Published at LXer:

LinuxCon 2014 Matthew Miller is a little concerned. As the new project leader for the Fedora Linux distribution, he thinks Fedora 20 is great and Fedora 21, when it ships, will be the best release ever. But he worries that to everyone else, Fedora – and Linux distros in general – are getting a little, well … boring.…

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Why would people forever use exactly the same distros? SOmething better arises, so they switch.

I find it rather weird when people base the popularity of a distro or an OS on the numbers they got from Google Trends, just because you don't know the used searches.
Having a decreasing number of searches, for example for Ubuntu, can mean that there is less interest in Ubuntu, but it also simply can mean that there nowadays are less problems with Ubuntu. People running an OS that just works don't usually include the name of their OS in websearches.
So I would think that those numbers are more or less meaningless for popularity contests.

I posit that less "Linux users" are using Google to search for Linux related information.

Where 10 years ago someone might have gone to Google to type in "ubuntu networking" they might now automatically head to LQ, StackExchange, Ubuntu.com, IRC, Reddit/r/ubuntu, maybe some other community, or they might just ask the nearest Linux user in their office, or they might order a book on Amazon, or hire a freelancer from elance.com.

Google isn't the end-all be-all Linux-usage statistical tracking site that this person is making it out to be.

And many of the persons who were web-searching for Linux seven years ago are using it now.

This is, quite frankly, a nothing story--you can't generalize on something as ephemeral as web searches--but it served to get Fedora a mention in El Reg, which was likely the point.

People generally don't repeatedly search for things anymore, once they find a resource they can use they bookmark it.

I think this is the *only* goal of many of the 'articles' written in tech blogs and tech 'news' sites.

Also, they figure, 'hey, the newest fedora came out, so people are going to be searching for fedora on google. why not write an article about fedora so our site shows up in the results and we get clicks so people can see our many, many, many ads!'

Its sad. I have a blog where I write about things that I care about. I have no trackers, no cookies, no ads. I am not looking for ANY revenue. I just want to share my opinion.

But people will monetize anything that they can, and it generally ruins things IMO. Oh well.