just an "area" thing. It seems that in some geographical areas, certain distros or apps or more prevalent. As an example, I was in Sweden recently and had a group of Swedish linux enthusiasts watching a small learning tutorial I was giving. When i launched vi to edit a file, they all started giving each other strange looks. Finally, one of them asked me why I didn't use nano. I told him that I prefer vi. They all looked at me like I was nuts.
I left there and travelled a bit north. I was working as a linux security consultant for a large firm that did have a linux admins, but wanted a second opinion on security. Again, I launched vi to do something and the linux guys there looked at me like I was an oddball. Sure enough, they absolutely could not believe that I didn't use nano for an editor.
Now, I don't know a single person that uses Ubuntu or any Debian based distros. The only people I know using Mandrake are a couple of friends that are new into linux.
However, I know that many people are using Debian based distros for desktops, but I just don't know any. Perhaps I don't live/work in that part of the world where they are as popular as Fedora or gentoo.
Any debian using moderator will mark this as a troll, but I'm really just giving an honest account of my experiences. Perhaps the debian users can all mention where they are from so we can get an idea what part of the world Debian is so popular in.
Slackware rocks! It was my learning distro for years.
I ended up on Debian because of the simplicity and selection.
Is really nobody my fav email client anymore.
Grr, and Windowmaker dropped too:_)
Great post! It really is a chicken-or-the-egg situation. Users will come when there are developers. And developers will come when there are users. We need to forget these silly arguments about what's the best time for XYZ to happen, and just make it happen! No alternative OS is perfect, but plenty of them are perfectly usable at this point.
IOW, it's impossible to draw any conclusions whatsoever from the data, except it might be an interesting example of how biased web polls can be.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Mandrake with 0% of the 123 advisories still open (and thats for their entire software collection people). They've really improved, nice to see them number 1.
;)
And interesting to see gentoo beat every distribution in 2003 before the ricer campaign
But why no Crux or Arch? -- I love those distributions.
1- This is an online poll. About as useful as Slashdot's.
2- They had to remove Yoper Linux from first place to make it look as if they had remotely believable results.
3- They still compare results from year to year and try to infer conclusions.
Even with excellent methodology it is difficult to extract usable information from survey data (look at the vast majority of medical surveys. We still don't know for sure if mobile phones are dangerous and it took decades to persuade enough people than smoking was indeed deadly). In this case the results are useless and are a waste of time other than for entertainment value.
About Linspire and some of the other "Debian-based" distros; Mandrake and SuSE both forked from RedHat, and they both use RPM. The survey doesn't seem to be making any finer distinctions for all of the "Debian-based" distros--it just seems to be a throw-away line to assuage the egos of the many Debian fans on their messageboard.
:)
'course, I couldn't care less--not only does this 'survey' seem entirely bogus, but I use Gentoo anyhow!
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I find it really strange that mutt beat out pine by such a large margin in 2003.
I'm a big fan of mutt, but just about everyone I know seems to use pine or a graphical mail reader. Whenever the subject comes up, few people seem to have ever heard of mutt.
Then again, almost everyone I know has been brought up in academic computing environements with historical roots in solaris and other unixes, so they're probably not a representative group. Still, it seems pretty weird to me to see mutt scoring so high. I'd be tempted to write off the 2003 showing for both mutt and debian as anomolous.
Perhaps in 2003 news of the survey made it onto a hand full of particular sub-sub-culture mailing lists?
Either that or there's been a trend in desktoplinux.com readership toward a more mainstream linux user base. (ie. desktop users rather than desktop coders.) Based on anecdote and little else, I'd expect a correlation between debian and mutt use among the geekiest crowd and an anti-correlation with KDE use.
The strange thing is that I'd expect slackware to show a similar trend, and yet it doesn't show up in the survey. Odd.
I think the sample of users is too small (~4k) to generalize the state of Linux distributions. The data is valid for those visitors to DesktopLinux.com.
