Yes, vitally important. Without a disto-specific icon, havoc will reign. One way to solve this "problem" is to use the profile feature of the board. The profile in My LQ gives us the options of showing our location and distribution. Simply type which OS your are using into the space provided and everyone will know which distro is yours. (No colour though, but we cannot have our cake and eat it too.)

It's not just this forum though, is it? I don't use Iceweasel so if I visit distrowatch I'm not registered as a Debian user but a generic "Linux" user, for example. If this is happening to a lot of people with a lot of distros then it's going to skew the figures. There aren't all that many of us using Linux and I don't really want to be lumped with the Ubuntu or Red Hat crowd if anyone's counting (no offence to people using them, I just don't want to promote Canonical or Red Hat when I don't use their products).

Distrowatch does not base their hit list on user agent strings. Also, their figures are skewed already by design: http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

Statistics gleaned from the user agent string are not very reliable... but you seem to misunderstand how distrowatch works? Or perhaps you're referring to something else...?

Distrowatch stats are based on page hits at the relevant distro's site, not on page hits at distrowatch from browsers carrying the relevant user agent.

Yeah, kind of annoying, it's mentioned in the FAQ:

1 members found this post helpful.

Randicus Drao Albus, I've always had openSuSE in the profile, distro section, but it did not reflect that in my posts. I've tried 'SuSE', suse, opensuse, SUSE, etc...
If you were to hover over a distro icon of some, anyone who's distro icon shows anything other than 'Linux', you will see that the distro names are not normal nomenclature, ie, those with SuSE show a hover title of 'linuxsuse',,,,,
So, it would be helpful to know the distro 'icon' names used in the php of the forum.
Again, SuSE (openSuSE) = linuxsuse
Member TobiSGD's Slackware = linuxslackware
Member ntubski's Windows = windows_vista
Member ukiuki's Ubuntu = linuxubuntu
Yours is simply = linux

see, one would need to know the actual distro name to 'icon' name equivalent.

Thanks though.
Landis.

ps. now that i know the 'translation' for mine is linuxsuse, i will try that as distro name in profile section....
Thanks.

273, as ukiuki said in the second post, referring to another post, 'they' are picking up your 'OS' from the Firefox (browser) UserAgent string. The issue here is how to get Mozilla (FF) to keep or allow permanent changing of the general.useragent.package entries. One used to be able to add, edit these, but FF does not seem to be reading them any longer.

Landis.

ntubski, Thanks! I thought I've seen Every page at mozilla... Maybe I have, it would not be the first time mozilla didn't have appropriate info about 'it's self'.. on of my peeves. : )

Thanks again,
Landis.

FYI... incase i didn't mention it earlier... here is where and how I've been checking my useragent string

notice the Operating System label. It will Not change with the addition of FF prefs: general.useragent.vendor , vendorComment, VendorSub entries. The only way to get it to change is by editing, Adding general.useragent.override and enabling general.useragent.enable_overrides
copy the string from above link, past in ...override and edit the 'linux' to your distro (OS).
Mine reads: [code]Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Suse; Linux i686; 12.3-1.7) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/27.0[/url] again, originally edited with User Agent Switche

Landis.

Nope, you don't have to use that translation, this is my current useragent stringI forgot to update it, actually I am using Firefox 24.

The distro name in your profile does not affect the displayed icon.

Since about Firefox 4 I am using general.useragent.override to set the useragent string. This entry does not exist by default, one has to create it.

My point was; Why would anyone care about it? I am not picking on you. You are simply the latest person to start a thread about this topic. It was amusing the first time I saw such a thread, but they pop up regularly. I am being honest when I ask, why does anyone care? Personally, I would like to see the icons done away with.

To disable it go to:
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...do=editoptions

Find the section:

Show User Agent in Posts
Show the Operating System from your browser User Agent in posts?

Select "No" and click "save changes".

They can be helpful in case of newbies that forget to tell us which distro they use when they ask for help. As cynwulf pointed out, if you don't want that feature, disable it.

I was referring to having the feature removed from the board, not me personally.Valid point, but it assumes that someone posting a question is using his or her computer and not someone else's. Such as this post, which should have a Windows icon, since I am not posting this with my computer.

You can ask Jeremy about that, but I don't see why that feature should be removed.

Correct. That is why I said they can be helpful. They don't have to be, but the possibility exists.