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1 • CDEbuntu (by cde1993ftw on 2012-08-13 09:54:12 GMT from United States)
I detest Unity but don't wanna use LXDE. Soooooo glad there's another FOSS choice now. All my favorite lesstif apps will look so 1990s-spiffy even though I don't think I've used CDE since around the time Kurt Cobain died. Gosh, I haven't built emacs against lesstif in ages...
2 • Peppermit (by Wine Curmudgeon on 2012-08-13 10:46:16 GMT from United States)
Another right on review, Jesse. I've had the same reaction to Peppermint -- nothing really wrong with it, but I feel more comfortable with Watt or Lubuntu.
3 • Debian and Xfce (by Koroshiya Itchy on 2012-08-13 10:47:28 GMT from Belgium)
I think that switching to Xfce as the default desktop environment is a sensible move. I believe that right now Xfce offers the best balance between size/resource economy on one hand and usability/features/familiarity on the other. It is also more mature and stable a project than other alternatives.
I also hope that if Debian finally adopts Xfce as default DE that will also help to boost the it development and, namely, to implement the two or three features it is still missing.
4 • Bodhi (by Blammo on 2012-08-13 10:58:37 GMT from Costa Rica)
Having been in linuxland since Storm, I finally settled in with Bodhi. I really like E17 with Jeff's twist. If you're an XFCE guy look no farther than Saline.
I've tried them all. These two are the way to go unless you want MallNinja-OS. Pinguy has that covered !
5 • Debian (by greg on 2012-08-13 11:24:30 GMT from Slovenia)
That is good news. I like XFCE. Chrunchbang had a very good version but they focused on Openbox (it's hard for one person to maintain two DE i guess). And as comment 3 i too hope this will help improve a few things in XFCE as well.
6 • CDE (by Arshad on 2012-08-13 11:28:13 GMT from Bangladesh)
I miss CDE from my solaris days. Cant wait to see it incorporated in one of the distros in the near future.
7 • Rosa 'Gnome' (by Dave Postles on 2012-08-13 11:40:17 GMT from United Kingdom)
It's a heavy desktop, of course, but I quite like it - with a Cairo dock for most-used applications instead of the bottom panel, and a change of wallpaper.
8 • Another Plug for Bodhi (by Candide on 2012-08-13 12:46:43 GMT from Taiwan)
I agree with number 4: I'm giving Bodhi the thumbs-up. After a bit of procrastination, I just installed it today and am running it now. I probably should evaluate it for a few days before giving my endorsement, and thus avoid any foot-in-mouth statements, but so far so good. It just amazes me that more distros haven't latched onto this idea of running Enlightenment as a desktop environment. Enlightenment blows Unity and Gnome 3 away.
9 • CDE/XFCE (by vw72 on 2012-08-13 13:17:13 GMT from United States)
When XFCE first came out, it mimicked, quite well, the CDE interface. Since then, it has moved on to look more like Gnome 2. However all of the parts are still there so that XFCE can easily be configured to look and operate like CDE (although without using Motif).
10 • Migrating Outlook mails to Thunderbirf (by Fred R. on 2012-08-13 13:38:05 GMT from France)
The best way I found to migrate mails within Outlook, to Thunderbird, is to use... Outlook ! And an IMAP account.
In Outlook, configure an IMAP account (Gmail for example, but be sure to check IMAP is properly activated) along with your classic configuration.
Then move any emails from Outlook to this account. Moving 1 folder after another may be clever, as it may take some time.
When IMAP is full and Outlook empty, you get your emails, and are free to use them with a web interface or Thunderbird/Evolution.
Personnally, I have a Gmail account dedicated to backup all my professsional emails.
And I never used an "heavy" email client for more more than 10 years !
11 • Peppermint (by Hollandhook on 2012-08-13 14:27:18 GMT from Mexico)
Counting the Ice release, I've used Peppermint in four releases ever since it was first introduced, on an older laptop and an up to date desktop. I can count on one hand the number of times anything has acted up. It's that steady and it's quick and smooth. It's kept updated and fresh. Just install the few applications you actually use in life and you've got a great system. If you think you need everything under the sun, of course, Peppermint may not be a great choice. But if you want something fast and light, I can recommend it very highly.
12 • Mageia (by alonso on 2012-08-13 14:37:31 GMT from Sweden)
What is wrong with page rank and Magiea ?
No review, no news, nor a fresh version and it is still climbing to rank #2 or rank #1 in one week ...
cheaters around ????
13 • E-Mail (by DonM on 2012-08-13 15:11:54 GMT from United States)
I wonder if I'm being paranoid or not. I've been a 'buntu fan and I admire all that they have done. At least up to Unity. However 12.04 is at best awkward, slow and not at all intuitive to use, to say the very least. So I've been looking for an alternative that I can live with. Having tried many of the 'buntu based distros, I have not yet found one which will support evolution. All seem to be broken in the kernel. It almost seems to be deliberate. Since I really do need the calendar function as well as rest of evolution, I have not been able to find an alternative that doesn't break evolution. Thunderbird is not an alternative, since I haven't been able to get lightning to work either. So; paranoid or just poor luck?
-DonM
14 • re 12 - Mageia (by corneliu on 2012-08-13 15:55:31 GMT from Canada)
That's the wrong question. A good question would be:
"What's wrong with Ubuntu?"
and the answer would be:
"Unity."
Why is Mint doing so well compared to Ubuntu? Why is Mageia doing so well compared to Ubuntu?
Mint has Cinnamon and Mate, Mageia has KDE
There is nothing wrong with Mageia. There are no reviews and no news, but people like you keep it in the news. The controversy stirred by you when you accuse Mageia of cheating, that controversy makes Mageia more intriguing, more mysterious. People want to know, why is Mageia doing so well? Could it be because of its quality?
15 • E-mail (by Hendrik on 2012-08-13 15:58:33 GMT from Netherlands)
in any distro i mean any its possiblle to ad evolution, and get it up and running.
if it isn`t the case there is intervention with one or another you have installed.
in all distro`s i have used (many) ubuntu based i just downloaded it installed it and it works great!
16 • Debian DE (by Joseph on 2012-08-13 16:34:32 GMT from India)
I feel that LXDE would be the best Desktop Environment as it is more lightweight and faster than XFCE. XFCE is becoming more and more bloated.
17 • Evolution (by DonM on 2012-08-13 16:42:42 GMT from United States)
Hendrik
I assume the breakage on evolution is in the kernel, since it works fine in Ubuntu 12.04. But is broken in Mint 13 and many others. (all I have tried, and that's a lot)
DonM
18 • CDE in the 90's? (by Luke on 2012-08-13 17:00:20 GMT from United States)
Try working at an aerospace engineering firm. I used CDE at my previous job on some real-time Solaris 8 boxes less than two years ago!
19 • Evolution (by Jesse on 2012-08-13 17:09:32 GMT from Canada)
>> "I assume the breakage on evolution is in the kernel, since it works fine in Ubuntu 12.04. But is broken in Mint 13 and many others."
That seems unlikely as I think Mint and Ubuntu currently use the same kernel. Also, if the distro installs on your computer, but only fails to install Evolution, that indicates the kernel is working fine, but you've got some other conflict on the system. You also mentioned you couldn't get Lightning to install either, which seems highly unusual. My guess is if there is a problem with all those distributions, then either your system is really short on memory or you're missing a step in the install/setup process. You might want to try launching the software from a console and reporting the results on Launchpad. I've set up e-mails clients on the same distributions you've tested and they all worked fine here.
20 • debian & xfce (by Roland on 2012-08-13 18:09:05 GMT from United States)
This change is a good idea, but it's being made for the wrong reason. Why is any release allowing itself to be restrained by the size of a CD? DVD readers are about to become antiques. Nowadays using 'unetbootin' and a thumbdrive is the way to go. Any ISO that requires 'dd' to thumbdrive (destroying a useful filesystem) and won't work with 'unetbootin' is IMHO broken. And why don't they include the language packs? I would much rather download a larger ISO while I sleep using 'at' and 'wget', than twiddle my thumbs during every install. What's debian's target userbase--antique computers?
21 • Around The Web... (by Vukota on 2012-08-13 18:49:03 GMT from United States)
Interresting DWW and refreshing addition of "Around The Web" section.
22 • debian & xfce (by JmK on 2012-08-13 18:50:22 GMT from Sweden)
Roland: Are you sure that all 11 officiell(+ 12 unofficial) ports Debian supports can boot from USB or even frrom large DVD's for that matter?
23 • @12, re14 (by Bam on 2012-08-13 19:04:25 GMT from United States)
@12 you are absolutly correct.
re: 14 that is bougus logic.
24 • Re:Page hit rankings and Debian cd installs (by Eddie on 2012-08-13 19:06:53 GMT from United States)
@12 & 14, The page hit rankings are not to be taken serious. That is a shame because when people start looking into Linux they usually end up here. They look at the rankings and automatically think that the numbers go hand in hand with the quality of a distro. After being involved with Linux for a while they realize that they are for entertainment purposes only. :)
@20, The change is irrelevant. If it's offered in the repos then there is no good reason to change just to put the install disc on a cd. A thumbrive is the best way to go for installing a distro. Anyway Debian is a great base with which you can build a distro on. That is the only target base they need to concern themselves with. As a stand alone distro there are many more better alternatives to choose from and many of them are built off of Debian. So there you go.
25 • re 23 (by corneliu on 2012-08-13 19:50:00 GMT from Canada)
Bam, you are cute :-)
26 • CD size (by Jesse on 2012-08-13 19:58:16 GMT from Canada)
>> "Why is any release allowing itself to be restrained by the size of a CD?"
This question come up a lot and it surprises me how many people are stuck in their own (technology) bubble. A large portion of the world still does not have reliable nor high speed Internet access. Much of the world that does have reliable high speed also deals with restrictive data caps. Keeping the size of the distribution ISO under 700MB isn't just for technical reasons (ie targeting older computers with CD drives), it's probably primarily because smaller downloads are still strongly preferred by the majority of the world's population.
Some people are probably thinking, "Then download the tiny net-install image." However, net-install has a lot of similar drawbacks as it requires a reliable Internet connection and is only efficient for single installs, not multiple installs across multiple machines. Further, net-install takes up exclusive control of the computer while downloading a CD ISO in the background allows the user to perform other tasks while downloading.