I used to think that graphical filemanagers all suck. I didn't like Windows Explorer, pre-spatial Nautilus, gmc or Konqueror. I used only command line for file management. The first time I tried spatial browsing was on MacOS System 7.5 running on Basilisk II Mac 68k emulator (this was a few years back) and after 15 minutes or so I found that it was something I actually enjoyed using. I thought: "This Finder thingy is insanely great. Why can't GNOME or KDE people do something like this?" And then, soon after GNOME 2.6 was released, I bought a new computer and installed Slackware 10 on it. Using spatial Nautilus and the entire GNOME 2.6 environment was absolutely wonderful! It was the best user experience I had ever had (I have used Windows, OpenLook, CDE, GNOME 1.x, KDE, FVWM, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, OS/2 Warp and Indigo Magic (on SGI O2 workstation running Irix)). Now I use GNOME 2.10 on Ubuntu and FreeBSD. I do most of my personal file management tasks using spatial Nautilus. I actually use command line only for file management related to system administration (bash + vi rule in those tasks). I have to wonder why I like GNOME 2.10 and spatial Nautilus so much?
One reason for this is that spatial nautilus is extremely simple and fast to use. For me using spatial file managers is very intuitive and natural. A good analysis on spatial filemanagers is found at: http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/finder.ars
Other parts of GNOME 2.10 are also very nice. I really like the way GNOME 2.10 handles filetypes and connecting them to certain applications. It is so intuitive and effortless to use that it puts the abomination known as Windows Filetypes dialog to shame!
GNOME dialogs are also awesome. The new open and save dialogs are finally usable (again: simple, fast, effortless, efficient). They are vastly superior to the pre Gtk 2.4 dialogs. As for other dialogs, they are also extremely nice and logical. Finally we have gotten over annoying "Yes/No or OK/Cancel -dialogs should be enough for anyone". Using verbs in dialogs (when it makes sense, that is) is a huge improvement!
In my opinion GNOME has become a lot better desktop environment than anything Microsoft has ever had. I used to hate gnome in the 1.x days because it was just like Windows 9x. If I wanted to use Windows-like environment I would probably use Windows.
told him that I prefer vi. They all looked at me like I was nuts. You prefer nano to vi? Have you considered getting help from a mental health professional? Seriously, there's no upside to vi unless you're doing one hell of a lot of text editing, and if you're doing that much, you're probably better off going with a full GUI text editor like kwrite. I abandoned vi at the first possible opportunity.
Tech Public Policy stuff
sorry, that was vi to nano. Never drink a pint of Jack Daniels before posting to slashdot.
Tech Public Policy stuff
If your intent is to compare to Fedora, try yum or better yet, apt-get/synaptic. Manual fetch (unless you count urpmi and stuff) - automatic fetch .conf files to make them usable), sort of.
auto-felch? check. Binary based - source based (with an option for binary) the automated downloaders for Fedora are binary-based. No dependency handling - automatic dep handling Centralized list of available packages (with urpmi and stuff) - Centralized list of available packages that is copied to clients different versions of packages - USE flags Check, sort of (Fedora Core yum and apt-get require heavy customization of repositories
Tech Public Policy stuff
"Unless you count urpmi and stuff" is a big understatement, as I doubt if there are many people who still use plain rpm these days. All the three big distros listed in the survey use a wrapper around rpm by default that do dependency resolution and automatic fetching, so that trims your list by a fair amount:
So the list of differences is actually smaller than you might think.
I've been bitten by this before: note well, if you want to have a dual boot Windows/Linux system install Windows first. Even if like me you use separate hard disks for each OS, Windows will flat out refuse to install if it sees Linux on the system.
For me the solution was simple: just unplug the hard disk with Linux on it and then the setup program was happy. If it's all on the same disk you'd probably have to delete Linux, install Windows, reinstall Linux. So I'm not surprised the AC or his wife couldn't figure out how to do it.
> GNOME dialogs are also awesome.
Yeah they are awesome as you can see on this screenshot. So awesome that every toolbar looks differently than the other. One with icons only, the other with text below the icons, the other has draghandles, the other toolbar is bigger than the others and and and. This form GNOME CVS. So please don't spread bullshit about consistent and aesthetical look. You are wrong, this screenshot proves you wrong.
"but gentoo is always on the cutting edge"
,
:
...
Wrong
I read a post by Daniel Robbins 4 years ago who said Gentoo needed to work on
Better installer , better fonts , better local instal , better wider hardware support , etc
NONE OF IT EXIST TODAY IN GENTOO !
" and the community built around it is top notch."
Thats why Daniel Robbins left , he whas so in debt that he could not go on like this and put the life of his familly in danger.
"Gentoo... 2 lines, emerge sync, emerge mythtv"
What kind of box come pre-installed with Gentoo on it ? Oh , thats right you mean once its already installed.
And no your lying Red Hat and Debian dont take 100+ lines of instructions to install Mythtv.
