surprised by Distrowatch trends

newbiesforever · 06-23-2007, 11:31 AM

I haven't looked on Distrowatch in at least a few months, so I was surprised to see that PCLOS is #2 (and #1 in the last 7 days, but who cares about weekly trends); that Slackware and Knoppix have dropped (I think); and that the new distro known as Mint seems fairly popular. Are the favorite distros changing in the Linux world?

slackhack · 06-23-2007, 11:34 AM

i don't think distrowatch is an accurate or reliable measure of anything. not that it's not a good site, but i don't really think the rankings have much meaning.

rickh · 06-23-2007, 11:47 AM

I think the preferred distro numbers probably reflect the changing Linux user base from a technically qualified group to a group composed of ever increasing Windows refugees.

While this change is good, I think it needs to be accompanied by the vigilance necessary to protect the concept of FLOSS. Too many developers, IMO, don't care what they have to stick in their distribution if it will help them corral a given percentage of the newbies.

nx5000 · 06-23-2007, 12:31 PM

Yeah I think the ranking is crap.
Don't care, take the distro you like, dont bother with what other people are doing

Hern_28 · 06-23-2007, 01:57 PM

I wonder how many regular users actually vote on distro watch. I haven't yet.

XavierP · 06-23-2007, 02:08 PM

The ranking reflects the number of visits to that distros page on Distrowatch - NOT the number of downloads.

Quakeboy02 · 06-23-2007, 02:11 PM

From the descriptions above, it sounds like Distrowatch is more of a poll of newbies than a consensus on who's using what. Perhaps I'm the exception, but I don't have any need to play with new distros or even bother examining them. Debian does everything I need and I have no great desire to play with other distros just to see pretty graphics.

newbiesforever · 06-23-2007, 05:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by nx5000

Yeah I think the ranking is crap.
Don't care, take the distro you like, dont bother with what other people are doing

I assure you, I wouldn't. My interest in the Distrowatch statistics was academic. I'm in Linux limbo right now, because my current monitor won't cooperate with the distros I like except in failsafe mode and because Windows gave me a lot of trouble about being confined to half the HD. (I've never been ready to migrate completely, because I haven't figured out how to do in Linux everything I do in Windows.) But I don't care whether Distrowatch says Ubuntu is the favorite; I've never used it. I like MEPIS, because it handles my wireless network very well, and Knoppix. I may not follow what everyone else is doing, but I was miffed at Knoppix's slide. Nyah nyah, Knoppix snubbers.

Hern_28 · 06-23-2007, 05:22 PM

I usually try recommend people try different live distro's before settling on one. My personal preference is Slackware, but it is not for everybody.

I wonder how influnced distrowatch is by the recommendation of "try them" and the chance of distro's being selected because the name sounds interesting.

reddazz · 06-23-2007, 05:38 PM

Unfortunately many people equate distrowatch page hits with distro popularity. Some distros or distro fanboys have been known to manipulate (well cheat/abuse) the distrowatch ranking system to inflate the hits per day for ther distro.

newbiesforever · 06-23-2007, 05:41 PM

[QUOTE=Hern_28]My personal preference is Slackware, but it is not for everybody.

I don't have nearly enough patience for Slack.

XavierP · 06-24-2007, 06:55 AM

Like I said, the Distrowatch rankings do not reflect the number of times a distro is downloaded. It merely tells you how often a particular distro's Distrowatch page has been accessed. Which is why the title of the rankings is called Page Hit Rankings

Quote:

Originally Posted by Distrowatch

Linux Distributions - Facts and Figures
The Page Hit Ranking statistics have attracted plenty of attention and feedback. Originally, each distribution-specific page was pure HTML with a third-party counter at the bottom to monitor interest of visitors. Later the pages were transformed into plain text files with PHP generating all the HTML code, but the original counter remained unchanged. In May 2004 the site switched from publicly viewable third-party counters to internal counters. This was prompted by a continuous abuse of the counters by a handful of undisciplined individuals who had confused DistroWatch with a voting station. The counters are no longer displayed on the individual distributions pages, but all visits (on the main site, as well as on mirrors) are logged. Only one hit per IP address per day is counted.

The figures in the third column of each table represent the average number of hits per day for the specified period. The tables are updated daily at around 40 minutes past midnight GMT.

dive · 06-24-2007, 08:46 AM

When a new distro appears people will go to that page to read up on it. That is what is affecting the count.