In short, for most of the people in the world, a small CD which includes a fully functional base install is by far the best solution. If you aren't one of them, Debian supplies full sized DVD images too. Debian is doing a good job of appealing to all three camps (full DVD, net-install and CD-sized ISOs). They should be applauded for their efforts.
27 • Peppermint (by tom from Oz on 2012-08-13 20:52:54 GMT from Australia)
Thanks for the Peppermint 3 review. I hope it is as good as Peppermint OS 2. I have been using Peppermint 2 on an Asus EEE 1016 PC with IGB RAM and have to say that Peppermint 2 has always been reliable, fast and lightweight. I removed all the cloud links and have installed some of the programmes available on software manager. I look forward to trying Peppermint OS3.
28 • @26 CD size (by rick on 2012-08-13 21:06:42 GMT from United States)
TRUE!...in my case. I have a 1Mbps (small "b") dl speed (which in reality is only about 128 kbps) and it takes about 1 1/2 hours to dl a 700m iso. I like testing new distros, but a lot of newer flavors are hitting 2+ GB with far more pre-loaded software than I will ever want. It would take me about 8, 10, maybe 12 hours to dl an iso that I might not even like. If they're small, 1.5 GB and under, I'll give it a try. But for now, I'm hooked on Madbox 12.04 and I don't think anything will come along to change my mind about leaving this one anytime soon.
29 • Page hit rankings & miscellanea (by :wq on 2012-08-13 21:11:41 GMT from Germany)
@12 You aren't the only person to notice the meteoric ascension. I have yet to see an explanation given citing legitimate interest that even approaches adequacy in explaining the sudden uptick of the last few weeks. I in no way suspect anyone directly involved with Mageia, it is likely just an overexuberant actor who thinks they are acting in Mageia's favor. It doesn't really matter, as there is nothing particularly stupendous about the page hit ranking, despite its (repeated) misapplication in forum discussions and articles written on Linux distributions. Page hit ranking is revered by some to an extent that I wonder if it actually has begun to detract from the overall DistroWatch experience.
I hope this comment will not be deleted, as it is not my intent to incite controversy; I wish the Mageia community the best with their distribution and, based on my own experience, I think they are doing decent work, but I felt the need to lend a little solidarity to others who have commented on the striking increase in HPD.
On to other matters...
I echo the comments of some others in welcoming Debian's change in default desktop.
I hope Digia's acquisition of Qt works out for the best (for the community), but I'm not on the love train just yet.
30 • Debian & XFCE (by Edna Crabapple on 2012-08-13 21:41:03 GMT from United States)
I have to agree with the others who feel Debian's adoption of XFCE as the default DE is bound to be of benefit to XFCE.
XFCE has a lot to like, and is the closest alternative to Gnome 2 for many of us.
There is a lot of room for improvement though. And any increase in the popularity of XFCE due to Debian might be the catalyst that spurs these improvements.
And hopefully this will be also be a kick in the behind to spur the Thunar dev's on as well... :-)
31 • Transferring email to Linux (by Thunderbird on 2012-08-13 21:53:57 GMT from Singapore)
Wrong to introduce Thunderbird to your readers since Mozilla had officially stated that development of Thundebird will be slowed down (bluntly put, to none).
32 • Iso sizes (by claudecat on 2012-08-13 22:17:31 GMT from United States)
I agree with Jesse for the most part, but I do find it useful when Libreoffice, vlc, a torrent client, image editor, etc are on the iso. Makes for a bigger initial download, but saves one from having to grab these things after install - especially if one is installing to multiple machines.
My pet peeve is the practice of providing isos that immediately require massive updates, even before refreshing repositories. The recently released Mint 13 KDE is a prime example - it comes with the original kernel from Ubuntu 12.04 as opposed to the one current as of the time of the release (as but one example of outdated software on the iso). I'd love it if they could include all updates as of the time of release, or as near as is practical. 5Gb of download cap gets eaten away very quickly indeed, and anything that distro providers can do to alleviate that would be greatly appreciated.
33 • Debian CD, Thunderbird. (by Anonymous Coward on 2012-08-13 22:24:53 GMT from Spain)
Jesse wrote:
-----------------------------------
Keeping the size of the distribution ISO under 700MB isn't just for technical reasons (ie targeting older computers with CD drives), it's probably primarily because smaller downloads are still strongly preferred by the majority of the world's population.
-----------------------------------
I could not have explained better. Even when I am a DVD user myself, sometimes CD images are a lot more convenient. A system which claims to be "universal" should not happily kick out CD. It would defeat the point of it.
Eddie wrote:
------------------------------------
Anyway Debian is a great base with which you can build a distro on. That is the only target base they need to concern themselves with. As a stand alone distro there are many more better alternatives to choose from and many of them are built off of Debian.
-------------------------------------
It is a funny stereotype I read every now and then.
Debian is surely a nice distribution to take as a base for building new distributions, but this does not mean is has not normal users. Many use it as "stand alone" system, and they have their reasons to do so. In fact, I would bet most Debian users are no distribution developers.
Thunderbird wrote:
--------------------------------------
Wrong to introduce Thunderbird to your readers since Mozilla had officially stated that development of Thundebird will be slowed down (bluntly put, to none).
--------------------------------------
So what?
Thunderbird is still a popular application, and is a maintained one. Email client world has not changed enough to justify constant fiddling on Thunderbird other than maintenance fixes.
When a piece of software needs no new features and only receives bug fixes, it is surely as close to perfection as it could be. This point should be the objective of more application developers, instead of constant development (read: experimenting and breaking things).
34 • Peppermint (by Marti on 2012-08-13 23:24:55 GMT from United States)
Peppermint Ice was on my laptop and I was devastated to learn it would be discontinued. I did put OpenOffice, and the libdvd stuff, but it was WICKEDLY fast on everything: boot-up, launch apps, shutdown. I downloaded iso for Peppermint 3 and it, as sneeklylinux on youtube says, "does what it says on the tin". I decided to go with a new LiveCD with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and the Equinox DE. Not as fast on boot-up, but familiar DE look, apps work, and a 5 year stable OS. In my mind: Ice lives on; long live the Ice.
35 • Oz Unity Black Opal (by Alex on 2012-08-13 23:26:12 GMT from United States)
Al last something really excellent! Black Opal was released quite sometime ago an done of the best and polished Ubuntu based distros available today. Try and see, you'd never go for another Ubuntu derivative!
36 • RE: #18 CDE (by A. Non Ymous on 2012-08-13 23:27:32 GMT from United States)
2012. In March, before I left a federal building I will not name, I had a Sun box, Solaris 8. CDE.
37 • OZ Unity (by jo13 on 2012-08-13 23:28:01 GMT from Indonesia)
i have been try this one, but right now it's only for 64 bit, user who want to run on 32 bit don't get that, really mess. and this one like ultimate edition. fully software and good for newcomers!
38 • CDE to be *GPLd? (by sum know buddy on 2012-08-13 23:30:50 GMT from Russian Federation)
So an ancient desktop is finally getting the license all the kewl kids wanted it to have, when it was shiny and cutting edge? What could possibly go right?
Well, at least somebody at Lenovo finally opened the suggestion box that came with the filing cabinets from IBM.
39 • HPD fraud (by FactChecker on 2012-08-13 23:33:07 GMT from United States)
@12, 14, 23, & 24
Anyone who knows anything knows that DW "HPD" statistics are incredibly easy to spoof. They have been massively spoofed in the past (*koff*PCLOS*koff*), and there is every reason to believe that they are being massively spoofed now.
This point has been made very compellingly in the Mageia forums, but no one there is actually listening. They are too busy congratulating themselves on the success of their "campaign."
Link: https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1537&start=25#p17803
HPD is simply too tainted to be a valid or useful indicator of anything: not quality, and not even popularity. If HPD were a valid metric, it would correlate well with other metrics that are harder to spoof (which it does not, and never has).
@24 said it best: HPD is "entertainment only," just like the astrology column in your local newspaper.
40 • debian's CD images (by cflow on 2012-08-13 23:34:09 GMT from United States)
Somehow, the excuse to make XFCE default due to CD size restraints tells me something: they are conservative about the compression tools they use in their ISO, as well as in their packages. I once installed the main CD of debian squeeze, and it didn't have nearly the amount of software in it that other main distros, like openSUSE, Fedora and Ubuntu had. It was a rather minimalist gnome 2 setup. I've also found that Debian's packages have a 10-25% larger download size than the other distros as well. I think the trade-off is probably stability in the installation processes, which would make sense.
Also, I know there is an "alternative" first CD in squeeze that has a KDE setup, as well as one that includes both XFCE and LXDE. Knowing this, I would hope that they could do a Gnome CD like that despite this switch in the default. If not, then their reason to switch desktops would go way beyond the ISO size!
41 • A few thoughts (by That Dude on 2012-08-13 23:52:44 GMT from United States)
On Distro ranking: I listen too about 15 different linux podcast and read about 30 different linux related web sites over a monthly period. I have yet to hear or read anything loving or hating Mageia on a regular basis. Where's the "tip & tricks" or "top 5 things to install" articles you normal get when a distro gets real popular. If might be good, but its cheerleaders have not convinced the linux media that it is. Distrowatch is the only place I'm even reminded that distro exist. With that said, It crashed twice on install, an update messed up confige files in firefox and thunderbird (never seen that before), and mobile-broad band was a headache to get working.
Debian: Love the CD sized and XFCE decision. Hate the on going FSF direction. I choose practicality over ideology, but that just me.
Gmone3: Removing it as the default is the best way to show lack of confidence. How many forks and default exclusions is it gonna take for these developers to understand they are going in the wrong direction. There's a special kind of arrogance when you start thinking my way to use a computer is the only way. I'm not a huge KDE fan, but they did it the right way. They gave people a choice.
PeppermentOS is good, no complaints. Everything worked. great for the majority of non techy normal users that surf and check email. Since we, the readers of distrowatch are not normal people. This OS will not fit the majority of our techy needs.
Enlightenment: the easy to configure options are great. Bodhi is a good distro to showcase this DE. I'm playing around with Sabayon & Arch using enlightenment and its crazy fun/fast on a core I7.
