Slashdot Mirror
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...
Yeah, not to mention. Ubuntu users are more likely to be on ask Ubuntu. Mint also had it's own forums. This is personal choice not server administration so redhat and centos are out...
The real question is how many prefer slackware for their personal desktop but use something else most of the time for some work reason or something.
LinuxQuestions is a pretty Slackware-centric site. IIRC the Slackware docs say to go to LinuxQuestions for Slackware support. That may have changed since I last used Slackware, but I suspect that's the explanation.
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.
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
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.
have you ever suported a opensource project? Like submiting code or donating?
Why dont you help out instead of asking for free help?
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!
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 *
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
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!