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LinuxQuestions Users Choose Their Favorite Distro: Slackware (zdnet.com)
ZDNet summarizes some of the surprises in this year's poll on LinuxQuestions, "one of the largest Linux groups with 550,000 member". An anonymous reader quotes their report:
The winner for the most popular desktop distribution? Slackware...! Yes, one of the oldest of Linux distributions won with just over 16% of the vote. If that sounds a little odd, it is. On DistroWatch, a site that covers Linux distributions like paint, the top Linux desktop distros are Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, openSUSE, and Manjaro. Slackware comes in 28th place... With more than double the votes for any category, it appears there was vote-stuffing by Slackware fans... The mobile operating system race was a runaway for Android, with over 68% of the vote. Second place went to CyanogenMod, an Android clone, which recently went out of business...
Linux users love to debate about desktop environments. KDE Plasma Desktop took first by a hair's breadth over the popular lightweight Xfce desktop. Other well-regarded desktop environments, such as Cinnamon and MATE, got surprisingly few votes. The once popular GNOME still hasn't recovered from the blowback from its disliked design change from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3.
Firefox may struggle as a web browser in the larger world, but on Linux it's still popular. Firefox took first place with 51.7 percent of the vote. Chrome came in a distant second place, with the rest of the vote being divided between a multitude of obscure browsers.
LibreOffice won a whopping 89.6% of the vote for "best office suite" -- and Vim beat Emacs.
Linux users love to debate about desktop environments. KDE Plasma Desktop took first by a hair's breadth over the popular lightweight Xfce desktop. Other well-regarded desktop environments, such as Cinnamon and MATE, got surprisingly few votes. The once popular GNOME still hasn't recovered from the blowback from its disliked design change from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3.
Firefox may struggle as a web browser in the larger world, but on Linux it's still popular. Firefox took first place with 51.7 percent of the vote. Chrome came in a distant second place, with the rest of the vote being divided between a multitude of obscure browsers.
LibreOffice won a whopping 89.6% of the vote for "best office suite" -- and Vim beat Emacs.
That's unfair. You might run Vim within Emacs.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
It does seem sispicious to me. I download and try lots of distros (well, a few of the top 10, and occasionally some others), so I'm contributing to the numbers on Distrowatch. I don't keep using most of them, but FWIW I like vanilla Debian/KDE.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Yes we all know that on-line polls are so reliable. This is why Mt. Dew will be naming their new flavor either "Hitler did nothing Wrong" or "Diabeetus". The people never stuff polls. The reason Vim won is simple, all those unemployed people have a lot of time on their hands, like the Slackware slackers.
LibreOffice by the way blows chow. It's sole stated goal is to have the look and feel of Microsoft Word. Such an aspiration.
BY the way, is there any linux product that has the look and feel of Apple's Keynote. Now that's something to aspire to.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I'm assuming you're a mIRC user with the large trout reference. +10 nerd points for actually knowing what IRC is, -20 for not using a real OS and using BitchX or ircII.
Slackware performs better on Linuxquestions polls in general because it's essentially the home forum for Slackware users. Ubuntu, Arch, Debian, and all the other major distros that are highly ranked on Distrowatch have their own forums, and they are usually very populous. The users have less reason to visit Linuxquestions. So in general, Slackware users will be over-represented.
I don't recall poll results from previous years, but unless there's a large skew, I would think that vote manipulation would be jumping to conclusions.
they just released 5.3 with the new notebookbar GUI. It's essentially m$ word's ribbon interface. You can enable it in the experimental features menu options. LO is slowly entering the XXI century.
VIM users couldn't figure out how to exit the polling mode and just kept voting.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
A group whose business plan was, "don't bother us, if one of us feels like supporting a device we will, and if we decide to stop supporting it at a whim, we will... and did we mention? Don't bother us to ask us to support anything, we will if we feel like it." Unfortunately the reason many open source products suck. And I LIKE Linux. But only groups that understand that the software isn't the reason for the business, the people who use the software and their business requirements are. Redhat, Canonical (and derivatives), Suse, Open/Libre Office, Apache Foundation, PostgreSQL, etc. THEY get it. Your users are why you are in business, not your personal whims.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Red Hat gave us RPMs,systemd and NetworkManager. If I was drawing up a kill-list for a Linux distro, those would be at the top.
Outside of their high-end enterprise stuff and the kernel itself, they don't really touch that much. I'm a network manager and have deployed and managed Linux systems, and still do (VMs make this much easier nowadays, alongside the traditional MS setup). I've never once touched Red Hat as a distro for that purpose.
But I've bought any number of Slackware DVDs. Just the fact that Slackware is clean upstream code and simple patches for the most part, rather than highly customised stuff to make it work for The One True Distro gets my money.