42 • Thunderbird (by Jesse on 2012-08-14 00:52:16 GMT from Canada)
>> "Wrong to introduce Thunderbird to your readers since Mozilla had officially stated that development of Thundebird will be slowed down (bluntly put, to none)."
Rumours of Thunderbird's development stopping are entirely inaccurate. There is a small core development team actively working on Thunderbird. It isn't going anywhere. Don't take my word for it, look at their impressive changlog for the next release.
43 • @39 HPD fraud (by Thomas Mueller on 2012-08-14 03:21:10 GMT from United States)
It looks like HPD refers to Page Hit Rankings, though I can't really rationalize HPD acronym. Anyway, I think Page Hit Rankings are based solely on how many people click on (or otherwise activate) http://distrowatch.com/<distro-name>/ . Is this correct?
Going directly to the distro's web site would have no effect on the Page Hit Ranking. Is this correct? If somebody wanted to find what FreeBSD (for instance) is all about, I would tell them to go to http://www.freebsd.org/ , and I have no hard feelings against DistroWatch.
I also want to mention quickly, regarding (Mozilla) Thunderbird, I prefer to have all Mozilla applications in one suite (namely, SeaMonkey) which includes web browser, mail and news, IRC, composer, and did I miss anything?
44 • @43 (by Magnus on 2012-08-14 04:20:48 GMT from United States)
http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity gives an explanation.
Unfortunately there are still ways in which the HPD can be manipulated. Some people seem to think that manipulating the page hit rankings serves as good advertising for their distribution(s) of choice. This can lead to several issues, such as: 1) some people new to open source operating systems who come across DistroWatch.com will overestimate the purpose and validity of the page hit rankings and will use them as a guide to gauge the merit of various distributions. 2) Reporters often trumpet the page hit rankings as a somewhat definitive metric, and pass it along to their readers. For example, had Mageia not been bumped in the rankings, would the article http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/258760/mageia_a_linux_distro_on_the_rise.html still have been written?
45 • migrating email from Outlook (by greenpossum on 2012-08-14 05:32:25 GMT from Australia)
Another way is to install Thunderbird on Windows, accept its offer to import your email from Outlook, and then once you can access email in Windows TB, copy the TB folders over to Linux, then tell Linux TB where the folder directory is. A search will find you howtos for the last step.
46 • Debian defaults to Xfce :-) (by Bobby Hunter on 2012-08-14 05:45:41 GMT from United States)
RE: Debian will default to XFCE:
WooHOOOOOOO!!!!! YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES!!!!!
**ahem***
Did I mention I am pleased by this decision ?
47 • Debian Xfce (by Bobak Ferdowsi on 2012-08-14 05:51:49 GMT from United Kingdom)
One missing feature for Xfce is a theme manager. Here's one I'm happily using:-
http://xfce-look.org/content/show.php/Xfce-Theme-Manager?content=149647
48 • @16 Debian DE (by greg on 2012-08-14 07:51:31 GMT from Slovenia)
16 • Debian DE (by Joseph on 2012-08-13 16:34:32 GMT from India)
I feel that LXDE would be the best Desktop Environment as it is more lightweight and faster than XFCE. XFCE is becoming more and more bloated.
----
Problem with LXDE is that it is not as mature as XFCE. plenty features are missing and plenty DE programmes have not yet reached 1.0 version. Since Debian is about stability...
49 • @43 HPD = Page Hit Rankings (by DavidEF on 2012-08-14 12:15:25 GMT from United States)
You are right that HPD indicates the Page Hit Rankings. It's funny you don't get the acronym. Hits Per Day. That is what the Page Hit Rankings are specifically following - the number of hits per day.
But yeah - it is being spoofed. Too bad, I'd like it if there was at least a little validity to the rankings. I thought what #39 FactChecker said "...just like the astrology column in your local newspaper." really summed it up nicely. Unfortunately, there are people who believe those too.
50 • @45 (by gumb on 2012-08-14 12:48:51 GMT from France)
@greenpossum I'm pretty sure I went about migrating from Outlook to Thunderbird in a similar way, and to be honest the above procedure would probably have frightened me off. It was back in 2005 and I don't recall too well, but it was basically a two-step process. Install Thunderbird under Windows and transition to that first (there may have been a PST file converter I used under Outlook, I'm not sure TB had a direct import facility at that time).
Once everything was running smoothly with TB under Windows, it was easy to copy the folders and point the Linux TB installation to them. Indeed, I think I had them on a shared FAT32 partition so I didn't need to copy them, though it would be wise to make a back-up first.
51 • @50 (by greenpossum on 2012-08-14 13:58:21 GMT from Australia)
The reason TB can import Outlook mail natively under Windows is because it uses the Windows shared libraries. I've done this procedure a couple of times for friends so I know it works. There is no risk since TB's mail folder is a copy of the Outlook PST and furthermore the Linux folder is a copy so you don't have to delete anything until you are satisfied it works.
52 • HPD (by mcellius on 2012-08-14 14:51:35 GMT from United States)
DavidEF: You don't believe the astrology columns? I'm shocked and appalled! ;)
It does seem funny to me that just about everyone here realizes that the HPD are bogus, yet some of the reporters are so lazy and uninterested in knowing the truth that they write whole articles based on such misleading and false information. Actually, a useful column might actually deal with uncovering the truth about those numbers, including how they are manipulated and if there any distros whose supporters engage in it. I'm sure there's evidence in the data.
53 • HPD and Astrology (by DavidEF on 2012-08-14 15:09:53 GMT from United States)
If we could only get some Astrology columns to say something along the lines "Don't be fooled by HPD." we could reach everyone! Anybody have connections with a major newspaper?
54 • CDE (by Nick on 2012-08-14 18:43:16 GMT from United Kingdom)
Is CDE going to be a viable alternative to GNOME etc. in the near future? Does it have its own file browser / image viewer, etc. or will it use GTK+ or QT ones? It looks even less resource-hungrey than LXDE.
55 • Re: 54 CDE (by paroxysm on 2012-08-14 21:12:59 GMT from United States)
I'm sorely tempted to go ahead and say no, but I guess it depends on what you consider viable to be. "CDE for Linux is currently Alpha Quality. CDE for other platforms is unknown/untested." (http://sourceforge.net/p/cdesktopenv/wiki/Home/)
File manager
dtfile- http://cdesktopenv.sourceforge.net/man1/dtfile.html
Image viewer
I do not know if something like dximageview (http://h30097.www3.hp.com/docs/base_doc/DOCUMENTATION/V51B_HTML/MAN/MAN1/0106___X.HTM) or sdtimage (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19455-01/806-1360/6jalch34h/index.html) will be included at some point.
56 • HPD "clickfraud" (by FactChecker on 2012-08-15 00:44:28 GMT from United States)
@52: Yes, mcellius, there's a fairly strong, data-driven way to spot DW "click fraud." Simply compare a distro's HPD ranking with its ranking on other, harder-to-spoof measures.
For instance, if Mint is truly the most popular Linux distro on the planet, you'd expect it to be #1 on some other measure, too (such as Google traffic, total site traffic, or number of backlinks). And yet, mysteriously enough, Mint isn't even in the top 3 on any one of those measures.
What conclusion you draw probably depends largely on whether you run Mint. ;)
57 • re: HPD "clickfraud" (by mcellius on 2012-08-15 02:57:39 GMT from United States)
@56
I looked at a couple, and you're right! I'm not sure how accurate those statistics are, either, but even if they're quite inaccurate the numbers are sufficient to raise questions about Mint's numbers on the HPD. For example, Wikimedia's numbers show Ubuntu with 79.2 times the traffic of Mint! It always seemed obvious that HPD was wrong, but I hadn't expected that degree of, um, misrepresentation. However, most of the statistics I saw don't break Linux down by distro.
Are there any such sites that are considered particularly accurate or reliable? It's clear that HPD is, as DavedEF pointed out, about as good as the astrology column in a newspaper, but what might be a pretty good source of such information?
58 • HPD/PHR (by Landor on 2012-08-15 03:45:18 GMT from Canada)
This is a topic Ladislav doesn't like at all. He's come to believe that they do indeed have some merit within our community, and they are an accurate measure that shows interest, at least on this site.
I don't, for either.
I've never believed Mint to be massive in the numbers, nor did I believe PCLOS to be either. Now another one is on a massive rise for no reason? Amusing.
There's been people who have openly admitted to padding the numbers here, though that could have just been hot air.
I haven't even looked at that ranking in about 6 or so years. What makes it worse is people paying more attention to it than it deserves. Ladislav needs it as another measure on how popular his site is, which helps him encourage advertising dollars, and gives his site a bit more media coverage. That's how I see exactly what it means, nothing more. Oh, and we go through this about once or twice a year too.
Sorry Ladislav
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
59 • HPD (by Seeker on 2012-08-15 03:53:33 GMT from United States)
Why insist these statistics are inaccurate? Envy? People seeking a distro are likely to look at Mint and Mageia as they search.
Nobody's suggesting HPD reflects their choices, just alternatives they consider. And these are very sensible candidate distros.
60 • RE: 58 HPD/PHR (by ladislav on 2012-08-15 03:59:55 GMT from Taiwan)
This is a topic Ladislav doesn't like at all
Ah, au contraire, I absolutely love it! The topic creates a controversy and it provides much-needed hype for the site. And that, as you said, lures visitors, advertisers and advertising rupees. Just watch as Mageia gets to the top of the ranking - everybody from little blogs to mainstream tech media will soon be writing about it. It's going to be even more fun that we had with Mint last year!
Everybody please keep the DistroWatch PHR talk going. And if you find a bit of time, don't forget to take it to other blogs/forums/mailing lists/social media sites too!
61 • Re: HPD/PHR's Attention (by jxliv7 on 2012-08-15 04:50:34 GMT from United States)
It's just attention. There's probably some old proverb about it, but ask any (child) psychologist - if somebody wants attention, they don't care if it's praise or admonishment, whether other people think it good or bad, favorable or unfavorable. It's still just attention.
Ask any old style news reporter and you'll discover people pay more (pun intended) mind to bad news. Good news is filler and fluff, bad news is what sold newspapers, gets bloggers' irritated and productive, and causes a knee jerk "let's legislate that away" reaction in every politicians' agenda. Not to mention it's what each and every media's viewers, listeners, and readers seem to discuss or have an independent opinion about.
