adyx Posted September 28, 2005 Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 (edited) This topic on Mandriva Club forum make me think about the Page hit ranking on Distrowatch, where Mandriva is on the second place. Speaking of Page hit ranking on Distrowatch, I would like to propose you a little "project". If the Mandriva users community exists and is the greatest, then we can make Mandriva be (again) the first in that top. I have a personal site, dedicated to Mandriva Linux and I want to post a banner pointing to the Mandriva page on Distrowatch so that users can easily help distribution to gain points clicking on it. If all the dedicated sites, or a great number of them will do the same then we can get the first position on top. I did not consider this to be cheating, instead is a proof that the Mandriva users exists and they are the greatest linux community. Any sugestions, ideas, a name for that project a text for the banner... ? Edited September 28, 2005 by adyx Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted September 28, 2005 Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 (edited) I see no point manipulating the clicks on distrowatch... their "ranking" list is absolutely useless regarding everything. Edited September 28, 2005 by scarecrow Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adyx Posted September 28, 2005 Author Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 I am not very good at english to explain you very well why this top is important. As a mater of fact you are right, it is not important at all but there are a lot of numbers there and numbers allways describe something, in this case the interest for a distribution. It's obvious that to be the first or the last is not the same thing. I must confess that I visit Mandriva page on Distrowatch ocasionaly but I am here and I use Mandriva and like me pobably there are hundreds of users wich are not counted on that page. For me Ubuntu is not a revelation and really i can't remember when it came to be on the first position but i saw a lot of articles on the Internet refering to it as the number one distribution in the world because of that top. But this is not about Ubuntu is about the Mandriva users community and showing its existence and strength. It's not a manipulation of the result, users are not forced to click the banners. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted September 28, 2005 Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 Something seems fishy to me; ubuntu has 1000 more hpd than mandriva in the No. 2 slot and twice the hpd of either suse or fedora. I assume this is an orchestrated campaign by ubuntu. However, I'm really not surprised. From day one ubuntu has been extremely aggressive in marketing, PR, press releases and there is a lot of money behind ubuntu to fund this marketing campaign. IMHO the goal of this marketing campaign is to portray ubuntu as much more popular than it really is. I seriously doubt ubuntu's installed base exceeds mandriva's, or either suse's or fedora's for that matter. I have no way of proving that contention but that's what I believe. Certainly, the ubuntu installed base does not explain why ubuntu should have nearly double the hpds of other popular distros. I've tried ubuntu and it's OK but really nothing special IMHO so I just get annoyed with all the ubuntu hype. And ubuntu is gnome based, a DE which is consistently less popular, especially among recent windows converts, compared to mandriva and suse , which are kde based. All this really doesn't add up. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Artificial Intelligence Posted September 28, 2005 Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 I am not very good at english to explain you very well why this top is important. As a mater of fact you are right, it is not important at all but there are a lot of numbers there and numbers allways describe something, in this case the interest for a distribution. It's obvious that to be the first or the last is not the same thing. I must confess that I visit Mandriva page on Distrowatch ocasionaly but I am here and I use Mandriva and like me pobably there are hundreds of users wich are not counted on that page. For me Ubuntu is not a revelation and really i can't remember when it came to be on the first position but i saw a lot of articles on the Internet refering to it as the number one distribution in the world because of that top. But this is not about Ubuntu is about the Mandriva users community and showing its existence and strength. It's not a manipulation of the result, users are not forced to click the banners. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That's cheating in my book. It doesn't matter who's one or who's 134. Both are linux that's really matters in my book. And ubuntu is gnome based, a DE which is consistently less popular, especially among recent windows converts, compared to mandriva and suse , which are kde based. All this really doesn't add up. That is untrue. Most users of Ubuntu are converts from windoze, though the awareness of Kubuntu alot of them choosed Ubuntu with gnome. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted September 28, 2005 Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 the rankings on distrowatch are barely a good reflection of popularity. to manipulate them just makes them even more pointless. it's unfair to other distributions. those numbers are supposed to reflect interest, not the size of the community, anyways. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pmpatrick Posted September 28, 2005 Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 That is untrue. Most users of Ubuntu are converts from windoze, though the awareness of Kubuntu alot of them choosed Ubuntu with gnome. Have to disagree here. Kubuntu came out sometime after ubuntu, as a spinoff I believe. Kubuntu has no where near the publicity or hype that ubuntu has and seems to bask in ubuntu's reflected glory. After trying kubuntu, it does not seem nearly as polished as ubuntu either. I don't think the new user preference of ubuntu over kubuntu can be fairly read as a preference of gnome over kde. Especially since everything else I've read shows a clear preference for kde over gnome. Not surprising since kde is more windows like. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aRTee Posted September 28, 2005 Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 I agree with all others who take the point of view that the counter on distrowatch is not very meaningful. Let's suppose the Ubuntu numbers are not rigged/cheated, which they may or may not be,... and thus people have more interest for Ubuntu, so what? I'd worry if Mandriva fell out of the top 5, but that's not happening anytime soon, especially if you take into account the upcoming release. You know what? There's been lots of talk about Ubuntu, in the press, magazines, etc. So it may well be because of that that there's more interest about it. Honestly, the score at distrowatch is indicative at best, useless at worst. I mean, which user of Mandriva actually goes there? Or, for that matter, which linux user goes there? To find out which distro you want to mess with next? In general, I don't think so. As for Ubuntu, it's great, but somewhat overhyped - I've had more success with Mandriva/drake on various hardware (mind you, over 6 months ago). That said, I'm happy Ubuntu is around, since it seems a completely free (Free) modern debian based distro was lacking. