Yeah that's a common bias in misreading stats and polls... We need to define "how is it calculated".

As some mentioned it already, distrowatch is mainly visit by people looking for information. So "Slackers" won't make the Slackware link growth as they already use Slackware. (Although I sometimes just go to the Slackware page just to make help the counter being "up" ).

The linux counter, despite the fact that it doesn't cover the whole linux community might be closer to the real deal.

It's okay for people to "distro hop" for a time. I think the better advertising for Slackware, beside its inherent forces we all know here, is when you encounter this community in LQ. My first experience in forums in LQ was "mainstream" and was bad with pedantic a$$h0les... Whereas in the Slackware 'pool' I found just 'normal' people willing to help others and being more rational than on other "posers" distros I won't name here .

Cheers.

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I find it a central place to learn what applications/packages have issued new versions, e.g., VLC, LibreOffice, Mozilla, etc., etc., etc., and from there one can go directly to the home page of whatever application/package they might be interested in.

Hey - about a year (or so) ago - there was this distro that sailed up to #1 that no-one had ever heard about (can't remember its name). Turned out it was about 6 years old and hadn't seen an update in those same 6 years. later someone admitted to 'falsifying' the hits-record ...
Probably the same is happening these days with 'mageia' (not that I have ever tried it, nor am I going to, but by all accounts - it's less than stellar)

The end of the Slackware is nigh! Call Caitlyn!

Exactly.

Hiding... waiting...

Slackware is a ninja distro; silent, invisible, yet highly efficient and powerful. It doesn't get in the way of a user. It doesn't break easily so it gets easily forgotten by the user. While other distros' forums swarm with posts about broken dependencies, pulseaudio issues, etc, in the Slackware land, things work fine so out of boredom slackers have nothing better to do than to engage in silly threads like this one

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FreeBSD 9.2-RC1 was just released, which might explain FreeBSD's rise in the rankings. It's looking a bit nicer than 9.1, too.

It looks like the best way to improve a distro's Distrowatch ranking is for the distro to make news somehow.

Right, Distrowatch rankings don't speak ultimately to a particular distribution's popularity, but they do say a little something about *curiosity* about a certain distribution. I go to Distrowatch when I read in a magazine about what sounds like an interesting distro, or I want to find a distro's home page and some information about what it's based off of and what software it includes. If Slackware's dropping, it's because other distros are getting more buzz. Notice how Ubuntu has also fallen and excellent distros like Mint stay near the top. That's a distro people are keeping their eyes on. It doesn't mean other distros aren't also excellent, but it might indicate that overall use of them might fall off over time.

I think I registered my first Slackware install at the Linux counter project. That was about five Slackware installs ago . . . . Got Slack on two computers right now (gosh, back in the old days, who would have imagined having two computers, let along six, in a house).

perbh, I have Mageia on a computer right now. Frankly, I think it's a pretty slick piece of work.

I recently took a look at these Distrowatch rankings.

I saw Ubuntu at No. 2.

And Crux at No. 102.

I know which one I'd prefer.

If there were 26 alphabetubuntus leading the top 30 I would pick 30, 29, 28 and 27 in that order.

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Mint is really two distros at least, one with regular releases based on an Ubuntu foundation and the other a rolling release based on Debian testing. Additionally it is worth noting that Mint provides different download options when preconfigured with different desktops. Yet distrowatch only counts Mint once.

Ubuntu on the other hand has all its variants counted individually (Ubuntu, Lubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME, Ubuntu Studio, UbuntuKylin, etc.) despite their core packages remaining the same and coming from the same repositories.

If you add up the HPD (Hits Per Day) value of all of the Ubuntu variants that have some kind of official backing it is clear that Mint is still a long way behind Ubuntu. The only reason Mint comes out on top is because it is counted as one distro rather than 5 (Cinnamon edition, Mate edition, KDE edition, Xfce edition, Debian Edition) as they have done with Ubuntu.

This is actually quite a good example of how flawed these stats are!

I look at Distrowatch only to see the new released for any distro.

Those numbers bounce around a lot...whenever there is a new version or release. Seems like every Tom, Dick, Harry, Mary, Jane and Alice rolls a distro for some niche hobby these days.