Like ladislav suggests - "'with Mint last year" - this discussion is simply the controversy du jour at DWW. <sigh>
There's probably other applicable proverbs, too... one man's treasure is another man's something or other, to each his own whatever, seek and you might find anything, or whatever Mark Twain said about keeping your mouth shut...
62 • And there you have it... (by jafo on 2012-08-15 05:15:16 GMT from United States)
And there you have it straight from the horse's mouth people.
The HPD controversy generates page hits on distrowatch and results in increased ad revenue.
Perhaps this will now end the endless calls for more accuracy in HPD results, for as you can now plainly see...the resulting controversy is quite welcomed by the site's owner and could perhaps even be by design.
63 • re: HPD "clickfraud" (by FactChecker on 2012-08-15 05:07:13 GMT from United States)
@ mcellius, There really isn't a single vetted source for accurate distro popularity estimates. You have to be willing to "roll your own" from raw data.
And you have to be careful about forming any *distro-specific* conclusions based on Web server logs (Wikipedia's, or anyone else's). Only old/rare browsers (on any distro) include distro information as part of the UA string. In other words, any modern browser simply says "Linux," and does not specify "Mint" or "Ubuntu." So some portion of that 78-fold difference you see @ Wikipedia is simply saying something really boring like, "Ubuntu has (a lot) more older installations than Mint." Wikipedia is great for answering "big" questions, but not so much the smaller-scale stuff.
@59 For the same reason I "insist" on believing in that the sky is blue, or that grass is green. :)
And hey, the "astrology column" analogy is mine, dammnit. Don't go giving it away.
64 • @60 Ladislav (by Pearson on 2012-08-15 12:53:10 GMT from United States)
Ladislav, do I detect a bit of sarcasm in your post? I chuckled when I read that.
While I'm sure you don't mind the extra attention "controversies" bring, I also believe that the HPD helps you, and others, know how people are using your site. You've described it many times before, including what it does *not* represent.
65 • RE: 58 (by Landor on 2012-08-15 15:08:31 GMT from Canada)
I had to laugh at the guy who posted #62. 'There you have it' was amusing indeed. People will swallow anything.
We've discussed this before Ladislav, and you've even deleted comments about it before, so I won't be surprised if you now. You knew what I meant, or should have, the problem was I didn't elaborate on why because from experience I felt the comment would get deleted.
Because of all that drama, you 'cannot' (Jafo, read that word a number of times) have it heavily discussed and it become public that the numbers here are being severely padded. If that happens people (advertisers) will put into question the validity of your site, it's true visitors, and why they're spending money here. Facts are, if you actually did find out that people had been abusing the numbers severely again, as they have in the past, I don't think anyone would ever hear about it.
In the not too distant past you said something that made me smile, and proved to me that there easily could be issues that you indeed were unaware of. You said there was no way for anyone to alter the numbers now.
PHR/HPD is probably one of the least accurate things on the world wide web as a whole.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
66 • @65 - PHR (by fernbap on 2012-08-15 17:04:14 GMT from Portugal)
This entire discussion is getting completely ridiculous.
PHR is exactly what it is. It provides accurate numbers for how many times a page is hit.
And that is all what it is.
It is you, Landor, and many others, that want to give it a meaning that it never had.
Besides, PHR would always be an index for popularity, not for use, so trying to associate PHR to distro use is idiotic. It is not DW that is making that association. It is you, when you say that it is not accurate, that is making it.
It is like blaming the planets for astrology.
67 • Page hits (by mcellius on 2012-08-15 17:41:22 GMT from United States)
@63 I apologize for the misattribution of your comment about the astrology column in the newspaper. I think it was a brilliant comment!
@66 Maybe it's ridiculous, but not for the reasons you state. In the first place, I doubt you actually KNOW that the HPD numbers reported are accurate, although you make the claim. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, but do you have inside information on them? I really doubt that DW lies about them - I'm not making any such accusations - but are you sure that people or groups aren't manipulating them?
Second, the numbers are so far different than those gathered on other sites that there is good reason to question them. Intelligent users should at least question the huge differences. Numbers that vastly disagree invite examination!
Third, I don't think Landor and others are trying to make the HPD numbers have a meaning they aren't designed to provide. It's rather the opposite: there are wild claims aplenty and the attempt is to figure out the real meaning of the numbers so they can be used properly. I think it'd be great to know the real numbers behind distro usage: knowing the truth is far better than believing innaccuracies.
Just like Open Source in general, wouldn't you think we'd all benefit from knowing how the numbers are gathered, having the necessary information so we could know the truth about what is going on, and being able to be sure that they aren't deliberate - or even unintentional - misrepresentations?
68 • @67 (by fernbap on 2012-08-15 18:10:08 GMT from Portugal)
"but are you sure that people or groups aren't manipulating them?"
On the contrary, i'm sure that they are being manipulated (PCLOS and Bodhi comes to mind). That is why i find odd that so many people here are demanding them to be accurate.
As i said, people are blaming the planets for the inaccuracy of astrology.
"Second, the numbers are so far different than those gathered on other site"
It would be odd if they weren't. DW is a very different site, people come here to know about the news and to be directed to distros they want to take a look at.
"Third, I don't think Landor and others are trying to make the HPD numbers have a meaning they aren't designed to provide."
That's exactly what they are doing. Anyone would figure out that the methodology for finding reliable information on distros use would never be a DW hit page. They are making the claim that a hit page on DW should be meaningful and accurate.
I would love to have reliable info on open source distributions use, but i know i won't ever get it from a hit counter at DW. Yes, i agree that i would be awesome if we had that info, but people are trying to find it in the wrong place. The place is not to blame, they are.
69 • @65 (by jafo on 2012-08-15 19:16:46 GMT from United States)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
said by by Landor:
“I had to laugh at the guy who posted #62. 'There you have it' was amusing indeed. People will swallow anything.”
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Indeed they will my friend. And I’m happy I could amuse you, even if only for a moment.
I find it interesting however that you are willing to detect/inject sarcasm in one person’s post, yet not in another’s.
The fact remains that the site owner is either unable or unwilling to correct the inaccuracy of the HPD (or to do away with it altogether), and I certainly believe he is capable of accomplishing either task if he so wished.
Personally I think he is a marketing genius, and the people who continue to bewail the inaccuracies in post after post are playing into his skillful hands.
So I salute Ladislav for his marketing skills, and will continue in amazement at those who choose to make a major issue of a hit counter’s accuracy while simultaneously claiming it doesn’t really matter anyway.
Good day to you sir, and by all means please keep your sense of humor de-iced.
70 • @fernbap #66 and #69 (by DavidEF on 2012-08-15 20:59:20 GMT from United States)
I can't speak for Landor, mcellius, or others, but let me attempt to clear up for you one little distinction that I see. You said:
"PHR is exactly what it is. It provides accurate numbers for how many times a page is hit."
Now, on a microscopic level, your statement is possibly right. It would depend on the assumption that visiting the page is the only way to get a "page hit" counted. Technically, there could be dozens of ways to manipulate that number without ever visiting the page, thus making even your narrow definition wrong.
The bigger issue is that the assumed intention of a page hit counter is to count the times that a page is visited legitimately by persons interested in learning more about a distro, or finding out if a distro has had a recent upgrade, or even downloading an iso, since there are direct download links on the page. There are numerous technical ways to tell if someone is visiting the page 100 or 1000 times a day, and IMHO, there are no legitimate reasons for doing so. Just a little bit of code could at least make the PHR/HPD counter a TAD MORE reliable than in its current state.
And, it's not so much that WE want it or need it to be that way. It's the fact that most reporters/bloggers EXPECT that it's that way, because on OTHER sites it is! So, they use the numbers as if they're meaningful, because they expect that at least a minimal amount of effort has been given to make the numbers meaningful, as at other sites.
Of course, I don't know if any effort has been given to make the numbers meaningful, or how effective those attempts may have been. So I, and Landor, and others largely ignore the numbers, but get a little irritated when other people seem to take the numbers seriously. I would never put up any sort of counter that couldn't be relied upon to count in at least a mildly meaningful way. It's like the buttons at crosswalks that don't do anything, but are only there to make people THINK they have a way to control the crosswalk signal. It's a deception.
71 • @71 - page hit counters (by fernbap on 2012-08-15 21:24:15 GMT from Portugal)
You know, i once tried to write a reliable page hit counter.
The first obvious thing you need to check it the ips from where the hit is coming, and rule out repeated hits from the same ip.
There are other signatures besides the ip that you can use in order to identify the "place" from where the hit is coming.
However, all of those filters can be manipulated, and the "professionals" know them all. A simple bot that uses a pools of proxy servers and manipulated the hptd header will produce many "single" hits.
After spending many hours trying to filter all the methods, i came of with something reliable"ish", and realised that whatever method i used, i would never be able to circunvent any deliberate attempt of manipulation.
So, i started to look at hit counters as something as reliable as the level of the users. The professionals will always be able to manipulate them, whatever you do.
It is the illusion that hit counters can be accurate that is dangerous. They aren't, and never will.
72 • PHR - another perspective (by cflow on 2012-08-15 22:04:06 GMT from United States)
A lot of comments here have questioned the legitimacy of the Distrowatch page-hit-ranking - not so much whether if it tells real usage, but more about how they should be treated and interpreted. Is it merely an entertaining "horoscope" in the linux world? A sign of popularity of distros? A mere hacking contest by some distros? Maybe it really is a media scheme by distrowatch to generate ad money... but was it the original intent?
Personally, I think the PHR has a little bit of each involved in it... But once you learn more about a distro by their web pages, their forums, people's reviews, and how often they release their ISO images, the PHR might tell you a little more about a distro's perceptions of Distrowatch itself.
Some OS communities I've looked at view these rankings as extremely important, for to them it is the best way either to get attention from the media, gain power over other distros, and/or even to see how passionate their user base really is. The levels can vary: Snowlinux looks like it's media attention all the way, yet their forums are rather bare. SolusOS looks like it wants media coverage, but there community passion looks just as important, and their decisions look like it wants to overturn other Gnome distros.