He whas being cynical ...
There shoul'd be *anything* that you *have* to do using a gui, except maybe websurfing.
Actually, given how superior KDE is to GNOME in virtually every way (from developing for it to easy integration with KParts to the file manager to ... well ... ervything, really!), I wouldn't shed a tear if GNOME just died off completely leaving KDE as the One True Desktop. Plus, the GNOME developers seem to be arrogant, insular cocks - whereas the KDE team seem to be glad to incorporate any of GNOME innovations that are actually good (e.g. HAL, DBUS), you see no such flow into the GNOME camp, who assume they know better than everyone (including their users!).
A dumb example of this comes from the latest release of Ubuntu where the developers completely randomly decided to ship Nautilus with default settings that are so mind-bogglingly awful (think ordinary spatial nautilus with all of the "benefits" removed) it simply ... well ... boggles the mind! There's a huge thread on the forums where about 100 people criticised the move saying it was dumb and *not one* non-developer voiced any support for it at all. The GNOME devs, of course, said "fuck you" to the users and carried on with their utterly retarded plan.
It's just a shame that the build of KDE that comes with Kubuntu is so completely fucked - their half-assed implementation will probably put people off what is otherwise an extremely good DE. Plus, there's that whole "upgrading kdelibs is impossible because it conflicts with kdenetwork" which has been unresolved (and not even commented on by the developers) for about three weeks now.
Anyway, I've started ranting incoherently. I'll stop now :)
I never wrote anything about UI consistency. I however agree that those toolbars could use some improvement with respect to consistency. That screenshot rather nicely demonstrated your point so I feel that I must now return the favor: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/kaitanie/UI/Windows/S
I found this screenshot during web browsing and it very nicely demonstrates UI inconsistencies in Windows. Look at the toolbars!
That's funny, I was under the impression that Linux was supposed to save money. Using a 'free' operating system but having to shell out $200 on compatible hardware doesn't really fit that bill, IMHO.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
If you combine all the debian-based distro's, Debian is still doing well. And with Ubutu doing so well, Debian's base will keep expanding :)
http://www.fanboy.co.nz/adblock/
I was gonna mod this down until i actually read what the parent wrote. Right on brother.
Refuses to install? Did you actually partition your system? I've NEVER had a problem with installing windows beside linux aside from it overwriting the boot sector so that it only boots windows (no surprise there considering the arrogance of MS). No need to reinstall linux, just reinstall the boot loader (grub install or whatever).
Thinking the same thing myself. Just stick the cd in and let it boot. If you can't follow the prompts, then you REALLY can't use windows either.
At what point do they figure out they are all chewing on the same carcass?
Agreed, it doesn't. But if you go back and read my post, you might notice I never said it did.
I merely said that I came to dislike it for the same reasons I disliked rpm. I'm not going to go into my subjective perceptions of the demerits of gentoo's portage system, since I am aware that for other users it rocks, and I have no reason to insult their intelligence by insisting that their requirements should be congruent with mine.
You are confusing Ubuntu devs with GNOME devs, the change of which you are talking about, closing the previous window when you select a new directory (completely missing the purpose of spatial) was implemented by Ubuntu developers and not GNOME developers and yes I agree completely retarded.
Personally, I prefer GNOME over KDE and like spatial file management, moving files is quick and simple. Beyond that, I find GNOME cleaner looking than KDE and I have less libraries loaded up at run-time since I don't use any QT applications. If I were using KDE I would still use Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice and would have to have two graphical toolkits libraries loaded up.
Feeling a little arrogant yourself, perhaps? There is probably lots of people that feel that Windows is the one true OS and wouldn't care if everything else died off.... To each their own, however, competetion is a good thing - it inspires innovation and GNOME/KDE are no exception. Watch for what you wish for....
They probably shouldn't have children... No need to degrade the gene pool.
These problems don't exist in Ubuntu, at least in my experience. The printer setup is the same format as windows; choose your printer manufacturer, then the model, then install. Done. I was AMAZED how easy it was to set up my printer under Linux after hearing all the bitching about it here on Slashdot. The list of supported printers is HUGE and included every printer in my house.
And no offense, but I highly doubt linux came pre-installed -- if your wife installed Linux herself, she can probably set up the printer herself. But if she has to take her computer to "the shop" to have someone else install Windows XP for her, I doubt she's capable or interested in setting up linux herself, so I would assume that you set up linux for her -- if you did, you should be able to set up the printer. It's quite easy if you stop whining and actually give it a chance.
