Why is Kubuntu never in the top ten on Distrowatch?

[SteveRiley]

JEEZE LOUISE.................how many times do I have to post this!!!!?

And...........it is never done.

No one's stopping you from starting. And if you think that you don't know enough to write everything, perhaps simply taking the iniative to start will attract other contributors. That's kind of the Linux way, isn't it?

wood

gettingtothestageofbeyondcaring

smoke

That's rather unkind.

[SteveRiley]

You should look at Rosa.

Rosa's origins in Russia gives me the creeps. I've had to help folks recover from too many attacked computers where we had good reason to think that the origin was somewere inside the Russian Business Network. Personally, I worry about the RBN than I do about malicious state, semi-state, or non-state actors from China. That said, I'm also leery of Chinese software. I've removed all Russian and Chinese apps from my Nexuses 4, 7 and 10.

Now then, I realize that I can review Rosa's source code. But I don't have the time to do that, and I'll the first to admit that developers smarter than me could easily hide bad code within the good and I'd never even see it. I wonder if anyone outside Russia has conducted a thorough code review, including static and dynamic analsys, fuzz testing, and other detection techiques.

[SteveRiley]

My TOP TEN reasons;

Ok, I am sorry, but my point is, anyone can make up a top ten list, it don't mean a thing.

That's so meta, dude.

[woodsmoke]

I will reply AGAIN........... I have said this MULTIPLE times...........

The "cognoscenti" and a bunch of "new users" should get together and........

MAKE A SINGLE DOCUMENT........... that will fit within the "height" of a "monitor" that shows, with links, and text SIMPLY........"what is going on" with the "cashew" and "widgets" etc. and LINK to other sites/ YouTube videos the ADVANTAGES of KDE...

compared to "other 'nixs" and Windblows.

"Minnesota Mining and Mineral" company........."3M"...........had, and STILL HAS a policy in which if ANY DOOF..........

IN THE MAILROOM.....................

submits a single idea, one a single sheet of paper, on ONE SIDE that paper that it WILL BE CONSIDERED at the "highest levels"..........

Now.............do all of the become enabled...............NO..............

BUT..............."post it notes" started out that way..........

SURELY WITH THE HUGE NUMBERS OF PEOPLE AT THE FORUM AND THE.....

Capabilities of Blue Systems.........

"WE"..............notice.........

"WE" could come up with "one side, one sheet"..!!!!!!

JEEZE LOUISE.................how many times do I have to post this!!!!?

And...........it is never done.

wood

gettingtothestageofbeyondcaring

smoke

[sithlord48]

Lastly, I find RPMs easier to package.

i was trying to pack some of the software on my ppa to RPM and had all kinds of problems. packing RPM's is way harder (for me) then creating deb files. Long story short i write some tools for some specilized stuff and was trying to use the openSuse build system to package for different distros (to replace launchpad mostly). Since they need to be RPM format i was having one hell of a time.Prehaps if you have some time you can maybe look at one and help me get them packed up ? the main tool i would start with this since its the one i write myself so i know it the best. (the others are ones i only code small bits and package)

[perspectoff]

The answer is relatively simple.

By default, the User Agent string (at least in Firefox) for Kubuntu shows Ubuntu as the OS instead.

Since many OS usage statistics (such as W3Techs) are compiled by analyzing user agent strings, all Kubuntu users inaccurately appear to be using Ubuntu instead (as identified by the user agent strings).

If you want Kubuntu to be counted by these services, change your default user-agent string in Firefox directly using the about:config settings:

Firefox -> about:config -> Search: useragent -> general.useragent.enable_overrides -> Toggle (so that the value is true) -> <right-click> -> New -> String -> Enter the preference name: general.useragent.override -> OK -> general.useragent.override: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Kubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:26.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/26.0 -> OK -> Restart Firefox

For more info cf. http://www.brighthub.com/internet/go...les/90768.aspx

An alternative is to use the Firefox plug-in/add-on User Agent Switcher instead ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/fir...gent-switcher/ ) , but it is less consistent because it reverts to the default user agent string each time you restart Firefox.

For full info see (K)Ubuntuguide at http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Template...in_for_Firefox

When I do an online scan of my Kubuntu OS online logged in with Konqueror (whose user agent identifies it as a KHTML browser), it comes up as "unknown OS," which also wouldn't be counted.

In short, there might be far more Kubuntu users than it appears.

[dmeyer]

EXACTLY what I did wrong. At the time (like opensuse 10?) I was still unwary of the repos. Having the variety and quantity of packages that opensuse had sort of ran me over. About the third time I broke my video driver, I found PCLinuxOS which was a lot simpler. Once I "cut my teeth" there, I wanted more software and that group does NOT want you adding anything to "their" OS, so I found Kubuntu and have been happy ever since.

Yeah, I don't think they had Zypper back then. Zypper is the only tool that makes living with RPMs bearable. To be fair, I always thought openSUSE was slow, bloated, outdated, they've only really been able to shake that image with 12.2 and now 12.3. Their systemd migration was pretty good but they do silly things when it comes to design choice like not adopting DKMS by default. Also nvidia and intel mesa drivers can't be installed simulatenously which means I have to install nvidia, move the folder, then reinstall mesa to get bumblebee working. Its very frustrating, fortunately nvidia driver updates aren't very frequent. Bumblebee on Kubuntu is 100% smooth and simple.

[oshunluvr]

The trick with openSUSE is to limit yourself to not add a billion repos or use a repo built for a different distro or version. Also I'm fairly sure openSUSE has the second largest package repository after Debian, and only comes second by a small margin. When using the community repos, untick stay subscribed to the repo unless its one of the big repos.

