Readers' choices: 2004 Desktop Linux survey results in!

Looks like someone ran a get-out-the-vote campaign. That is the trouble with these polls and why they are worthless.

Yoper has 18% of the votes, but is 17th in the Distrowatch 6 mo. rankings and 27th in the 1 mo. rankings. Nothing against Yoper, which may be a fine distro, but this destroys any credibility the Desktop Linux Market survey may have had.

Agreed. But your implication that the Distrowatch rankings are more reliable is... interesting.

No, I would not say that Distrowatch ratings are all that accurate, but in this case they look a *whole* lot more accurate than the Desktop Linux Market survey.

Have the Gentoo crew also had a (smaller) ding-the-bell campaign? It's not that popular a distro, at least here in West Oz.

Tend to agree that in general, DW's figures look a lot saner than DTL's.

Actually, I have used Yoper in the past and cannot say anything bad about it, in fact it lives up to most of its hype...but number one distro? The date of the testing probably had something to do with some glaring exclusions. PCLinuxOS has to be one of the, if not THE most nOOb friendly distro to date...wasn't even mentioned. That has been brought to their attention, like it's gonna do any good.

helios

AC, the Gentoo crowd probably didn't need to stuff the ballot box. While it's not anywhere near the most popular distro, it seems to have the most obsessive community (http://funroll-loops.org/). On the other hand, we did try to stuff the box on the PCLinuxOS forums, but it just seems we're not obsessed enough. I mean just look at the current state of our slogan, "PCLinuxOS - Like a Fart in Church." We definitely need to work on the obsession thing.

-> Fritz

Fritz,

Hilarious link! The image at the bottom of the page makes great wallpaper.

I just switched to Gentoo... man you should see how fast lxer.com is now. Even this post was accomplished in record time... at least 20% faster than Red Hat. W00t!!

Haha, cjcox. The sadddest part is that I actually had to sit there for a second and wonder if you were serious.

-> Fritz

Fritz --

You n00b wanker, how dare you cast aspersions on Gentoo?

What's the matter, not man or woman enough to run a machine that can handle all the compiling? You got little training wheels on your processor?

I'll bet you don't even run Linux at all. Probably just Cygwin on top of Windows ME.

Yeah, that's the problem.

Gentoo is great. At least that's what I've heard. I use SuSE. Too impatient to build from scratch. But that's my problem, not Gentoo's.

Right?

Oh yeah? That's what you think is it? Well I'm just going to go and spend the next 5 days compiling/configuring my system to run gentoo. That way when I open up a document I'll do it in .02 seconds less each time. Oh yeah! w00t! That will show you. My system will rule yours with it'll be so awesome. I'll probably even gain .07 FPS on Armagetron! Yeah, I'm sure I will.

Yeah, just as soon as I'm done compiling, I'll save myself so much time. Talk to you in a few days. . .

-> Fritz

;-)

He's got a point, dinotrac. And with the money he saves by not buying Suse, he can make a pretty hefty down payment on that really cool six foot bolt on wing for the car.

OK. I bow to your wisdom, except for one thing:

I bought the upgrade version of SuSE, which would only get half a wing.

Getting back to the original topic, it seems that DeskTopLinux figured out that the Yoper guys had stuffed the ballot box and have "fixed" their data by throwing out the Yoper data. They now seem confident in their data and I'll take them at their word. If I still had any doubts about the validity of the data, I might suspect that Debian stuffed the ballot box last year, but forgot to do it this year. They dropped from something like 35% to something like 15% in just 1 year. However, since it is clear that the desktoplinux data is unassailable, the only reasonable conclusion is that people are leaving Debian in droves, like rats from a sinking ship, and that by this time next year, there will not *be* a Debian. Who'd have thought?

Scottie --

Warp...Oh, wait -- wrong context.

There will always be a Debian.

The only question is whether there will be Debian users.

dino...

Correction...

there will always be Ubuntu...

the question is whether there will always be Debian. Current trends don't look very favorable toward Debian.

Devnet,

I'm not a Debian advocate. I think Ubuntu is interesting. But it seems pretty clear that without a Debian Testing, there would not be an Ubuntu.

Debian has allowed a weird state of affairs to develop in which "Testing" is what everyone uses, "Stable" is irrelevant, and "Unstable" is what people who want to be on the cutting edge use. To my knowledge it is the only distro that has been able to play the shell game in such a way that they can get away with not releasing security updates for their most commonly used branch and no one seems to even notice.

Debian "Stable" is a sort of reducto al absurdum of the "It's ready when it's ready" philosophy.

Ubuntu is a rectification of that situation.

Expect Debian to improve. (At least I would hope that having a fire lit under them would get their attention.)

But the real question, I suppose, is whether end users will use "Debian" or something else that started out as Debian, but then got packaged up, QA'd and shipped out by someone else.

Think of Testing as the release that is the base for a family of distros, and Stable as Debian's own "consumer" distro.

In a nutshell, Debian now has direct competition right in their own neighborhood (Just like other distros have had all along, and have learned to deal with).

And that's a good thing.

devnet --

Nah. I think there will be somebody holding out for the next release. Should be coming sometime in 2037, I think.

There will most definately be a Debian for a long time to come. The debian desktop project is dead, but Debian is still usefull. Even as outdated as it is, there are a lot of server oriented tasks that debian is best at. People don't want to be updating their ftp server, every time there is a new release. As long as it stays secure, a lot of the server crowd is happy. In fact, for many, it is preferable that it doesn't update frequently, because with system updates configuration updates are often required. This leaves little reason to run debian at home, but this could change too.

Debian is so often made fun of for not having made a significant release since 2002, but last I checked microsoft hadn't updated windows significantly since 2001. With the current state of desktop functionality in linux, there will be very little reason for many end users to update sarge for quite some time after it's released, if it works for them, it just works.

-> Fritz