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openSUSE Survey Results Online

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the liars-damn-liars-and-statisticians dept.

apokryphos writes "openSUSE have announced that the results from the openSUSE survey (PDF) are now online. The survey was live for almost 3 months and more than 27,000 users participated, making it one of the largest Linux distribution surveys ever."

5 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Why? by Hemogoblin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I RTFA and even RTF-PDF, but I still don't know the point of this survey. For what purpose was it administered? As far as I can tell, it simply collected the characteristics of people who use openSUSE. Is some organization going to be using these results for something?

  2. Re:It's bigger but it's not new by kebes · · Score: 5, Insightful

    who still cannot accomplish everything without having to resort to a command line
    Hold on a second... where are you drawing that conclusion from? Is it because 64% of respondents answered "Yes" to the question "Do you use non-graphical tools when installing or administering your Linux operating system?" ??

    I don't think that's the correct conclusion to draw. The 64% merely shows that alot of Linux users prefer the commandline, because it is quite powerful and efficient. If anything, the fact that 36% of users are able to install software and administer their box without ever touching the commandline is evidence that you don't need to touch the commandline in a modern Linux distro. (Unless you think that 36% of openSUSE users never install software or make changes to their system?)

    I agree that many Linux users are technophiles and love the commandline (I know I do), but in a modern Linux distro, there are graphical tools to do just about everything. So can we stop propagating the myth that only UNIX-gurus can run Linux?
  3. Re:KDE vs Gnome by sjbcfh · · Score: 5, Informative
    Considering that GNOME is the default on suse, it is amazing.

    Gnome is the default selection for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, but only in that the radio button for Gnome is preselected, rather than that for KDE. KDE is still the default selection for openSUSE.

  4. Re:KDE vs Gnome by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There is, as far as I can tell, only one place in the world where GNOME is more popular than KDE, and that is, surprise surprise, on the Ubuntu Forums. Everywhere else, KDE appears to lead my a margin of roughly 2:1. In particular, it is a consistent winner of the LinuxQuestions Members Choice awards. It's also very popular on the desktops of European government, being used on 10.2% of desktops, compared to GNOME's 5.5% (see page 29).

    It always saddens me to see the Big Distros rallying around GNOME and pouring funds into it as I've always viewed Open Source as a meritocracy, whereas the decision to back GNOME development is quite clearly not based on its merits (or at least, not its technical ones), nor even, clearly, on what the end users want. It also strikes me as a terrible waste of resources: GNOME's shaky technical base and general bureaucratic attitude means that even though money is thrown at it, nothing ever seems to get done, with GNOME's busiest days barely matching KDE's laziest, while the KDE team are completely shaking up the code and architecture of their massive code-base on a shoestring. A real shame, but - c'est la vie, I guess!

  5. I want a Vista Survey that way by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    15. Where do you usually get Microsoft[R] Windows Vista[TM]?

    Steal it from computer or software shop 7%
    Download from thepiratebay homepage 70%
    "Free CD" from friends (hey, they said it's free) 10%
    I actually bought it. 3%
    Other (please specify) 10%