Amen. This porn ain't going to download itself. Oh wait, I wrote a script and cronjob to do that. Nevermind.
I actually switched to Mandrake from Redhat as well. I had been a Redhat user since 5.1 (I think) and finally just got fed up with not being able to keep up to date on my system. This is one thing that I think will plague OSs forever - the need to reinstall (vs upgrading). I once tried to upgrade from Redhat 7.1 to 7.3. Granted, it was a while ago, but the results were disasterous. I had to concede and do a complete reinstall.
When I finally decided to try a different distro, the Live CD was a savior. I tried to install Knoppix on a laptop to try it out, but upgrading KDE exploded all over the place, and required another re-install. I finally settled on Mandrake because at the time it had very current software, and after the Knoppix apt-get mess, I wasn't very confident in it. (I later found out that using apt-get on installed Knoppix isn't quite the same as straight-up Debian apt-get) But urpmi has served me well, when I use it. I still have to compile some packages by hand because the options in the packaged ones aren't what I need. (Mplayer being one of those)
But I am happy with Mandrake. The GUI config stuff is nice, but I rarely need to use it. Once I get a system configured, I don't usually change it all that much.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Yes, it was all partitioned correctly. I'm not the only one who has had this issue. It never happened with Windows 98, the first time I noticed it was with XP. And like I said, after I unplugged the second hard disk it installed just fine, no worries.
I was really skeptical of Ubuntu, as it had been quite a while since I used a debian-based distro. My linux history has been rather varied -- I always work to try as many distros as possible, so I keep a handle on everything out there. I started with mandrake, went to gentoo primarily for quite a while, then fedora (trying out other distros along the way -- Suse, Debian, Novell linux, Redhat, etc.). I recently decided to try Ubuntu. I am not totally sold on .debs, and I find apt-get and dselect clunky, but really Ubuntu strikes me as being very fast and auto-configures itself very well. I was intially quite surprised at it's speed that I haven't seen since gentoo. My impression of it are a distro that is poised to become very popular, as it is full featured and easy to use... But that is just my opinion.
"Wah Wah Wah, I can't find the manual. Wah Wah Wah, it's too hard."
You think I was born knowing how to do this crap?
I'll admit I did attempt one computer course in school. I had to drop it because by midterm there was no way in hell I'd ever get better than a 'D' in the class. It's not about being a computer geek.
It's about learning how to learn new things. Once you've done this, making a PeeCee with linux talk to a 'supported' printer is no more work and requires no more reading than doing it with windoze. The only difference between the two is that you can make it work with windows in much the same way as a chicken learns to play the piano. Just like the chicken pecks at the keys until she learns the sequence that results in a bit of corn, you peck away at the buttons until your brain learns the pattern that makes the printer icon match your printer. I'm sure the chicken finds immense personal satisfaction when she pecks out "sweet little 16" or "surfin USA".
It's not that you can't find the information, it's that you're too frigging lazy. Once you've learned how to find things via basic on/off -line search tools, you can find information quickly, not just on printing with linux, but on just about anything you might be interested in. Want to fix your lawnmower or car? Want to carve a wooden propellor for your airplane? Want to adapt your old manual knee mill for CNC? It's all there. Need some chlorinated hydrocarbons or a Proton source(don't point it at me, those puppies make a mess when they decay)? Hell, you can make your own.
I suppose the next thing we're going to hear is that you're handicapped. You've got a gimp brain. It's just not capable of thinking in the patterns required to make beneficial use of search tools. It's unfair that you have to do more work to overcome this handicap so you should be accomodated...
Well, I can't argue with 'the little engine who can't because he might strain his boiler' so I'm done.
Debian is doing well regardless. Fast forward to the near future when Sarge is released stable. All the Ubunters that ditched Debian for newer packages will be back in droves, playing with the *truely* new stuff that will be in Etch and Sid, and alot the ones that tried Ubuntu as a "newb" distro will test the Debian waters when they're ready to remove the training wheels (or figure out that it's not quite as shiny a thing as most make it out to be).
Been there, done that, tested Ubuntu, dropped it like a hot rock. Not quite ready for mass consumption there, lotta hype, big stablity problems. Personally I don't want to trade stability for the latest eye-candy.
