What happened in June of 2009 within the Fedora Project?

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Mittwoch, den 14.10.2009, 17:35 +0200 schrieb Gregory Zysk:

> There is a problem with measuring downloads though, it does not give
> us a realistic number of how many people actually use Fedora. 

We do have smolt data for that:
http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/static/stats/stats.html

> It goes for the same ranking system on
> http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity. These popularity
> rankings are just based off of downloads and just give us data to
> reflect just that: downloads.

And you think distrowatch is more representative? I don't think so.

Distrowatch is counting visitors by user agent strings. Ask yourself:
Who visits distrowatch? Likely somebody who is looking for a new distro
to try. So are these people really happy with their distro or even
convinced of it? This is something the numbers cannot show.

By counting uniqe visits, you wont get numbers of OS installations or
users, because you don't know how often people visit that site. There
are people who say the number of Fedora installs is actually larger than
the number of Ubuntu installations, but quite a lot of them are servers
running in data centers [1]. They will never show up at distrowatch
because servers usually don't visit that site. ;)

Regards,
Christoph

[1] Just look at the high number of virtual machines in smolt.