EXACTLY what I did wrong. At the time (like opensuse 10?) I was still unwary of the repos. Having the variety and quantity of packages that opensuse had sort of ran me over. About the third time I broke my video driver, I found PCLinuxOS which was a lot simpler. Once I "cut my teeth" there, I wanted more software and that group does NOT want you adding anything to "their" OS, so I found Kubuntu and have been happy ever since.

[dmeyer]

I installed Rosa awhile back in a VM, but I can't get past my gag reflex at RPM packaging. I suppose it's improved a lot since I last used it regularly.

The only program I really miss from my Mandrake/Mandriva days is DiskDrake. It's the only partitioning tool I've encountered that allowed you to create a partition, enable it (fstab, etc) and move data to it all in one step. It made creating a separate /home easy as pie back when installers didn't offer the option. Now-a-days I've outgrown the need for that ability (btrfs and all) but I think a lot of new users could benefit from that functionality.

My major linux history is Mandrake>Mandriva>OpenSuse>PCLinuxOS>Kubuntu. There's about five others in there that didn't last a fortnight. OpenSuse lasted three months before I descended into RPM hell. Several dozen others have passed through my VBox. I'm a hobbiest not a professional, so I lean toward cutting edge and cool over totally stable. I tried Gnome for about a minute once, but KDE it the only desktop I use except I use Bodhi (E17) on my light-weight netbook. I use Ubuntu server without a desktop at all.

Oops - I've wondered off topic again!

I like RPMs, especially delta RPMs which help conserve bandwidth at home. RPMs make it easy to install multiple versions of packages simultaneously. Lastly, I find RPMs easier to package.

The greatest problem with RPMs is that almost all RPM distros are built from their own bases/cores while all deb distros are built off of a Debian base/core. Even Ubuntu although sort of its own distro still relies on Debian for packages. If all the RPM distros took a single core, say openSUSE then most of RPM hell would disappear. Also yum is nasty. So nasty. Try openSUSE again -12.3 was just released. Its genuinely a good distro and I have not run into dependency issues once with 12.2. The trick with openSUSE is to limit yourself to not add a billion repos or use a repo built for a different distro or version. Also I'm fairly sure openSUSE has the second largest package repository after Debian, and only comes second by a small margin. When using the community repos, untick stay subscribed to the repo unless its one of the big repos.

[oshunluvr]

I installed Rosa awhile back in a VM, but I can't get past my gag reflex at RPM packaging. I suppose it's improved a lot since I last used it regularly.

The only program I really miss from my Mandrake/Mandriva days is DiskDrake. It's the only partitioning tool I've encountered that allowed you to create a partition, enable it (fstab, etc) and move data to it all in one step. It made creating a separate /home easy as pie back when installers didn't offer the option. Now-a-days I've outgrown the need for that ability (btrfs and all) but I think a lot of new users could benefit from that functionality.

My major linux history is Mandrake>Mandriva>OpenSuse>PCLinuxOS>Kubuntu. There's about five others in there that didn't last a fortnight. OpenSuse lasted three months before I descended into RPM hell. Several dozen others have passed through my VBox. I'm a hobbiest not a professional, so I lean toward cutting edge and cool over totally stable. I tried Gnome for about a minute once, but KDE it the only desktop I use except I use Bodhi (E17) on my light-weight netbook. I use Ubuntu server without a desktop at all.

Oops - I've wondered off topic again!

[dmeyer]

That link page is interesting. Russia seems to be an "emerging" linux market.

Linux has actually historically done quite well there although it doesn't really produce all that many distros. You should look at Rosa. Its picking up where Mandriva left off and delivers a customized but highly polished KDE desktop. It has both enterprise and "fresh" (average consumer) products. They also have some really innovating technologies.

In terms of the prettiest KDE distro out there I always think Rosa >> openSUSE = PCLinuxOS > Kubuntu = Fedora = Arch = Mageia. I'm talink default looks here. Best thing about KDE though is that even the most Vaniila install can be customized into something alien.

Checkout Klook (sort of brings back some Konqueror features to dolphin for in app previews), Rosa Media Player and their spin on the Mandriva control centre. Their launcher is quite cool but I'm not a fan of full screen launchers - Krunner is more than ample for me. Didn't really checkout their cloud integration though as I run my own owncloud install.

[oshunluvr]

That link page is interesting. Russia seems to be an "emerging" linux market.

[oshunluvr]

Agreed it's rather useless, but you think I would go to distro watch and click on a distro I already use? That makes zero sense. The purpose of the website is the opposite of that. I go there to shop for new distros, not review what I already know.

[dmeyer]

One could logically argue that the lower score of Kubuntu reflects a higher level of use.

That's a pretty awful logical fallacy. Plus, I can almost guarantee that interest implies popularity which implies usage. Now obviously there is a correlation, but it probably doesn't imply causation. Also, Ubuntu's distrowatch page is on the second page for me on google, imagine how much that impacts page hits. I think a better gauge for interest would be google searches. Now give this a look (correlate with say wikipedia's browser statistics). I think that would show that interest probably has a very strong correlation with usage. What this leads me to think is that distrowatch is not only a poor metric for usage, I feel its also a poor metric for gauging interest. In other words, distrowatch is a fairly useless metric.

/rant

[oshunluvr]

If you think about it, the results show a level of curiosity, not use. Distrowatch is really a source of information for distro's that one does not already know about. When one visit's that page, there would be no or very little reason to click on the distro you are already using, so the "score" shows how many people who are distro-hopping or wandering about looking for info.

One could logically argue that the lower score of Kubuntu reflects a higher level of use.

I visit there once a month or so just to see what's new. Rarely any more do I actually try a different distro for a minute.