You are fighting a loosing game by defending spacial Natilus, seriously. I believe you when you say you love spacial mode but there is an overwhelming majority of users who don't; and from the looks of it only the Gnome devs like it and maybe a few stray mac users like yourself. Therein lies part of the problem that's causing a decline in Gnome's popularity. It's not just the spacial thing, there has been a number of things that damaged the userbase, like the famous button switch and the new file dialogs - my god - it's been a long time since I've seen such a clumbsy switch to a less intuitive/established design. To clarify, I'm not saying the designs are inherently flawed because they may indeed be the best ones for people who's alredy accustomed to them. Gnome users aren't, however, and each time the developers implement designs that forces the user to "re-learn" how to navigate through the most basic steps of the desktop they'll alienate and distance themselves from the existing userbase. As a result Gnome suddenly became annoying to use for a lot of people.
Now, I was a Gnome user back in the 1.4.x days and did use 2.x in the beginning. But I have since then come to realize that Gnome is designed poorly and moved on to KDE (I have compared it thoughroughly with KDE, many times, and I feel that KDE is designed with "modularity done right" unlike Gnome which is inconsistent and messy to say the least).
The problem is - I just don't believe that Gnome will ever become the leading desktop, and especially when KDE is around. In fact, the only thing going for it is a coupld of key-apps based on Gnome/Gtk - namely Gimp (may soon be facing competition from Krita), Evolution (already in fierce competition with Kontact), Gecko browsers which have Gtk integration (gecko for Konqueror is already on the way). Quite frankly, it doesn't look good for Gnome.
I've always suspected that KDE had a much, much larger userbase than Gnome but I never knew that it might be this big.
Control-R -- reverse interactive history search.
ESC 5 ESC D -- delete following 5 words.
If your keyboard has one, the Alt key can be used instead of ESC. Or for more complex repetitive tasks, you can even use keyboard macros, such as:
ESC ( ESC D foo ESC ) ESC 5 ESC e
Where ESC ( and ) start and finish the definition of a keyboard macro, and ESC e replays the macro (similar to vi's dot "." command. The ESC 5 says to do the next thing 5 times. And the stuff inside the macro says to delete the following word and type " foo" in it's place.
However, bash is not full emacs. Also bash, like many other command-line apps such as MySQL, uses the GNU readline library to do all the command-line editing and history functions. The keybindings are completely customizable by editing your ~/.inputrc file. Read the man page for readline....there's lots of useful tips in there to become a command-line editing guru.
I also, having been around from the really old Unix days, miss the old vi-versus-emacs battles that used to take place so often. Now it's more common for the two workhorses to join forces against all the new friendly editors.
Oh, and the hjkl sequence for cursor movement is also quite useful in nethack; proof enough for me.
> Beyond that, I find GNOME cleaner looking
Really ?
Yeah it looks awesome as you can see on this screenshot. So awesome that every toolbar looks differently than the other. One with icons only, the other with text below the icons, the other has draghandles, the other toolbar is bigger than the others and and and. This form GNOME CVS. So please don't spread bullshit about consistent and aesthetical look. You are wrong, this screenshot proves you wrong.
Linux on the desktop ain't gonna happen until... Any old user can access the CD-ROM drive, and a masters degree in comp-sci isn't required to get a fucking printer to work. My wife is taking her shiny new Linux computer into the shop tomorrow to have Win-XP installed on it instead so she can actually print some stuff. Oh well. Subtract one Linux desktop user from that total.
:). So maybe it was ready for the desktop when my kids (5 and 8 years old) insisted on having Linux on their desktop because it has better games.
For me, Linux was ready for the desktop when I installed it on my desktop. However, I'm a geek who likes to play with all sorts of software, settings, etc. So maybe Linux was ready for the desktop when my non-geek wife insisted I install Linux on her desktop for multi-user capabilities and security. However, her husband is a geek
What exactly are your requirements for Linux on the desktop? Anyone accessing the CD-ROM? That's a security question. There are times I prefer to mount the CD-ROM and not share its contents with everyone. Remember, Linux is a multi-user system. Just change your security settings (Hint: look in fstab). Installing a printer? That can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. I've found clicking on the Add Printer button in KDE's Print Manager is as easy as XP's Print Manager. Now if you are talking about hardware compatibility. Linux was designed by people who use quality components. There is support lacking sometimes on the really low-end "run out of ink and replace the printer" type of hardware. However, XP doesn't work with all of my hardware either.