However, not all OS communities see the PHR as important, or even more they think it might tamper with their goals and hurt their work. Some think it could become pressure to release their work half-baked, all in the name of gaining page hits here. Some see this whole site as a place of geeks, and do not want their OS to look "geeky" by it's page hits. Some just want a limited fan base and don't want the popularity. Again, levels can vary: elementaryOS doesn't release very often - and does not want the pressure to because of this site. that's not to say it doesn't want to take over the world. If it wanted to, Ubuntu could probably lead more users to the PHR, but it doesn't want its reputation to be extremely melded to this site, as it could hinder their real plans for the general public. And think about openBSD, and other specialist distros, if they got too popular...
73 • May I have the envelope please? And the "top 5 distros" are... (by FactChecker on 2012-08-15 22:41:11 GMT from United States)
Just because I was curious, I went out and sampled 9 plausible measures for "popularity." The most noteworthy thing about these various measures is the remarkable agreement among them. All in all, they tell a remarkably consistent "story."
If one takes a "composite" of all 9 measures, the "top 5" distros are:
Ubuntu (#1 by a huge margin)
Debian/Fedora (See NOTE, below)
Mint/SUSE (a "virtual tie" for 4th place)
NOTE: There was fierce competition between Debian and Fedora across all the measures. Debian snagged the #2 spot more often, and typically on the "better" metrics. But the margin was relatively close, and Fedora did sometimes snag the #2 spot. A definitive answer about which distro is #2 may not be possible, and if it is, it would definitely be somewhat time-consuming. (Though if some trade-magazine editor is reading this, and wants to negotiate a rate for an article, drop me an email!)
74 • Debian being diplomatic about Gnome 3 (by Seth on 2012-08-15 23:31:18 GMT from United States)
Debian is being so diplomatic about Gnome 3, finding a technical excuse to not using Gnome 3. I bet the real reason is that most Debian developers hate it.
75 • @73 "top 5 distros" (by Garritt on 2012-08-16 04:07:37 GMT from Luxembourg)
Did you use measures that could be predisposed to favoring desktop usage over server usage, home usage over business deployments, etc?
Regardless of the measurements used, I think we can all agree that Xandros Desktop and Presto are the kings of Linux. I kid.
76 • @75 "top 5"--plus 1 (by FactChecker on 2012-08-17 00:47:28 GMT from United States)
The measures I used were "universal" in nature. Three of them (and the best three, at that) I've already mentioned: search traffic, Web traffic, and backlinks.
However, in order to compare "apples to apples," I deliberately chose to exclude the only distro in DW's "top 10" that's primarily targeted at servers (CentOS). Nothing against CentOS, but I don't think anyone doubts its popularity as a server platform. And because it's targeted at a different audience and different use-cases than the more desktop-oriented distros, there's really no valid point of comparison between CentOS and, say, Mint or Fedora, etc.
However, since you seem curious, CentOS ranks in the "Debian/Fedora" neighborhood in terms of the "big 3" measures mentioned above.
It's important to realize that all of these metrics (as well as the underlying phenomenon of "popularity") follow a so-called "power distribution" (also called "rank-size distribution"). That is, the difference(s) between the #1 slot and the #2 slot is several times larger than the difference(s) between the #2 slot and the #3 slot. The further down one goes in the list, the more difficult it becomes to make accurate, meaningful distinctions.
77 • One last point (by FactChecker on 2012-08-17 04:44:05 GMT from United States)
Since this all started with a discussion of the anomalously high HPD rank of Mageia...
Predictions based on the multiple-variable composite index suggest that Mageia "should" rank around #10 (+/-2). (Again, it's increasingly hard to make high-quality, high-confidence predictions as one goes further down the list.)
At this point, I suspect I'm the only person who cares about any of this. So I promise I'll stop posting now.
78 • re 77 - one point after the last point (by corneliu on 2012-08-17 11:45:34 GMT from Canada)
FactChecker,
You are not alone I read your posts with interest. I care about Mageia's HPD too. I hope the it goes higher and higher.
Cheers,
TruthAbuser
79 • RE: #77 (by mcellius on 2012-08-17 11:45:49 GMT from United States)
No, FactChecker, you aren't the only one who cares about this stuff. I doubt very many people agree with the "embrace the inaccuracy, meaninglessness, and uselessness" approach that has been promoted above. Having the truth is much more preferable.
And despite Ladislav's comments (#60 above), he cannot really like it that his HPD numbers are so meaningless. I'm sure he does like it that some reporters and journals quote his numbers as if they're significant, but that won't keep up if people lose respect for the data. When those reporters and journals realize that everybody's laughing at them, DW loses with them. It'd be better for DW if people could trust the data.
So your numbers are interesting, at least, as a counter to the apparent manipulation of the HPD. To the degree that it happens (and we don't really know that degree yet), and to the degree that it's deliberate and not inadvertant, such manipulation is an attempt to hoodwink the Linux community, and that's rather despicable.
As for the statistics side of things, well, you aren't the only one here who enjoys that sort of thing, either.
80 • PHR (by Jordan on 2012-08-17 15:31:39 GMT from United States)
Not to be stick in the mud, but on the page hit ranking explanation page here http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
it says:
"Only one hit per IP address per day is counted."
"The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more."
Heh.. "..light hearted.." <------- That says it all. Pipe down everyone. lol.. That was light hearted, too. ;)
81 • PageHitz (by Amused Hopeful on 2012-08-17 18:00:49 GMT from United States)
A measure of interest, possibly fleeting, in whatever that page should provide. Advertisers love interest.
But how much teapot tempest was stirred up by some fool implying it means something more! Oh, the FUD!
A group 'inherits' an 'enterprise' distro - why wouldn't we be interested? Pioneers!
Another 'enterprise' distro gets a makeover - surely someone appreciates a stable base?
82 • RE: 66 (by Landor on 2012-08-17 19:38:53 GMT from Canada)
I can't believe you say I want it to be something. The funny thing is, I know you're serious.
I guess you didn't read that I haven't even looked at it in years eh. I bet you look at it more than I do. Maybe you want it to be something. You also completely missed the point that I said it is 'only' a metric for Ladislav to earn money from, nothing more. I'd even go a step further and say if the HPD/PHR system wasn't in place this site would eventually drift off into obscurity, or at least severely drop in popularity.
The HPD/PHR is nothing but a sad joke. I've actually spoken against it even being here. I think it is utterly useless and causes nothing but division within the community. Fanbois and egotists (like Hoogland or whatever his name is) get stroked with every hit their distribution gets. What a joke.
I want it to be something. WoW.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
83 • RE: 66/86 (by Landor on 2012-08-17 19:41:38 GMT from Canada)
I've also said this in the past, but just to make things a bit more clear:
'If I created my own distribution (which is something we may very well see in the not too far off future) I would not have listed here, and would even request that there was not a page here about it.'
A big part of that is because of the HPD/PHR.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
84 • Re: 86 (by FactChecker on 2012-08-17 21:43:48 GMT from United States)
"...if the HPD/PHR system wasn't in place this site would eventually drift off into obscurity..."
Nonsense. DW is an amazingly useful site for anyone who wants cross-distro reference information. Or historical information. Or news on latest releases. Etc.
Without HPD/PHR, DW might (or might not) get as much traffic from Linux newbies in search of a broad overview of the Linux landscape. And maybe it wouldn't get as much "press" from statistically clueless bloggers looking for a reason to talk about a particular distro.
But there is simply no better distro-agnostic Linux reference site on the Web. (If I am mistaken, then it should be trivially easy to point out a higher-quality alternative.)
You should know that.
85 • OTT (by Antony on 2012-08-17 22:17:09 GMT from United Kingdom)
Yes, I agree wholeheartedly with FactChecker (post 84).
This (unsurprisingly) is just a *little* over the top:
"...if the HPD/PHR system wasn't in place this site would eventually drift off into obscurity..."
Plain silly. Fact is though, I think a certain person, while whining about ego, actually craves attention and really needs to grow up - or something - it is just so boring now.
86 • REL 58, 65 (by ladislav on 2012-08-18 05:26:59 GMT from Taiwan)
I haven't even looked at that ranking in about 6 or so years. ... I've never believed Mint to be massive in the numbers, nor did I believe PCLOS to be either.
You exhibit a remarkable amount of knowledge about the DistroWatch HPD ranking for somebody who hasn't "looked at it in 6 years or so".
PHR/HPD is probably one of the least accurate things on the world wide web as a whole.
The DistroWatch PHR/HPD ranking his 100% accurate. It shows how many people view each distribution's page on DistroWatch every day, period. As statistics and numbers are concerned, there is nothing that could possibly be more accurate that this...
87 • RE: 86 (by Landor on 2012-08-18 05:51:49 GMT from Canada)
I have a few replies to make her, but I'm going to reply to yours first, and possibly the others tomorrow.
"You exhibit a remarkable amount of knowledge about the DistroWatch HPD ranking for somebody who hasn't "looked at it in 6 years or so". "
You yourself acknowledge that this section gets inundated with talk about the PHR, you admitted to the hype of MInt last year, and yet you make an offhanded comment alluding to me possibly following it, thus possibly lying about not looking at it? You've stooped to fishing now, Ladislav? Seriously? I would have thought better of you than that. Shame on you. Hell, I even said the topic comes up at least once or twice a year.
"The DistroWatch PHR/HPD ranking his 100% accurate. It shows how many people view each distribution's page on DistroWatch every day, period. As statistics and numbers are concerned, there is nothing that could possibly be more accurate that this.."
It shows how many people view each distribution's page on DistroWatch, and is 100% accurate eh?
So, when it was being manipulated at various times through DistroWatch's history it 'showed' how many people viewed each distribution's page and is 100% accurate? C'mon now, Ladislav.
I know it means a lot to you, I know you believe in it. I know this has got your feathers ruffled a bit, but it cannot ever be trusted, by anyone. Its been manipulated before, and more than once, and could be again. There's probably a myriad of ways nobody has even really considered yet. People have already mentioned ways of using proxies, you can spoof IPs and MAC addresses, the list goes on. I'm even guessing you thought at one time nobody could ever take your site down, but remember that weekend you fought hard to keep them at bay? I do too of course. It happened. Probably could happen again too. You know?
You'll never convince me it's accurate, and you'll never convince me that all the page hits are by people.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
88 • RE: 67 (by ladislav on 2012-08-18 06:37:01 GMT from Taiwan)
I would have thought better of you than that.
Really? Based on your comments here I concluded long time ago that you had about as much respect for me as a cobra would have for a frog it just caught for lunch.