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted September 28, 2005 Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 I don't care that much about the distrowatch ranking. It is almost impossible to know which distro is Numero Uno, which one is second, third etc. You can only guess. And everytime a new distro appears, it gets some attention, will rise for some time and sooner or later, the hype will go away. ;) Thus, I think that that Mandriva will get closer to Ubuntu again, if not even become the "#1" on distrowatch again in the future. Many users tried Ubuntu, so the hpd ranking grew. Some use it on a dual-boot system (alongside e.g. SUSE or Gentoo or ...), so the hpd-ranking is getting even more irrelevant. And I do know that there were campaigns for improving the distrowatch ranking for many distros. E.g. Mepis users once started such a campaign and so did Ubuntu users. Let them behave like kids if their ego is connected so much to a rather irrelevant number on distrowatch. :D One day they might see that it is some kind of nonsense. If you ask me, the most widely used Linux systems are (personal guessing based on my "feeling" and "experience"): 1. Debian 2. Fedora/RedHat 3. SUSE/Novell 4. Mandriva 5. Gentoo 6. Ubuntu 7. Gentoo 8. Mepis 9. Slackware 10. Damn Small Linux Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adyx Posted September 28, 2005 Author Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 Thus, I think that that Mandriva will get closer to Ubuntu again, if not even become the "#1" on distrowatch again in the future. If you check the top for the last month you will se that Mandriva is getting closer. It's still strange that even when a new release is near (2006) and the users visit more often that page, it cant get much closer. I mean it's very untrue, it's not a natural evolution of the top. It's like someone push number one further. Imagine this. We try to promote Mandriva and we can't. Then... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tyme Posted September 28, 2005 Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 promote mandriva through the use of this forum and through telling people about it, not by inflating numbers on an already skewed poll :P Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Artificial Intelligence Posted September 28, 2005 Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 Thus, I think that that Mandriva will get closer to Ubuntu again, if not even become the "#1" on distrowatch again in the future. If you check the top for the last month you will se that Mandriva is getting closer. It's still strange that even when a new release is near (2006) and the users visit more often that page, it cant get much closer. I mean it's very untrue, it's not a natural evolution of the top. It's like someone push number one further. Imagine this. We try to promote Mandriva and we can't. Then... <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I rarely get rude but will respond with a quote: Thief thinks every man steals. If you want to promote Mandriva do it in a honored way, if someone lets say cheated to give a distro some extra H.P.D. doesn't mean every other should sink to their level. .:=The AI Dude=:. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
adyx Posted September 28, 2005 Author Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 (edited) Ok. So I can see that most of the users consider this to be a bad idea. I accept the comments but probably I will still try to "help" Mandriva on that top using the romanian Mandriva users community. Now I belive that the second place can be generated by the lack of interest from the users but I still think that is something missing in that puzzle. Please stop the rude comments I have build and mentained the romanian users community site for several years so I think that I did my homework very well in promoting Mandriva. I post on this site to find interesting opinions not to start an useless argue. Giving to users the possibilty to show the interest for the distribution if they click on a banner is not cheating, it's more like a reminder, nobody force them to do that so virtualy you can expect the results to be even zero ! To use a script to automatically acces that page everyday and to spread this script among the users and on the Internet is cheating and I will never accept such thing even if Mandriva is on the last place on Distrowatch. Edited September 28, 2005 by adyx Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Artificial Intelligence Posted September 28, 2005 Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 That is untrue. Most users of Ubuntu are converts from windoze, though the awareness of Kubuntu alot of them choosed Ubuntu with gnome. Have to disagree here. Kubuntu came out sometime after ubuntu, as a spinoff I believe. Kubuntu has no where near the publicity or hype that ubuntu has and seems to bask in ubuntu's reflected glory. After trying kubuntu, it does not seem nearly as polished as ubuntu either. I don't think the new user preference of ubuntu over kubuntu can be fairly read as a preference of gnome over kde. Especially since everything else I've read shows a clear preference for kde over gnome. Not surprising since kde is more windows like. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> That can only be speculations, also for my point. But Ubuntu are really attracting a thrown of new users. A poll was made which shows that over half of the members comes directly from win OS (I'll find it for you if you want :) ). Also 3/4 of the users got gnome install despite there's a very easy howto to install KDE (I think it was something like sudo apt-get kubuntu-desktop) and KDE section for KDE at ubuntu forums. But again your point is also valid since ubuntu install gnome default, but not forget that gnome in ubuntu is very polish one :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arctic Posted September 28, 2005 Report Share Posted September 28, 2005 Ok. So I can see that most of the users consider this to be a bad idea. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Correct. If such things are revealed (and usually they are), they hurt not only the reputation of the user group but the reputation of the distribution as well. When e.g. the Mepis community launched the "increase the Mepis ranking on distrowatch" campaign, not only they, but Mepis itself got blaimed for this action. Same happened to Yoper (where I am a Dept. Manager), where users launched such a campaign not on distrowatch but in a poll in a magazine. We got attacked although we had nothing to do with that and didn't even know about this campaign. We had to distance ourselves drastically from the actions of some guys in our community, in order not to be the target of frequent "bad comments". Do you know what the result of this action was? We lost a significant amount of our userbase and many free-lance developers! That was a not only a shot-in-your-own-knee action by some lunatics that used Yoper but a big blow to the Yoper development and we haven't fully recovered from that... six months after the campaign. It is hard to regain the confidence of users and potential developers when your reputation receives a hard blow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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