Kubuntu Ranked #34 On DistroWatch? Why Is Not Popular?

[JeZ-l-Lee]

Kubuntu Ranked #34 On DistroWatch? Why Is Not Popular?

Hi,

I love Kubuntu 14.04 LTS 64Bit!
It's currently ranked # 34 on DistroWatch?
This makes me sad...

Can some money be spent of advertising?
Perhaps a Super Bowl advertisement?

But seriously, why is Kubuntu not popular?
I've tried many distros and Kubuntu is the best of all.

Jesse

[GreyGeek]

Page Hit Ranking = Meaningless metric.

Here is an interesting count of the type of Linux people who browse Distrowatch use:
http://distrowatch.com/awstats/awsta....osdetail.html

Linux		18,542,458	46.5 %
	Zenwalk GNU Linux	306	0 %
	Vine Linux	312	0 %
	VectorLinux	16	0 %
	Ubuntu	806,700	2 %
	Suse	9,709	0 %
	Red Hat	2,448	0 %
	PCLinuxOS	2,246	0 %
	Momonga Linux	29	0 %
	Mandriva (or Mandrake)	5,219	0 %
	Gentoo	2,034	0 %
	Fedora	5,737	0 %
	Debian	17,010	0 %
	Centos	1,524	0 %
	ASPLinux	55	0 %
	Google Android	1,066,512	2.6 %
	GNU Linux (Unknown or unspecified distribution)	16,622,601	41.7 %

Notice that far and away the largest number of Linux users visiting that site are in the category of "unknown", twenty times bigger than Ubuntu's share. I suspect that Kubuntu and other Ubuntu based distros are included in that 2% (806,700) which are attributed to Ubuntu.

During that year when I was using PCLinuxOS it was ranked as #1, but I rarely met another Linux user who was using it. Most were using SUSE, RedHat, Mandriva, Fedora or Debian. That ranking was, in all likelihood, due to a clicking campaign orchestrated by some folks on their forum, who encouraged the rest of us to click the PCLinuxOS link often.

[notabug]

I wish Kubuntu and KDE in general were not considered a hard to learn and use distro or desktop environment. I've tried all the major DEs over the last several years and hands down I've found KDE and particularly Kubuntu to be the easiest distro to install, customize and use. I get lost or sorely disappointed for one reason or another with the other environments and distros.

[GKNByNW]

I wish Kubuntu and KDE in general were not considered a hard to learn and use distro or desktop environment. I've tried all the major DEs over the last several years and hands down I've found KDE and particularly Kubuntu to be the easiest distro to install, customize and use. I get lost or sorely disappointed for one reason or another with the other environments and distros.

Maybe I'm reading your comment wrong but it sounds like you are implying that popular opinion says Kubuntu/KDE IS hard to learn? I suppose it's really a subjective thing and that everybody has their own opinion, but I would say that Kubuntu is by far the easiest distros I've ever used. In all fairness, I've only used a handful through the years (Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Puppy, probably others if I thought really hard) but I would feel safe putting Kubuntu on a computer for someone who is not as "computer literate" as the next person. From the very first bootup Kubuntu is user-friendly and easy to navigate. As with any Linux distro there is, of course, a learning curve. But with a little bit of brain power and - if necessary - Google, I think pretty much anyone can have a good experience with Kubuntu.

But like I said, it's all subjective and this is just my opinion

[claydoh]

Yeah, distrowatch clicking campaigns likely inflate a few different distros out there, I suspect; even if they are not sanctioned by the distro itself you can't stop the fans from being, well, enthusiastic.

The "problem" is that there are simply a large number of Debian based KDE spins these days, with not much to really, and I mean really differentiate them from one another.

[whatthefunk]

Distrowatch is without question the worst way to judge distro popularity. Ive been using Kubuntu for years and have never visited the Kubuntu Distrowatch page so my usage has never been counted. Why would I ever need to go to the Kubuntu Distrowatch page? Im already using it so I dont need any information about it. However, when I read about some obscure distro that looks interesting or different, I go to the distro watch page and give that distro one vote.

[GreyGeek]

I wish Kubuntu and KDE in general were not considered a hard to learn and use distro or desktop environment. I've tried all the major DEs over the last several years and hands down I've found KDE and particularly Kubuntu to be the easiest distro to install, customize and use. I get lost or sorely disappointed for one reason or another with the other environments and distros.

Hard to learn? Which parts? What features?
Having used Linux for 16 years and Kubuntu for 5 years, what I always told my physics students applies: "Everything is easy when you know how!", with a corollary that my years have forced me to add: " ... but it just harder to remember."

[citizen]

Can some money be spent of advertising?
Perhaps a Super Bowl advertisement?

Hmmm... Superbowl? Might I suggest you just get Janet Jackson to wear a Tshirt with the Kubuntu logo on it and then have a "wardrobe accident". That will make Kubuntu famous. :-)

I too wondered why more people don't use Kubuntu. I hated Ubuntu and can't stand gnome. KDE is so easy when you get the basics, but I also love to tweak my system to death.