You'll never convince me it's accurate, and you'll never convince me that all the page hits are by people.
Ah, because presumption of innocence doesn't exist in your democratic part of the world. As soon as something doesn't seem right to YOU, it sure as hell is because somebody is doing something illegal. Great. I wonder why you keep coming here. Aren't there more respectable and trustworthy Linux websites to visit?
89 • RE: 88 (by Landor on 2012-08-18 07:17:21 GMT from Canada)
I knew this would become personal for you. The opposition to the PHR always does. I've always treated you with respect, and now you say differently? I often even showed you kindness in e-mail. I know this is about the PHR though, so I'm not taking it to heart. Even though you tried to turn it around on me.
You completely avoided what I said, you're becoming like the others, Ladislav. Cherry picking what you want and replying to that. #84 did the same thing. I said that the HPD/PHR has been manipulated a number of times in the past. Because of that I have no faith in its accuracy at all. Which coincides with me not believing that all the page hits are from 'people'. You simply cannot verify that every single page hit is from a real person. You can only verify it's from a separate IP, that's it. So with that knowledge, and the fact that it has indeed been manipulated in the past it because extremely circumspect.
About coming here. Are you saying the site's only value is the HPD/PHR? That's how it reads to me. You have a lot of information on this site, you don't consider if of any use? But to partially answer your question, in which you already know this small part of it, I came here to read your writing, and at least the small bit you still offered in DistroWatch Weekly when you stopped writing. Though now I see you've even given that up, and I know the reason. As I said, that's only a partial reason. I do find many things on this site useful, if not the HPD/PHR.
Oh, and about respect. Many times you hold me to a certain standard of decorum. I noticed you deleted Antony's one comment about me, yet you left his whole comment in 85 which was nothing other than a whinefest about me too. I'm not complaining, I could care less what he says about me, and I intend on replying to it anyway. I'm curious if my reply will get deleted too, for being off topic, or personal. Irony eh. :)
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
90 • RE: 89 (by ladislav on 2012-08-18 07:30:25 GMT from Taiwan)
You simply cannot verify that every single page hit is from a real person.
And YOU cannot prove that it isn't.
91 • meanwhile ... back to that laptop that won't light up (by gnomic on 2012-08-18 11:30:56 GMT from New Zealand)
Regular readers may recall my mention of an HP laptop that shows only a black screen at boot, but gets the backlight turned on part way through boot via live Linux with select distros. Adding to my winner's list, Fedora 17 using Gnome 3 manages to boot the machine with both external and builtin LCD screens at their desirable resolutions. Shout out for Fedora. Nigh incredibly it also manages to start Rhythmbox when the Windows key on the included remote is pressed. Also successful were PCLinuxOS LXDE 2012.06 and Toorox 2012.08 Lite.
Still waiting for a Linux guru to explain how these distros light up the laptop screen during boot, while so many fail. HP DV4 -1041TX with Nvidia video (GeForce G105m) and latest available BIOS. Perhaps the key issue is how does the backlight get turned on?
As to the ranking of Linux distributions, personally I wouldn't be surprised if the Distrowatch rankings reflect something about the popularity of distributions in the real world among people who vist the site. I see movements towards the bottom of the list that seem to reflect waning of effort by developers, and now and then new efforts rising up the charts. Surely the answer is that it is what it is. As always the buyer must beware. No doubt anyone for whom the reliability of a Linux distro is crucial is seeking professional advice on the subject.
92 • Peppermint 3 on EeePC-1005HAB (by capricornus on 2012-08-18 13:03:49 GMT from Belgium)
I had Mint 11 installed on my EeePC and it did everything without any major problem. Pepp 3 installed swiftly but then became problematic, Synaptic ran into constant problems. I'm running Pepp2 now, and that is a relief: it does the job.
93 • Peppermint 2 on EeePC-1005HAB (by capricornus on 2012-08-18 13:34:15 GMT from Belgium)
Once the full Synaptic update was done, Pepp 2 ran into problems too. So now, Mint 11 is reinstalling, and I' m sure it will run like it did before.
94 • 91 • meanwhile (by mandog on 2012-08-18 15:08:51 GMT from United Kingdom)
Your problem is very common and not unique its to do with motherboard bios settings or lack of and is not a major problem. I have the same problem with my desktop using HDMI to a second monitor if the MB bios does not support booting vga and HDMI simultaneity you need to make HDMI the primary monitor then the other will start at login. I hope this is helpful
95 • On being civil (by A. Person on 2012-08-18 16:05:42 GMT from United States)
Would the person who tells all to keep their "stick on the ice" also do the same? It seems he wishes to use his "stick" to slash others having an opinion which differs from his.
96 • RE: 90 - 84 - 85 And to the Canadian whose comment was removed. (by Landor on 2012-08-18 16:47:47 GMT from Canada)
#90
You forgot the to close it off as you can see.
You're right, I can't prove it. I've give you that. I can prove that the numbers have manipulated here in the past. That's the crux of it. I can even link to an interview some years ago where you even discussed it being manipulated by Slackware guys. Nor is that the only time. So we're in a circular argument here now. Out of respect for you I'm gladly willing to drop it.
One other thing, the guy that came up with a name for a distribution I may create, his comment was in reply to two or three things, you removed it, and it had far more relevance than the crap you let stay at 85, which it seems all he ever does here is whine about me. I honestly shake my head at your moderating choices at times.
#84
You were being selective of course. A lot of people do that.
"I'd even go a step further and say if the HPD/PHR system wasn't in place this site would eventually drift off into obscurity, or at least severely drop in popularity."
There's the full sentence, a little bit different than what you were replying to. I never said the site was useless at all. You assumed I did. Ever since Ladislav created the HPD/PHR it is the main reason people come here. You talk about these "statistically clueless bloggers", you seem to forget about all the professional writers from sites 'and magazines' that talk about it a lot too, and have done so for a very long time.
When any writer mentions this site you don't hear how great it is as a cross reference, you don't hear how amazing it is from a historical standpoint. You don't even hear about the podcasts or newsletters. You only hear about the HPD/PHD ranking, and it has been that way ever since the system has been in place.
Of course this site would drop off in popularity, and quite a bit, if it was gone. It's only intelligent to believe so. They wouldn't have the drama and the 'look whose better this week' that every single one of the unwashed masses thrives on. Do you think the media would be all excited to discuss the latest podcast with fervor? Popularity would definitely drop.
You say I should have known better, but you were wrong because you went off on this whole irrelevant tangent that made it appear that I said the site was useless while I was only discussing a logical outcome based on facts.
#85
Oh, Antony, here we go again eh? Funny.
You agreed with 84 completely and he was completely wrong about what I said, so what does that make you? Hilarious! Poor Guy.
You really need to stop whining about me over and over again. It's the only time you post here. You devoted two comments solely to me, and complained about me the whole time in both of them, yet called me the complainer.
Let me ask you this, even though I don't have any reason to talk to you here, what did you contribute of merit to the discussion this week?
-------
Fellow Canadian:
Thank you so much for the name. I absolutely love it and will use it if I create my own distribution. It's perfect. I hadn't even thought of it myself. Greatly appreciated.
Keep your stick on the ice...
Landor
97 • Comments removal here (by Jordan on 2012-08-18 17:36:02 GMT from United States)
I don't mind. What I mean is my comments/questions here the other day got deleted. Yep I was surprised but then realized the queries had to do more with Windows than Linux so didn't fit.
I am interested in the PHC thing very little but I do remember seeing this same ongoing discussion years ago here with the same conclusions and distrust etc and the good site operator trying to explain, even thoug there is a page here dedicated to that simple explanation of it being "light hearted" etcetera.
And the "stick on the ice" condescending stuff was here then too, along with his or her answer for everything. I get the feeling that she or he feels that this is his or her little playground or domain or something. Easy to scroll past it though as soon as that name is seen. ;)
Maybe this will get tossed too, but if not then let me end it with a heartfelt expression of appreciation for the hard work going on for so long in keeping this site up to date, clean and a major major gathering point for linux lovers and just the curious as well as I was a long time ago.
98 • PHR (by Mac on 2012-08-18 18:35:12 GMT from United States)
I don't understand why that is such a big deal. I have been coming here for years and that has never made me try something. But I do look to see what is new. And sometimes run into something here that I like to check out. We seem to have some very smart people here that I like to see what they say about things. Most of my favorite's barely make the top 50!!
Have fun
Mack
99 • PHR (by Mac on 2012-08-18 20:41:01 GMT from United States)
re 99 . Most people are wrong.
Don't know about that but if everybody liked the same thing some major company's would be out of business.
Have fun
Mack
100 • PHR (by greg on 2012-08-18 22:24:40 GMT from United States)
Dittos to Mac @ 98. My present favorite distro isn't even on the PHR, it's Greenie. The lively discussions are far more entertaining than the PHR.
101 • PHR (by Wizard of OS on 2012-08-18 23:21:55 GMT from Brazil)
fernbap wrote: "As i said, people are blaming the planets for the inaccuracy of astrology."
People who think so is completely wrong. In reality, Astrology is an almost infallible method of predicting the future based on a scientific interpretation of the present position of the planets relative to Earth (the absolute center of the universe).
And because Jupiter is now in conjunction with Saturn, I can see Stella (a stellar distro made of RHEL sources) surely going to become the #1 in PHR, forever replacing Mint.
If it never occur, don't blame the planets. Blame the distrohoppers. Not even the fabulous PCLinuxOS or the venerable CentOS could stop them trying those f... 'buntus!
102 • RE:101 (by greg on 2012-08-19 01:23:02 GMT from United States)
True, but as a distrohopper, I've also tried PCLinuxOS and CentOS. I'll even give Stella a try. It does have gnome2, which I prefer.
103 • RE 97 (by Bill on 2012-08-19 02:50:54 GMT from United States)
Agree with Jordan that: "It's easy to scroll past it though as soon as that name is seen. and
a heartfelt expression of appreciation for the hard work going on for so long in keeping this site up to date, clean and a major major gathering point for linux lovers."
Nicely put.
Take care.