I'm sure they do invest and they have a lot of code spread around, but they clearly aren't after my money. They just want huge businesses and not smaller shops at all. The pricing alone tells you that.
But Slackware? I've bought CD's almost every year (that are basically useless as soon as they've published because they are out-of-date and I never use physical media anyway), and the amount of work that goes into making it *my* OS is what I'm rewarding.
Red Hat don't have a penny of my money, in comparison.
Am i the only one using screen + irssi?
Ppl using Ubuntu are too noob to know a linux site. Ppl using redhat have jobs.
Funny thing about Ubuntu/Mint switching from upstart to systemd : I found that I can now stop NetworkManager from the command line without jumping through hoops or uninstalling it. That has been the only user-visible change due to systemd that I noticed.
Sure, if you think having a shitty UI is what makes XXI century. I don't, so i continue to use a good, proven, professional UI.
Perhaps it's good if you can run the latest version i.e. 0.11, otherwise the GTK2 version of LXDE will run fine and still is actively developed.
I installed slackware 14 last year after trying ubuntu and fedora live disks and it was the only one of the 3 in which everything worked first time (apart from some minor printer issues which I discovered later).
Ok, hardly a representational survey and YMMV, but just saying. Oh, and there's no systemd. Win!
Nope, that would be SuperTuxKart and deservedly so. It's a better game than most commercial games.
LQ is one of the oldest forums - and have always been a bit of a goto place for slackware users, it may be the only place on the net where slackers outnumber other distros. This would also partly explain why vim would handily beat emacs. Emacs was never all that popular among slackware users, a mere text editor that took up an entire software category by itself (the (E) series) - and which, if installed, could easily double the size of your setup all by itself was not going to go down well with those who clung to slackware for it's extremely flexibility and tiny footprint after the big rise-of-redhat and domination-of-debian in the late 1990s. These days, of course, that's hardly true anymore - the (X) and (xapps) series alone could match (e) and that's without installing KDE (which is the only desktop slackware ships anymore and has been for quite some time). I remember it was big news on /. when slackware stopped including Gnome in the base distro - when was that ? Could be 10 years already...
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
As much as I hate RPM and NetworkManager, Redhat does employ many of the people who do the under the hood work on the software that we all depend on. For example the glibc maintainer worked for Redhat for the longest time.
I'm an example in this sample where I run loads of rpm-based and deb-based distros at work and at home. I might have one single VM with slackware running which I do not use much, but slackware's easily my favorite distro.
Slackware is what weaned us into Linux two decades ago (Infomagic CDs). Slackware was easy to open and understand every layer of the OS, and even make packages for. It's also 'cleaner' for purists and still comes with sysv init system. If you're considering installbase as being equal to favorite distro, you're disregarding the enormous goodwill slackware still has from people who hardly use it anymore.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
At Google Plus, which is actually a good nerd social network (Linus post content often), number of users in communities: Ubuntu 279,044, Arch 51,344, openSUSE 29,849, Mint 24,378, Fedora 19,694, RedHat 12,244, CentOS 9,924, Slackware 3,075.
Thanks for the WARNING, when the notebookbar GUI is unavoidable, I'll go LaTeX exclusively.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
For WiFi management on laptops, I have yet to find a better alternative for Linux than NetworkManager though. Do you have any better suggestions? (Yes, I know that NetworkManager had a lot of issues the first few years, and I know about e.g. wicd — but these days NetworkManager has been working fine on my computers, and automatically works with most WiFi networks, while e.g. wicd still refuses to work with my uni network.)
Same here. NetworkManager does a pretty good job of managing my WiFi connections. That includes roaming between a dozen APs in a 3-story office building, and automatically switching between WiFi and LAN when I dock and undock my laptop.
First of all, people are going to answer Slackware even if they don't use it, because the Linux community is pervaded by a bunch of neck-bearded hipsters who liked Slackware before Slackware was cool. The reality is that they all run RedHat but are just desperate to look cool and unique.
The barb would have been sharper if the distro would have been Kubuntu instead of Redhat.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I started with Linux in 1995 when a housemate put Slackware on my computer for me. I'm glad he chose SW; back then almost nothing 'just worked' and you had to configure everything by hand, from the network card and the moden to X and Samba. I learned so much from that. In 2005 I was fed up with Linux and bought a Mac but I still use the knowledge I gathered in my Linux years to make the Mac do what I want. In the land of OSes Unix is emperor.
-- Cheers!
If you'd ever encountered the "fast food" that Macdonalds and the like replaced -- e.g. Howard Johnsons -- you'd probably have more appreciation for them. I don't eat Macdonalds often because they use way too much salt. But the food is cheap, consistent, and edible.
