Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?.
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?
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.
I don't see what coming from statistia has to do with it. Unless, of course, you mean statistician?
C17H21NO4
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
I don't disagree. To its credit, however:
I think the greater danger is when data, such as this, gets picked up by the media in ways that are completely out of context. Most responsible people who I know are very cautious about stating limitations with data that they're presenting. That aside, I've repeatedly witnessed the very same people being cited out of context by overzealous and lazy media who want an attention-grabbing headline, and pick out whatever words or data that matches the story they've decided to tell.
If anyone's to blame for anything here, it would be the slashdot editors for presenting it as if it had some kind of authority. Even then, though, following the link from slashdot to the actual survey makes it pretty obvious... which is something that a lot of journalists in the real world won't even bother to provide.
They've been in deep shit for a long time. Mostly since the developers decided that they are smarter than their users. Does anyone like spatial nautilus? what about that red-headed-bastard-stepchild called gnome-control-center? Sorry for the rant, but I used to use gnome and have really grown to dislike it. I guess I shouldn't bitch though, I wouldn't have started to use the gem that is KDE if not for the recent stupidity of Gnome.