Get counted

[fheinsen]

As some in these forums know, http://distrowatch.com monitors the number of hits per day it receives from unique IP addresses for each of the Linux distributions it tracks, and then ranks these distributions daily according to their popularity. Ubuntu is currently #1 on the list with 2,700 hits per day, but I believe that this figure severely understates Ubuntu's true popularity, because many, if not most, Ubuntu users are new to Linux and probably have never even heard of or visited http://distrowatch.com.

If you would like your machine to be accurately counted, all you need to do is open Firefox, click Edit -> Preferences -> General, and add the following text at the end of your home location(s):

|http://distrowatch.com (The "|" is important. For example, if your home location is "http://google.com", after the change your home locations would be "http://google.com|http://distrowatch.com" -- each site would be opened in its own tab whenever Firefox is launched.)

If each of the nearly 50,000 registered members in these forums (and the countless unregistered visitors that come every day) were similarly counted, Ubuntu's ranking would go up by at least an order of magnitude, thereby helping distrowatch more accurately measure Ubuntu's true popularity.

[Brunellus]

do you *really* want to feed the anti-ubuntu camp this kind of red meat? There have been baseless allegations of distrowatch counter "ballotstuffing" by ubuntu users (and ubuntuforums members) since at least version 4.10 (warty).

[KiwiNZ]

That is not what we should be promoting. Ubuntu does not need to fudge the results in such a way .

Anyway the Distro watch count has nothing to do with how good a distro is , it is simply counting hits on a website.