Linux popularity contest....not very accurate, but anyway :)

[karellen]

I've found this article some minutes ago and thought that people around here would be interested in seeing the changing over time of the main linux distro, the ones they fade away and the ones they climb up (ubuntu ;) )
http://useopensource.blogspot.com/2007/03/unscientific-linux-popularity-contest.html

[1/0]

Interesting! I think there will be lots of changes in the future as well.

I just switched from Gentoo after some 3-4 years (used RedHat, Mandrake/Mandriva, Knoppix, SuSE, Debian, Arch, LFS before that). Portage (the package manager) is a great tool but developers has lost control so an update can crash your computer if you don't update all configs properly and even then things go bad. You will have to update a few times a week. That plus the recent mobbing of Daniel Robbins and some more led to a bad atmosphere. Unless they do something fast Gentoo is going down.

The bad thing though, is that Gentoo is build on a good concept (Daniel Robbins) that I think many other distros lack. Why is most distributions built on i586 or even i386? It seems to me that most people don't use the Pentium 1 any more. Not the 486 or 386 and especially not the 286. It seems to me that those who still use them would install something like Damn Small Linux instead. And why all the dependencies. I'm never gonna install KDE so why the dependencies? I don't know exactly how much speed you gain by optimizing gcc and so on but it shouldn't be difficult to do the change. I also miss updating to a new version by one command line. No CDs and that stuff, just one line.

That's one of the reasons I think there's going to be a change of the most popular distros and that's gonna be fun to watch! Most of us are distro junkies anyway!

[karellen]

in the era of easy-to-use almost out of the box distros gentoo is far too less appealing to many potential linux users, but I guess it will have his highly loyal users that like to tinker their system and compile things from scratch
of course, there is sabayon...:)

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Yes, I've been looking at Sabayon *drewl* but I needed a Gentoo break. Its the packages in portage that sometimes are badly tested and maintained that creates problems. The developers even removed XMMS without much notice... On the other hand you have everything there: win32codecs, acroread, real/helix, AA, ET, a.s.o.

But Gentoo isn't easy to use. But what says it has to be difficult to create a somewhat optimized distro? Why not an i686 optimized Xubuntu that skips the KDE dependencies, or an i686 optimized Kubuntu without the GNOME dependencies? I think the lack of a really good installer is the problem. All the hassle to get acroread, win32codecs, a.s.o.