104 • Around the Web (by Don Alfredo on 2012-08-19 09:20:37 GMT from Belgium)
Since you've asked for it :
I really enjoyed the addition of the 'around the web' section. I took me off-site, to enrich myself with some additional reviews which i can enjoy way more than this hidiously stupid discussion which has been going on since stone age... you know which one... funny though, you can learn a lot about personalities when discussing a non-issue. And I bet someone will feel the need to bash on this comment
Happy Hunting
105 • Macpup (by Barnabyh on 2012-08-19 09:56:04 GMT from United Kingdom)
Macpup is described as resembling the look of Mac OS X. Funny, it looks nothing like it unless I missed something. This is not a criticism because I don't actually care much for that GUI, but it's astonishing how many distributions are seeking to emulate that look.
106 • re #94 the badly behaved laptop (by gnomic on 2012-08-19 09:59:19 GMT from New Zealand)
Thanks for your response about the case of the laptop with blank screen at boot. It's not a situation I have seen previously. Added to the list of distros that put up the laptop LCD is Solus 32 bit non-pae as of this evening. However it does strike me as a rather problematic condition if a laptop screen does not light up from the start as one can't always have an external screen to hand. In fact one might be tempted to scrap the machine. However it has been an interesting investigation so far. Setpci is an interesting command I didn't know about previously. What is this HDMI of which you speak? :-) Haven't quite got up to that round here. The DV4 does have the relevant port.
107 • re #104 and so on and on (by gnomic on 2012-08-19 10:13:18 GMT from New Zealand)
I hear that being really angry most of the time and hating on people can be bad for one's health. It is only an operating system after all, with all due regard to certain ramifications around intellectual freedom. Perhaps some people are spending too much time between chair and keyboard? Time for a break to smell the roses, or at least get some fresh air and sunshine?
108 • HPD and fear of unwanted popularity (by Grepnix on 2012-08-19 14:35:33 GMT from United Kingdom)
As a long term Pclinuxos user I find it laughable that anyone thinks that we have ever manipulated the HPD figures. I'm certain that its the same for Mageia. We all have our preferred distro and some become the flavour of the month. Sadly, some can't/won't accept that. Democracy will sometimes destroy their pathetic vision of how the Linux world should be. For some its Debian or nothing. Just like marxists believe their version of reality is the only one.
You people don't really believe in freedom unless its YOUR freedom.
109 • Over a thousand new Slackware users on LiCo. (by cowlitzron on 2012-08-19 20:37:37 GMT from United States)
I just checked the distribution statistics registered with linuxcounter.net and the number of computers registered with that service has jumped to 1,369 putting Slackware in second place behind only Ubuntu which is at 2,038. In contrast, Linux Mint is registered under two variant names which total only 320 and Mageia has only 43 registrations. I have been using Slackware -current a little over a month and while I do not believe Slackware is the second most used distro, nevertheless this demonstrates how hardcore the Slackware users are. There must have been a large group of new Slackware registrations.
110 • Do-it-yourself click-fraud detection (by FactChecker on 2012-08-19 21:07:11 GMT from United States)
I know I promised to stop posting about this... but there's been some developments.
mcellius was quite correct when he said that evidence for click fraud can be found in DW's own data.
In an earlier comment, I mentioned that "popularity" in general (not just Linux distros) follows a "rank-size distribution." What that means is that whatever's #1 is way more popular than whatever's #2, which is in turn way more popular than whatever's #3, and so on.
But the magnitude of the *difference* between #1 and #2, and between #2 and #3 (and so on) is approximately constant for any given domain. Now, the specific value for that constant does decrease as one goes further down the list. But it does *NOT* change spontaneously by an order of magnitude for a pair of points on the scale. And that's how we spot the spoofers.
Two thing complicate successful click fraud:
1) most fanbois have no idea what the distribution *should* look like
2) success fully spoofing the data without leaving an *obvious* trace requires manipulating the numbers for the adjacent distro(s), not just one. Spoof only one set of numbers and the deception stands out like the proverbial sore thumb.
So, here's one reasonably decent method for building your own DW click-fraud detector:
Step 1: Take DW's raw HPD data for the period in question.
Step 2: Do a log transform (using common log/base 10 makes things easier for decimal-driven creatures to spot, but any log will do).
Step 3: Compute the *difference* between adjacent pairs of points. That is, the difference between #1 and #2, #2 and #3, and so on.
Step 4: Compare the obtained values with what one would normally "expect" to see in such data. Now, this is a DW comment, not a stats class, so a "rough guess" for the expected difference is perfectly adequate. Using base 10:
For distros 1-3: 0.10
For distros 4-6: 0.05
For distros 7-10: 0.03
Step 5: Look for *massive* outliers--either higher-than-expected or lower-than-expected. (If you find both, then it's a safe bet that you've spotted click fraud.)
Here's a worked example based on actual DW numbers for the top 3 distros for a particular historical period:
Raw HPD:
Distro1: 2519
Distro2: 2502
Distro3: 1596
Log transform:
Distro1: 3.401
Distro2: 3.398
Distro3: 3.203
Difference between pairs:
Distro1-Distro2: 0.003
Distro2-Distro3: 0.195
Remember that we expect to see a difference of *approximately* 0.10 between adjacent points at the top of the scale. (Remember too that the are log values, so that the difference between 0.1 and 0.2 is much larger than you would normally think of it.)
It's easy to see that Distro2 is both *WAY* too close to Distro1 and suspiciously far away from Distro3. Something is definitely amiss.
It's worth noting that the difference between Distro1 and Distro3 is 0.198, which is almost exactly the expected value of 0.20. Thus there is no basis in the data for questioning these numbers.
Which leaves Distro2 unquestionably and quite massively out of place. The observed value for HPD is simply way too large. A successful and *undetectable* spoof for the period in question would have targeted approximately 2,000 HPD for Distro2, rather than 2,500.
Ooops.
Several caveats:
1) This method works better for long reporting periods. Short reporting periods are too heavily affected by release announcements, etc.
2) This method only works for, say, the top 10 distros or so, and works at its very best for maybe the top 5. There is simply too much noise in the data if one tries to go too far down the list. (And besides, if some distro wants to click-fraud their way from the #36 spot to the #34 spot, who cares?)
3) This method only spots anomalies in the data. It does NOT substitute for clear thin king. One has to examine all of the data points surrounding the statistical anomaly to have any hope of identifying the click-fraud culprit.
4) Deciding how big a "difference" is "big enough" to support a presumptive conclusion of click-fraud is a matter personal preference and degree of intellectual conservatism.
5) Studious application of this method to DW's historical data will forever ruin your illusions regarding PHR. (You've been warned.)
A couple of other notes:
@86: What it counts is http GET requests, not humans.
@90: No one can "prove" a negative. You should know that.
And finally...
Because I suspect some folks may want to know the identity of "Distro2" without going on an extended scavenger hunt through DW's historical archives: http://distrowatch.com/index.php?dataspan=2007
(Sorry, but I don't have a catchy tag line.)
111 • Post 110 (by Jordan on 2012-08-20 00:21:31 GMT from United States)
Page Hit Rankings. That is what Distrowatch is about? All of the info and links and distro analysis etcetera is in the background shadows of the freaking ordered list on the right of the front page?
And now a science as to how to derive that list's perceived validity?
Perhaps an astute user here will put forth for us a mathematically based schema which can help us to discern the relative merits of all the other elements of this fine, famous Linux website.
I sure hope not. If they do, I'll likely find myself feeling conflicted as to why I come here, which is for different reasons at different times and is pretty much NEVER to worry about how god damned "accurate" (whatever that means in this circumstance) that "light hearted" (as described by the Site Owner) list is.
112 • #110 & #111 (by mcellius on 2012-08-20 01:22:44 GMT from United States)
FactChecker: well done!
Jordan: I'd hate to see science used to tell us everything about DW! I like DW and come here a lot, very little of it to see the page-hit rankings.
But the science applied by FactChecker to the page-hit rankings is nothing new: it's statistics. If nothing else, what FactChecker has shown is that such "sciences" are very useful and can do much to help us distinguish truth from error.
We need to remember that there is one side of this discussion who are not participating. It is the one group that takes these data very seriously, seriously enough to attempt to manipulate the results. They are dishonest, liars, cheats. They do no favors for the Linux community, but rather sow disunity and animosity (even as they try to increase the Linux "market share" of their preferred distros, or as they try to decrease the "market share" of the one they dislike). Their goal is to keep everyone else from the truth. It is they who need to look at the page-hit data "light-heartedly."
113 • @76 (by Garritt on 2012-08-20 01:54:05 GMT from Luxembourg)
FactChecker, I apologize if I don't word this well, but I hope you will understand the gist of it.
Wouldn't big-business-centric distributions (SLES/SLED and RHEL come to mind here) potentially be at greater risk of being underreported if just considering measures like search traffic, website traffic, and backlinks, not just as servers, but also as desktops/workstations? For example, if a home user using Ubuntu/Debian/Fedora/Linux Mint/openSUSE has issues, or wants the latest news, tips, and downloads, etc, I would expect that individual to conduct the relevant web searches, website visits, and such on their own. But if that person is using a SLED or RHEL workstation at work, most employees would probably consult with their IT department instead, such that there is a funneling down effect of activity, not to mention that much support-based activity might not even make it onto the Web to be counted. In other words, rather than having several hundred employees engaging in this function independently at a waste of productivity, it would be handled by a small group of employees, that being the IT staff. In the average household there may be a man or woman who is the domestic technology manager/guru (thus there could be some funneling at home as well), but that would be for households which average around only 3 people and maybe around 2 computers, thus the effect would be smaller, as opposed to big business which is exponentially larger, though obviously, despite differing use cases, there many more households than there are sizable businesses.
I think we all eagerly await DWW 470 where new discussions will emerge and any frayed nerves can sooth.
114 • #111 (by FactChecker on 2012-08-20 02:26:02 GMT from United States)
"Page Hit Rankings. That is what Distrowatch is about? All of the info and links and distro analysis etcetera is in the background shadows of the freaking ordered list on the right of the front page? "
@Jordan: Only in the minds of the ignorant. I've already said in an earlier comment that I think DW is easily the best site of its kind on the Web. PHR may bring in site traffic, but it's unquestionably the least interesting/informative thing on the site. (Hell, even DW's *ads* are better than PHR!)
