Re: new daylight savings time

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On Sat, 24 Feb 2007, William Hooper wrote:


Benjamin Franz wrote:
[snip]
Fedora has always been very clear about the life cycle of each release.


Clear, yes. Smart, no.


It is clear from watching Google Trends
<URL:http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2C+fedora+%7C+fc6+%7C+fc5+%7C+f
c4+%7C+fc3%2C+RHEL+%7C+redhat+%7C+red+hat%2C++suse%2C+debian&ctab=0&geo=a
ll&date=all> that Fedora (and even maybe Redhat itself) is dying.

But has Netcraft confirmed it?

Netcraft reports _web servers_. Not _machines in use_. And doesn't break the servers down by Linux distribution in the statistics anywhere I can find. But since you want numbers from them: 342 sites are reported as containing 'ubuntu' in their host name. 211 are reported for 'fedora'.

More seriously, I see a graph that says Ubuntu must be really bad because
more people have to use Google to search for help than they do for Fedora.
What do you see?

I see a graph where a steadily growing number of people are searching for information (of any type) relating to Ubuntu while a slowly decreasing number are searching for information (of any type) relating to Fedora, Redhat, SUSE or Debian.

Whether people are searching for help or some other information, they are doing so for _Ubuntu_.

Even _if_ those were mostly requests for 'help', what that would tell you is that month on month more people are looking for help relating to Ubuntu than are looking for help relating to Fedora. Help requests come largely from _new_ users, ergo that would imply there are substantially more Ubuntu new users than Fedora new users. If the street vibe on Ubuntu was _bad_, you would see a downward trend in the numbers as word of mouth spread. Instead you see a strong absolutely relentless upward trend over the last 2 and 1/2 years.

Alexa reports fedoraproject.org had its traffic rank spike around 2000 back in mid-October with the release of FC6 , and the current 3 month average is around 14,000. For ubuntu.com, it spiked around 1000 in late-October with the release of 6.10 and the current 3 month average rank is around 3,600.

Looking in the logs for the big (covering several hundred web sites, none of them in any fashion related to linux or even computers so it reflects just what the general public is using for their daily web browsing rather than specifically tech-heads visiting a linux distro site) webserver I run at work this is what I show for the month of February. I extracted these from roughy 15 gigabytes of raw access_log based on the User Agent matching either Ubuntu or Fedora (non-case sensitive) and excluded all hits from IP ranges controlled by my own company to avoid any biasing by in-house browsers. There are only three people at the company who use Linux _at all_ and they all browse from known fixed IP addresses (even from home), which are easily excluded from the numbers:

Distro     Hits    Unique IPs   Hits/IP address
=======================================================
Ubuntu    23770       270            92.4
Fedora    14319       155            88.0

Beginning to see the pattern?

Don't mistake me for a Ubuntu fanboy/evangelizer pushing their favorite desktop: The only Ubuntu installs I have right this second are a test install I did to a VMWare instance in my office and I am in the middle of an experimental install to see if I can get the disk partioning layout I want on a Ubuntu 6.x installation. If it succeeds cleanly, I'm going to finish my rebuild of my house backups server using it. If not, it will be FC6 (32 bit because the 64 bit version of FC6 remains a bit iffy for my taste) or CentOS4, again 32 bit.

I like having all the toys in Fedora - there are 2594 packages installed on my home FC6 64-bit machine according to rpm -qa (I believe that beats anyone else's numbers in the 'how many packages you have installed' part of this thread by a substantial margin).

I have about a decade's worth of experience installing, maintaining and operating RH based systems. I'm damn good at it. I find the Ubuntu installer to be annoyingly difficult to make do what I want it to do for disk partitioning with regard to RAID and LVM.

But I can recognize the the direction and the meaning of the trends when I look at the numbers.

--
Benjamin Franz

"It is moronic to predict without first establishing an error rate
 for a prediction and keeping track of one’s past record of accuracy."
                    -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled By Randomness
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