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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."
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.
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?
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.
KDE gained double userbase while GNOME drastically reduced. Wow. Looks like GNOME is really in deep shit now.
I blame the elitist Gentoo-using cyberbullies that try and say Mandrake is noob linux. Then, you have new nerds trying out Gentoo and getting frustrated on the initial 6-hour install process.
I had my fun with Gentoo.. but I like to have an up and running system in 20 minutes. And, I DID install Gentoo completely - I was just forced to recompile my kernel 3 times until I finally got it right.
Mandrake = fun for the whole family.
--- We need more Ron Paul!
Distrowatch counts downloads, not installations. People are testing it, but no proof that they are continuing to use it.
If you can't manage something simple like a kernel compile, Gentoo probably isn't the right distribution for you. You'll note that the Gentoo developers (on the whole) claim that it's a specific purpose distribution, and it's only a small number of obnoxious loudmouthed asshat users who go around saying that Gentoo is for anyone.
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
You're a dickhead.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
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
Many of us Mandrake users don't feel the need to aggressively promote our Distro as much as some other users. I can compile a kernel or other software, build rpms, write init scripts, but I prefer to spend my time doing other things.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
The GPL is not a communist scheme. It's a licensing agreement enterred into voluntarily. If you don't want to enter into it then don't.
you participate in a communist scheme designed to prevent software professionals from being compensated for their work
Are you kidding? The software professionals get compensated regardless of what OS I choose. It's simply cheaper for me to buy a box and pay the professionals for the software that I don't use than to buy a box without paying the software professionals.
Now if only the professionals will produce software that won't run exploits as root, then I may consider using it. Why is IE and Outlook Express integrated to the manditory OS anyway?
Can you say Target?
The truth shall set you free!
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.
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.
Well, for lots of us who were born before the 80s (or the 70s for that matter), we've been using vi or emacs for so long that running nano really feels like we're back on some kind of braindead DOS box (especially the "are you really sure you want to save this file, and what name should I save it to, and should I really save it to that name, and press "y" to continue, and really do it Y/n...").
When I first installed gentoo and the documentation said I had to edit this and that file, I actually spent ten minutes looking for an editor, trying all the variants of the names of vi and emacs I could remember. Turns out that the editor that comes with the gentoo live CDs is nano. I'd never even heard of the damn thing before. The only fancy newbie curses editor I knew of was pico (which I didn't like much either).
But the crux of the matter is that vi (and to a lesser extent emacs) is the standard editor. You'll find it on every machine. So you just have to know how to use it. Ideally you even have to know how to use it on a broken or on a dumb (without arrow keys) terminal (navigating with the hjkl keys). Because it's everywhere and when the fancy shit is gone to hell, chances are vi will still be there. Likewise when you start your new job and you find yourself logging in for the first time to that SunOS box that's been chugging along for the past 12 years which certainly won't have nano or kate on it.
And emacs is still useful to know a bit of because of all the key combos that found their ways in a number of other apps. I can't believe the number of people I meet who don't know how to edit a Bash command line (which by default uses Emacs commands). The basic Emacs commands like (C-E to go to the end of line) also work pretty much everywere (except in Windows which is a bit of a bug IMO). Besides it's still a nice editor because a lot of it's modes are relly very well made. Like all good tools, tou have to learn how to use it though.
Anyway, if you wondered why some of us don't use nano, that's why.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Not that this tells us anything. It's just an anecdote, like this survey.
Why are OE and IE integrated?
Back in 90's Microsoft became very concerned that Netscape's web browser could end up being the PLATFORM for which software would be written. If you wrote your software to run in a browswer window the underlying OS was no longer important. Microsoft needed to push Netscape over a cliff.
To do so, Microsoft introduced IE which they began shipping free of charge with every copy of Windows (and just about every other piece of software). Netscape felt they were abusing their monopoly position by doing this and therefore sued. The courts agreed and decreed: "Microsoft may not bundle IE with Windows".
Well Microsoft has never been one to let a legal ruling stop them. They went back to the developers mandated that IE be INTEGRATED with Windows Explorer. By making it a PORTION OF THE OS, they were no longer bundling. Suddenly they were legal again, but could keep behaving the same way.
So, there is no good technical reason for integrating your file system browser with your web browser (and plenty of reason not do), but there is every reason to do so from a "crush the competition" perspective.
Life is short: void the warranty.
Well, for lots of us who were born before the 80s (or the 70s for that matter), we've been using vi or emacs for so long that ...
:p
... I put set -o vi in my .bashrc (when there is no ksh arround ... how do you search for a string in your bash command history using default emacs-ish keys? And how do you tell it you will be replacing the next N words with some input text? Is that to the beginning of the N+1th word or to the end of the Nth word?)
And here I thought ed was the de-facto editor on all unices (It sais so in the man page)
I can't believe the number of people I meet who don't know how to edit a Bash command line
I must be getting stupider and stupider
--- Abnormally normal.
The GPL is viable , legal and enforceable worlwide , its also something everyone who use it agree to.
The recording industry license no one agree to or even most people know it exist , and they certainly disagree with it once they know what it is , making it an illegal license.
Sharing music on P2P is not illegal in a Real American country.
nice one, but igorance of the license does not make it invalid.
what about people that use GPL code without knowing about it? are they any less of an offender than people that do? (the FSF will still go after them)
using open source in a closed source application is not illegal in a real american country.