The problem isn't PHR. And the problem isn't DistroWatch. The problem is twofold:
a) Distro fanbois who deliberately pollute PHR just for the lulz. Many people (including me) find their deliberate manipulation and misrepresentation offensive, just in principle.
b) Clueless columnists who carry the pollution "down river" into mainstream media. Multiple columns @ ZDNet claim that Mint is "the most popular" Linux distro, based on its PHR ranking; another columnist (cited earlier in these comments) describes Mageia as "up and coming," again based on PHR numbers.
The thing is: both statements are demonstrably untrue.
But I don't get to write for mainstream media, so the best I know to do is post the truth here. Some DW visitors will see it an appreciate it." Others won't.
I confess that PHR is what brought me to Distrowatch years ago when I was first switching to Linux. And I'm very glad it did, because my life is enriched in some small measure by everything at DW. (*Except* PHR! ;) )
115 • #113 (by FactChecker on 2012-08-20 03:19:16 GMT from United States)
@Garritt: I think you worded it fine.
As I said earlier, I don't think that there is any valid point-of-comparison between server distros and desktop distros. It is "possible" that server distros are under-reported using this-or-that measure? Sure. Those same server distros are probably under-counted on the DW PHR list, too.
The thing is that there's an independent way of measuring server deployment. So it's not nearly so difficult a question to answer as desktop distro popularity.
It's not clear to me that there are large-scale deployments of, say, RHEL on corporate desktops. If there are reliable data to suggest that there are such deployments, I'd be delighted to learn about them.
The one exception to the server/desktop dichotomy is Debian. Understanding Debian's place in the larger Linux eco-system is complicated by the fact that there are at least two (or as many as three) "Debians."
A fair number of people probably think of Debian Stable as primarily a server distro, and it's certainly a very fine choice. But depending on whom you ask, Stable also makes a very nice desktop (even if it is a bit of a pain to configure initially). Conversely, Testing and Unstable are poor candidates for the enterprise server world, but some people adore them as desktops.
I have no doubt that Debian's desktop popularity is measurably under-reported by DW's PHR. But by how much is anyone's guess. (That's a large part of why I chose not to identify a clear "#2" choice in my "top 5 distros" posting above.)
116 • @115 - corporate desktops (by Garritt on 2012-08-20 05:42:21 GMT from Luxembourg)
Observation aside, the only data I can provide is that corporate Linux desktop usage share figures more or less mirror some estimates of overall Linux desktop usage (1.0-1.7% range --- 1.4% of corporate desktops as of March 2011 according to Forrester Research). However, a breakdown of who's who in corporate desktop Linux isn't provided by Forrester Research, or at least I couldn't locate it. According to Gartner, for 2010, Red Hat had a 58.2% share of Linux server sales (i.e. support revenue). While the vast majority of Red Hat's OS business is in servers, in those instances companies do decide to deploy a Linux desktop in the corporate space, I think Red Hat's (or SUSE's or Oracle's, etc, respectively) established corporate contacts would work to its favor, but that's an inference on my part. The management of some companies might be willing to have in-house distros built, and management at some other companies may be willing to use distros with no vendor support option, but there will definitely be a good percentage of companies for which the prospect of either is an anathema. I didn't specifically mention Ubuntu above, I know some more reserved companies seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach with regard to its corporate viability, but it’s certainly somewhere in the picture as well. I really wish there was more readily available detailed data out there, but such does not appear to be the case.
Number of Comments: 116
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| • Issue 1073 (2024-06-03): LXQt 2.0.0, an overview of Linux desktop environments, Canonical partners with Milk-V, openSUSE introduces new features in Aeon Desktop, Fedora mirrors see rise in traffic, Wayland adds OpenBSD support |
| • Issue 1072 (2024-05-27): Manjaro 24.0, comparing init software, OpenBSD ports Plasma 6, Arch community debates mirror requirements, ThinOS to upgrade its FreeBSD core |
| • Issue 1071 (2024-05-20): Archcraft 2024.04.06, common command line mistakes, ReactOS imports WINE improvements, Haiku makes adjusting themes easier, NetBSD takes a stand against code generated by chatbots |
| • Issue 1070 (2024-05-13): Damn Small Linux 2024, hiding kernel messages during boot, Red Hat offers AI edition, new web browser for UBports, Fedora Asahi Remix 40 released, Qubes extends support for version 4.1 |
| • Issue 1069 (2024-05-06): Ubuntu 24.04, installing packages in alternative locations, systemd creates sudo alternative, Mint encourages XApps collaboration, FreeBSD publishes quarterly update |
| • Issue 1068 (2024-04-29): Fedora 40, transforming one distro into another, Debian elects new Project Leader, Red Hat extends support cycle, Emmabuntus adds accessibility features, Canonical's new security features |
| • Issue 1067 (2024-04-22): LocalSend for transferring files, detecting supported CPU architecure levels, new visual design for APT, Fedora and openSUSE working on reproducible builds, LXQt released, AlmaLinux re-adds hardware support |
| • Issue 1066 (2024-04-15): Fun projects to do with the Raspberry Pi and PinePhone, installing new software on fixed-release distributions, improving GNOME Terminal performance, Mint testing new repository mirrors, Gentoo becomes a Software In the Public Interest project |
| • Issue 1065 (2024-04-08): Dr.Parted Live 24.03, answering questions about the xz exploit, Linux Mint to ship HWE kernel, AlmaLinux patches flaw ahead of upstream Red Hat, Calculate changes release model |
| • Issue 1064 (2024-04-01): NixOS 23.11, the status of Hurd, liblzma compromised upstream, FreeBSD Foundation focuses on improving wireless networking, Ubuntu Pro offers 12 years of support |
| • Issue 1063 (2024-03-25): Redcore Linux 2401, how slowly can a rolling release update, Debian starts new Project Leader election, Red Hat creating new NVIDIA driver, Snap store hit with more malware |
| • Issue 1062 (2024-03-18): KDE neon 20240304, changing file permissions, Canonical turns 20, Pop!_OS creates new software centre, openSUSE packages Plasma 6 |
| • Issue 1061 (2024-03-11): Using a PinePhone as a workstation, restarting background services on a schedule, NixBSD ports Nix to FreeBSD, Fedora packaging COSMIC, postmarketOS to adopt systemd, Linux Mint replacing HexChat |
| • Issue 1060 (2024-03-04): AV Linux MX-23.1, bootstrapping a network connection, key OpenBSD features, Qubes certifies new hardware, LXQt and Plasma migrate to Qt 6 |
| • Issue 1059 (2024-02-26): Warp Terminal, navigating manual pages, malware found in the Snap store, Red Hat considering CPU requirement update, UBports organizes ongoing work |
| • Issue 1058 (2024-02-19): Drauger OS 7.6, how much disk space to allocate, System76 prepares to launch COSMIC desktop, UBports changes its version scheme, TrueNAS to offer faster deduplication |
| • Issue 1057 (2024-02-12): Adelie Linux 1.0 Beta, rolling release vs fixed for a smoother experience, Debian working on 2038 bug, elementary OS to split applications from base system updates, Fedora announces Atomic Desktops |
| • Issue 1056 (2024-02-05): wattOS R13, the various write speeds of ISO writing tools, DSL returns, Mint faces Wayland challenges, HardenedBSD blocks foreign USB devices, Gentoo publishes new repository, Linux distros patch glibc flaw |
| • Issue 1055 (2024-01-29): CNIX OS 231204, distributions patching packages the most, Gentoo team presents ongoing work, UBports introduces connectivity and battery improvements, interview with Haiku developer |
| • Issue 1054 (2024-01-22): Solus 4.5, comparing dd and cp when writing ISO files, openSUSE plans new major Leap version, XeroLinux shutting down, HardenedBSD changes its build schedule |
| • Issue 1053 (2024-01-15): Linux AI voice assistants, some distributions running hotter than others, UBports talks about coming changes, Qubes certifies StarBook laptops, Asahi Linux improves energy savings |
| • Issue 1052 (2024-01-08): OpenMandriva Lx 5.0, keeping shell commands running when theterminal closes, Mint upgrades Edge kernel, Vanilla OS plans big changes, Canonical working to make Snap more cross-platform |
| • Issue 1051 (2024-01-01): Favourite distros of 2023, reloading shell settings, Asahi Linux releases Fedora remix, Gentoo offers binary packages, openSUSE provides full disk encryption |
| • Issue 1050 (2023-12-18): rlxos 2023.11, renaming files and opening terminal windows in specific directories, TrueNAS publishes ZFS fixes, Debian publishes delayed install media, Haiku polishes desktop experience |
| • Issue 1049 (2023-12-11): Lernstick 12, alternatives to WINE, openSUSE updates its branding, Mint unveils new features, Lubuntu team plans for 24.04 |
| • Issue 1048 (2023-12-04): openSUSE MicroOS, the transition from X11 to Wayland, Red Hat phasing out X11 packages, UBports making mobile development easier |
| • Issue 1047 (2023-11-27): GhostBSD 23.10.1, Why Linux uses swap when memory is free, Ubuntu Budgie may benefit from Wayland work in Xfce, early issues with FreeBSD 14.0 |
| • Issue 1046 (2023-11-20): Slackel 7.7 "Openbox", restricting CPU usage, Haiku improves font handling and software centre performance, Canonical launches MicroCloud |
| • Full list of all issues |
| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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| Random Distribution | 
linuX-gamers Live DVD
The linuX-gamers Live DVD was a bootable medium with a collection of popular 3D games. It contains both the NVIDIA and ATI proprietary Linux drivers and includes the following games: BzFLag, Enemy Territory, Glest, Nexuiz, Sauerbraten, Torcs, Tremulous, True Combat: Elite, Warsow and World of Padman. Although the live DVD was based on Arch Linux, it does not offer any desktop Linux functionality except gaming.
Status: Discontinued
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| TUXEDO |
TUXEDO Computers - Linux Hardware in a tailor made suite
Choose from a wide range of laptops and PCs in various sizes and shapes at TUXEDOComputers.com. Every machine comes pre-installed and ready-to-run with Linux. Full 24 months of warranty and lifetime support included!
Learn more about our full service package and all benefits from buying at TUXEDO.
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| Star Labs |
Star Labs - Laptops built for Linux.
View our range including the highly anticipated StarFighter. Available with coreboot open-source firmware and a choice of Ubuntu, elementary, Manjaro and more. Visit Star Labs for information, to buy and get support.
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