Falling Like A Stone and About to Drop Out of the Top 20.
 

In the page hit rankings over at Distrowatch, Slackware is in a free-fall and has dropped to number 20 and will shortly drop to 21 as Kubuntu moves up. Some of these distributions I've never heard of, e.g., Manjaro, Zorin, OS4, Bodhi and SparkyLinux. Even FreeBSD has moved up to number 17.

I wouldn't worry in the slightest. Those stats tell you very little, distrowatch itself acknowledges that.

It mostly goes to show that Slackware users have many better things to do with their time than hang out at Distrowatch! ;)

I seem to recall that another poll recently put Slackware at the top of someone else' most popular list.

It is certainly at the top of mine!

http://linuxcounter.net/distributions/stats.html

better look here:D

I usually go to DistroWatch.com to look up other distributions. I already know about Slackware. :)

My last visit to DistroWatch was 7/30/2013, before that was 3/4/2013.

Not everyone is registered there.

No. Slackware defies gravity. Floats like a butterfly, stings like a bee.

I used to visit DistroWatch when I was new in the Linux world. My purpose was to learn what other distributions were out there. My search ended long ago by switching to Slackware and I am no more interested in finding another one. I guess most of the readers of this forum feel the same way.

From another perspective, we may regard this as good news for the Linux world, in the sense that some years ago only people like IT professionals or academics were able to hear about Linux and Slackware is more widely known among the people of that generation. Now a lot more people can use Linux and it is natural for an average person to have a tendency towards the Ubuntu-like distributions.

I know why I use Slackware and will continue using it. I don't care what the statistics of Distrowatch say. Anyways Slackware is listed in the "major distributions" if it will make you feel better :)

I have only one purpose for Distrowatch: Looking up in their tables which version of a software is used in which version of a specific distribution. I never look at the Slackware page, so actually I am even contributing to this. But in reality, who cares about Distrowatch's page ranking?

Agreed. I have not looked at Distrowatch in many years.

Shhh...She's listening. :D

Regards.

First it has nothing to do with popularity, second quality is not related to popularity or even it's in a contradiction if there is some relationship. Who cares ...

It does surprise me to see this, but seriously, what am I going to do?

Meh.

Doesn't matter. FreeBSD is very popular, because it is very free and open. Lots of plants/companies use it for different reasons. I see it everywhere. More so than Ubuntu... or Mint.

But, the 'newbie' users out there are the ones pushing up the ratings of pretty desktop Os's like Mint. The companies that use FreeBSD probably aren't searching DistroWatch for info on it.

Same for Slackware. Rhel. Scientific Linux. Ubuntu LTS. Etc...