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Thread: Wikimedia traffic analysis...Ubuntu 70 times more popular than Mint?

  1. #1
    Join Date
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    Ubuntu Development Release

    Wikimedia traffic analysis...Ubuntu 70 times more popular than Mint?

    So Mint apparently is the most popular distro according to Distrowatch (and has been for sometime now)...but something seems VERY wrong with those stats. Ubuntu has/had such a huge market share of Linux that for Mint to overtake Ubuntu, one of two things had to happen...(1) Ubuntu users had to jump ship en masse, which judging by this forum/IRC/news activity has not been the case, or (2) Mint is attracting millions of new users to Linux, which considering they do no marketing whatsoever, that would be hard to believe.

    So I check out the monthly Wikimedia stats, which are probably are much more reliable way of measuring popularity...and, excluding Android and "Linux Other", Ubuntu is 24 times more popular than the 2nd place distro (Fedora) and 70 times more popular than Mint. Below, I only listed distros that registered at least 0.01% of the requests.

    Code:
    Distro        Requests    Percent
    Ubuntu        1,004 M     0.71%
    Fedora        49.1 M      0.03%
    SUSE          30.8 M      0.02%
    Debian        17.9 M      0.01%
    Linux Mint    14.7 M      0.01%
    Of course, all this begs the question: is there a reliable measure of Linux distro usage? Clearly Distrowatch is flawed as it can be easily manipulated by the media, bot nets, the Distrowatch site itself, etc...
    "The Linux philosophy is laugh in the face of danger. Oops. Wrong one. Do it yourself. That's it." --Linus Torvalds

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Feb 2011
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    Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn

    Re: Wikimedia traffic analysis...Ubuntu 70 times more popular than Mint?

    I don't understand why people keep using DistroWatch to evaluate the popularity of Linux distros, or even slightly mentioning it in a popularity context (like your posts, no offense). DistroWatch merely shows the page hits of a distro. Linux Mint at the top of DistroWatch means that DistroWatch visitors is interested in Mint, that's all.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    May 2012
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    38

    Re: Wikimedia traffic analysis...Ubuntu 70 times more popular than Mint?

    I bet I'm a third of those hits doing massive online
    searches for my problems.

  4. #4
    Join Date
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    Denmark - Scandinavia
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    Ubuntu Budgie Development Release

    Re: Wikimedia traffic analysis...Ubuntu 70 times more popular than Mint?

    Quote Originally Posted by zombifier25 View Post
    I don't understand why people keep using DistroWatch to evaluate the popularity of Linux distros, or even slightly mentioning it in a popularity context (like your posts, no offense). DistroWatch merely shows the page hits of a distro. Linux Mint at the top of DistroWatch means that DistroWatch visitors is interested in Mint, that's all.
    +1

    Moved to recurring.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
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    Distro
    Ubuntu

    Re: Wikimedia traffic analysis...Ubuntu 70 times more popular than Mint?

    Distrowatch is a terrible indicator of popularity, as it merely counts page hits, and most of the numbers are so low that it's easy to manipulate. In real life usage, Ubuntu is more popular than every other type of Linux combined (probably several times over). If there's ever going to be a 'year of the Linux desktop', it'll be because of Ubuntu.

  6. #6
    Join Date
    Nov 2009
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    Los Angeles
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    Ubuntu

    Re: Wikimedia traffic analysis...Ubuntu 70 times more popular than Mint?

    The Wikimedia stats are reflective of the trends shown at Alexa:

    Ubuntu.com - rank: 1269; inbound: 51,641
    http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ubuntu.com

    LinuxMint.com rank: 7035; inbound: 7,568
    http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/linuxmint.com

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Jan 2007
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    6,537
    Distro
    Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail

    Re: Wikimedia traffic analysis...Ubuntu 70 times more popular than Mint?

    Quote Originally Posted by Version Dependency View Post
    is there a reliable measure of Linux distro usage?
    No. DistroWatch is meangingless. The only people who really have any kind of clue about how many users they have are the distros themselves by counting hits on their repos (and even that has obvious flaws).

    It's hard enough trying to gauge the level of Linux use itself, trying to refine that down to individual distros is even harder.

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