WRT to linux software distributions. I suspect Slackware ranks higher than one might expect because a lot of individual users have neither the brains nor the desire to be a Unix system administrator. Slackware is straightforward and well-behaved. The support forums have a lower jerk quotient than some better known distributions so dealing with the inevitable occasional problems is less tiresome than it might otherwise be. It's unix for those want stuff to work the way it always has. My guess is that if I somehow had to support a large number of users and were therefore forced to devote much of my life to Unixing, I'd prefer something like Red Hat or Ubuntu.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Eh, LinuxQuestions.org is the de facto Slackware support forum, it just doesn't bear Slackware in the name. I mean, strictly speaking it's a multi-distro forum, but look at the number of posts in each subforum here.
It would be like asking bbs.archlinux.org or www.ubuntuforums.org what their favorite distro is.
Red Hat's developers work on almost every major open source project there is. They don't just work on the projects you listed.
Without Red Hat's influence, Linux would be dead or several years behind.
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
For some SytemD is a success and has 'won', for others, a number of distros have become redhat derivatives. For some, linux has been unified under SystemD. For others linux has been broken and the damage will be worked around, keeping production on long term support until the alternative infrastructures are up to speed.
We can choose who we work with, what we work with. Proof: slackware popularity.
Do these users pay for it? No. Red Hat makes money and reinvests in Linux. Red Hat matters most, Canonical matters second, SuSE matters least. All others are just freeloaders whose opinions and usage don't matter. Proof: SystemD.
How about Oracle? They are the richest of Linux players, even if they do that by rebranding Red Hat and then making sure that their distro works w/ their software
Granted that Red Hat recycles money in Linux, but a lot of projects have nothing to do w/ Red Hat - such as Calligra, LibreOffice, KDE, LX/QT, Videoshot, et al. Yeah, it would be good if those projects had a stable income stream, and not have to depend on donations. But they are at least as important: if they weren't around, people couldn't do much w/ just RHEL and the bash shell prompt in front of them
Also, speaking of systemd, one big aspect about that: Slackware, which has not embraced systemd, is the favorite.
Slackware was the first Linux distro I used but creating all those floppies disks was a such a pain so I switched to Red Hat which could installed directly from CD. Now days I don't own a single working computer with a CD drive but I can still read floppies via a floppy to USB adapter. That was back in the 90s, I wonder how Slackware stacks up compare with Mint and Cent OS I use these days?
I am a long time Slackware lover. I first installed it in 1994 on a 486 DX50, had no real idea what Linux was yet and after finally getting X to startx, TWM loaded and I gave a up for a couple months. Anyway, if you are a Slackware fan, give Porteus a try. It's a lightweight Slack derivate meant for portability via USB stick buts it's easy to lay down on an SSD. It works really well.
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Agreed, and in fact it's the ONLY instance I find NetworkManager useful. Luckily I only use Linux on the desktop these days, and the move to systemd only reinforced my love for FreeBSD on the server that's been strong for several years already (before systemd was a thing).
Compiling mplayer is always difficult.
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... pretty know their way around Linux pretty well. I'm sometimes surprised by the sort of questions that self-proclaimed newbies ask there. It's not too strange, IMO, to find that the majority of its users would like Slackware.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
i'm one of the people who hates NetworkManager with passion. BUT i guess, on RedHat, it's either that, or only only simple networking. i've yet to meet a RedHat person who can, without NetworkManager and/or without GUI, configure my standard server setup:
vlan interfaces on top of bridged interfaces on top of 802.3ad bonded interfaces on top of physical interfaces
modern editors around (with masses of extensibility and customisation potential) of which Emacs is just one
You misspelled "the". There is no other editor (believe me I have looked) that is as extensible or customizable as Emacs.
If, instead, you prefer to modify your text by applying functions to it - with visual feedback and interaction playing second fiddle - then VIM/vi is the only game in town.
No, Emacs is VASTLY superior for that purpose. Like beyond vastly really... I have used Emacs quite heavily, but also VI quite a lot as well because vi is always everywhere in a way Emacs may not be. There simply is no comparison, Emacs is not just easier but way more powerful for programmatically altering text.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The obvious future is your office suite running in a browser. I haven't used LibreOffice in years because Google Docs is just too convenient. I'm considering setting up Sandstorm with EtherCalc and Etherpad because they're pretty much at the basic level of functionality I need in a spreadsheet and word processor application. I don't use 10% of Microsoft Excel's features so the open source alternatives like Ethercalc/pad are good options for me.
Yeah what a bunch of idiots, right?
tmux+irssi
I switched to tmux mostly just to get easy vertical splits. The RPM based distros (fedora, centos) didn't have a patched version of screen so it was just easier to deal with. Also mouse control so you can easily drag around splits. You can also check out byobu which adds some really nice features on top of tmux.
A lot of people have also ditched irssi for weechat but I just haven't invested the energy because irssi works fine for me.