[GKNByNW]

Hmmm... Superbowl? Might I suggest you just get Janet Jackson to wear a Tshirt with the Kubuntu logo on it and then have a "wardrobe accident". That will make Kubuntu famous. :-)

I too wondered why more people don't use Kubuntu. I hated Ubuntu and can't stand gnome. KDE is so easy when you get the basics, but I also love to tweak my system to death.

I didn't mind GNOME myself. Like many n00bs, I got my Linux start with Ubuntu. Unfortunately, Ubuntu hasn't been usable since 10.04. To me, Unity was counter-intuitive after being so used to GNOME and when I installed GNOME on the newer versions it just didn't feel right to me. Eventually, I gave up on Ubuntu almost entirely. I do still run Ubuntu 10.04 on one of my laptops and I don't mind it but for my "daily driver" computer I don't think it gets any better than Kubuntu.

[SteveRiley]

Here is an interesting count of the type of Linux people who browse Distrowatch use:
http://distrowatch.com/awstats/awsta....osdetail.html

I don't know exactly how awstats (the link in Jerry's post) determines a visitor's operating system. If the site is making a decision based on the browser, then the numbers likely don't reflect reality beacuse browser user agents may differ. For example...

Konqueror
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.21 (KHTML, like Gecko) konqueror/4.13.2 Safari/537.21

Firefox
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0

Lynx
Lynx/2.8.8pre.4 libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 GNUTLS/2.12.23

None of these state Kubuntu, and I doubt other browsers will; that's why you don't see it listed in the "Linux" section. You do see Ubuntu, because the Firefox string includes that. Chrom(e)ium probably does too. Konqueror simply says "Linux," so that will be counted as "unknown or unspecified," as will Lynx.

[HalationEffect]

Also worth considering is that thanks to ill advised over-use of browser user agent sniffing, some Linux users alter the UA to say the OS is Windows or OS-X, just so they can access some sites.

[GreyGeek]

True, and I mentioned the user agent in a previous post.
However, here is the AWSTATS on the browser & version, which has a menu bar on the left for other related options:
http://www.nltechno.com/awstats/awst...destailleur.fr
Notice that for all the sites they keep stats on, Windows is 73%, Linux is 15.7% and Mac is 6.3%

Operating Systems (Top 10) - Full list/Versions - Unknown
Windows 2,066 84.5 % 7,212 73.1 % Linux 196 8 % 1,553 15.7 % Macintosh 93 3.8 % 630 6.3 % Unknown 48 1.9 % 101 1 % iOS 22 0.9 % 277 2.8 % Unknown Unix system 13 0.5 % 81 0.8 % Java 5 0.2 % 5 0 % AmigaOS 1 0 % 1 0 %

Browsers (Top 10) - Full list/Versions - Unknown
MS Internet Explorer No 789 32.2 % 1,741 17.6 % Google Chrome No 741 30.3 % 3,765 38.1 % Firefox No 609 24.9 % 3,297 33.4 % Opera No 171 6.9 % 226 2.2 % Safari No 47 1.9 % 575 5.8 % Unknown ? 41 1.6 % 64 0.6 % Netscape No 12 0.4 % 12 0.1 % Mozilla No 10 0.4 % 50 0.5 % Android browser (PDA/Phone browser) No 10 0.4 % 116 1.1 % Acrobat Webcapture Yes 2 0 % 2 0 % Others 12 0.4 % 12 0.1 %

[OldSmoky2]

I wonder if Kubuntu has its own stats as to how many computers check in for updates. I know I've seen Canonical state that more than 20 million computers get Ubuntu updates. I wonder if that includes Kubuntu and other derivatives or if those are counted separately.

[claydoh]

I'd guess it pretty much does, as the actual OS is ubuntu's (kernel, etc), using lsb_release and uname.

Actually, the flavours are all counted as Ubuntu. I am not sure how they could count or filter the derivatives that get a lot of the heavy lifting from Ubuntu's repos such as mint

[apachelogger]

I wonder if Kubuntu has its own stats as to how many computers check in for updates.

No. This is pretty much an impossible thing to do because:

- Packages a distributed through a mirror network of which the majority are operated by third parties, making it impossible to track how many unique accesses there are across all mirrors.
- Unless you have the system talk to a centralized server and tell it a unique id for the system you can not tell how many actual computers are behind any given ip address (there is some approximation you can do given sufficient data, but even that will mostly be a fuzzy estimate).
- Kubuntu in particular has a substantial user base in huge public service and corporate roll outs, neither of those will have the actual computers access the official package servers but instead have their own internal mirror and update system.
- Much like the previous point thin-client rollouts as often seen in schools and universities present as very few actual computers (servers), but effectively hundreds of client workstations are in use forwarding all the heavy lifting to the servers
- ...

So, even if someone came up with a number, it would be as good as an educated guess and have very little to do with reality.

For some general musing on the matter I recommend reading this blog post http://aseigo.blogspot.co.at/2006/07...user-base.html