Now what I'd really like to know, when is Windows going to be ready for the desktop? When is Windows going to make software updates as easy as it is in Linux? In Linux, a simple command updates all of the installed software. In Windows, it only updates software from Microsoft. For that matter, when is Windows going to make installing any software as easy as Linux? With Windows I have to hunt all over the Web to find all the little utilities, applications, games, and drivers I like to use. Every flavor of Linux I've used offers an online database of software from countless vendors that are easy to install. As for hardware compatibility, Microsoft dropped support for my parallel-port scanner and USB webcam. Both worked under 98, but not XP. My Apple webcam works great under Linux, but has never worked under Windows. I have a HD3000 TV tuner that works fine under Linux. When is Microsoft going to produce a driver for Windows?
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
First I must make a small correction: I have never been a Mac user. I have only tried MacOS 7.5 on an emulator and OS 8.3 on an iMac a few times. In fact I have used Unix and Unix-like systems (GNU/Linux, BSD, Tru64 (Digital Unix), Solaris) for about nine years. Before I tried any Unix-system I was an OS/2 user. In many ways OS/2 Workplace Shell was perhaps the best file manager I have used. Spatial Nautilus gets close but its template system for example just isn't even nearly as good as that of Warp 3.0 and 4.0. On the other hand GNOME beats OS/2 in terms of general usability like for example file chooser dialog.
Frankly I don't care much about how popular GNOME, KDE, Mac or Windows is. I use what works for me. Those who don't like spatial Nautilus are free to switch it to browser mode or use KDE, XFCE or whatever. As for intuitiveness I and several people that I have taught to use GNOME find new dialogs vastly more intuitive and usable than the old ones (unfortunately there are still some gtk1 applications, yuck). Also if popularity is really important why don't we just quit GNOME, KDE, Linux etc. projects and start using Windows instead...
Also we should remember that the article was talking about a poll on some website. For example I find it a bit difficult to believe that Debian is the leading Linux desktop distribution (I use Debian Sarge as my desktop and love it btw). I honestly believe that Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE etc are a lot more popular on the desktop largely because of their easy installation/administration tools and more current software.
Established conventions are just some guidelines, nothing more. GNOME developers just came up with better UI guidelines. Some people don't like these changes. If everyone just followed established conventions we would still be using DOS/Win3.1/CDE/OpenLook/(insert any obsolete ui of your choice here).
Now on the matter of KDE... I really like KDE technology. I would probably use Qt (or even KDE libs) for my own gui C++ apps. I have used Qt a bit and I really like it's API. I want to emphasize that I do not hate KDE. However I find its UI too cluttered and full of everything. I also find its dialogs cumbersome and unintuitive to use. I like the minimalistic style of GNOME (and MacOS).
As a side note: You might ask: "If you like Mac style UI design in GNOME so much, why don't you use a Mac?" MacOS X is an interesting system, but I think that I will not switch. I don't actually like Apple secrecy, patents and annoying marketspeak like http://www.apple.com/macmini/graphics.html. Debian community is a lot more trustworthy "OS vendor" than Apple.
You've posted this at least twice, and neither of the two posts you responded to said ANYTHING about "consistency".
Consistency and visual appeal are not necessarily the same thing. Personally (not talking specifically about Gnome, here), I like for apps to have a bit of a unique look. I like how xmms looks distinctly like xmms, and Firefox looks distinctly like Firefox.
I prefer KDE over Gnome myself (though I've been using plain ol' WindowMaker for the past year or so), but it bothers me how so many KDE apps look like clones of each other. It's not that they're ugly, but that "consistency" makes them feel like they all have this very bland generic appearance.
The number of visits to the homepage may simply be a reflection of the amount of help the installers of a distro end up needing. :)
That would only measure short term traffic though. To stay popular in the long term the site (and the distro) must be consistently useful for people to return.
Thus, debian remains popular because it provides a valuable resource, whereas redhat drops off because it has become less useful.
Actually the problem is, that nautilus in browser mode is even much inferior than Konqueror. Konqueror currently is the best file management tool you can get on any desktop and any os. Beating Konqueror in its elegance of scaling from the needs of the average user to the needs of the power user who needs something norton commander like and wants to browse as well and wants to have access to network transparent filehandling, is close to impossible. Nautilus was on its way pre 2.0 but since then every nautilus version was worse than the one before. I think the main problem was the point when they removed tabbing and splitting from Nautilus, while the KDE people tried to fix what was wrong with the implementation back then in konqueror (both had speed problems)