Well, as far as I'm concerned the matter of substance thus far on this thread has been from people explaining why Distrowatch's ratings are not a reliable indicator of use and would not matter even if they were. Distrowatch is where people who follow Linux go to see what new distros are popping up and what they have going for them. That is why it is called Distrowatch.

Everyone already knows about Slackware, so we do not need to go and look it up. This can be viewed as a good thing, if one has to care about it at all.

Seriously, why are we still talking about this?

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"Seriously," this thread was started with the hope that some of you condesending Heathkit types would get out of your mother's basement, via your modems/routers, and over to Distrowatch and click on the word, "Slackware."

Over the years it has been come painfully apparent that many of you don't understand, i.e., don't even have the first clue, that without marketing, Slackware, will fade away. You can call it "public relations" or even be so rude as to call it, gasp!, "advertising," but you need it to attract new users. Without new users, again, the product, i.e., Slackware will fade away.

As I imagine there is little to no budget for advertising, then the next best thing would be a live CD, but what do I know, I'm just an old man that has lived long enough and made enough of his own mistakes to know when others are headed in the wrong direction.

When it comes time to pay the mortgage and buy groceries, and there is no money in the cookie jar, you realize your "high ideals" were unrealistic.

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Slackware really doesn't need advertising to stay alive. Many people distro hop when they come to GNU/Linux for the first time and choose a mainstream distribution like Ubuntu, Fedora, or the such and end up really in no better a situation than the rest. Mainstream distribution get confusing with developer, documentation, binary, and multiple packages (including the most confusing one I've ever seen which is the staging package).

After a while people discover Slackware, they try it out, find out how simple it's design, and how direct philosophy is and make the switch.

The only difference is, most of the long-term Slackware users never migrate out of Slackware once they understand it, some leave, but the few actually move on to one of two distributions: Gentoo or LFS. Even then some even migrate to FreeBSD.

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Oops! Double post!

On distrowatch on the Slackware page, the "current" column shows a release date of 09/16/2013, and lists the versions of a bunch of packages that are being tracked.

Who does this tracking? How is it done? Where does the version information come from? Are the versions accurate?

I'm just wondering if the package versions are reported based on some kind of automated monitoring, or if distrowatch has people who go look for this information, or if it is being submitted to distrowatch by Pat or the other Slackware maintainers.

Sigh! You just made my point.

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I think the best advertising Slackware can have are the testaments of its users. So many people out there, many of them on this forum, have sites devoted to Slackware, or help make it more accessible to others through documentation or "internationalization," or even incorporate Slackware into their business and give it to the public. That is public relations. But I don't think it is attracting new users to present the impression that Slackware is fading from popularity because of a heavily biased statistic, which is not even supposed to be taken as an indicator of use. That really doesn't seem like advertising to me. It's just a sin against math. And maybe I am condescending, but that irks me.

But with that said, I guess I'll get back to my mother's basement. I'd rather not be here when the dead horse you're beating starts to smell.

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There is good advertizing and bad advertizing. The question is, in which category belongs manipulating the statistics from Distrowatch.

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who's stuck in the basement now?
Click smick, who dafuq cares what's "Popular"? Only one hit per IP address per day is counted anyway.
I click with what counts, my wallet.

https://store.slackware.com/cgi-bin/store

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We could boost Slackware at Distrowatch by making http://www.slackware.com/ the default page in our browsers. Then we would contribute to the ratings every day.

I believe that Arch GNU/Linux is probably misleadingly high in the Distrowatch ratings because all Arch users have to visit the site daily to read the latest instructions on keeping Arch going! I certainly did in my 18 months with Arch. I do not mean to criticise Arch, it is just the nature of that distro, one of my favourites.

I can't believe anyone could think that public calls for this kind of intentonal, artificial stat manipulation are a good idea. I am ashamed for us all.

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You don't appear to understand how these stats work.

---------- Post added 17-09-13 at 23:28 ----------

+1 to that.

My post was an attempt at humour - better stick to my day job!
But you may be right, I thought that Distrowatch counted hits on each distro website. Is that incorrect?

Distrowatch only counts the clicks a distro gets on Distrowatch's website. If I go to distrowatch and look up Slackware, it gets a point. Of course, like I said before, Slackware is such a venerable distribution that no one needs to go look it up.

That is why all the newborn distros have such high Distrowatch ratings. And also why their rating does not matter at all in the way this thread implies.

Thye count the info page (on the distrowatch site site) for that given distro. Not the distro's actual homepage.

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