Why is Kubuntu never in the top ten on Distrowatch?

[KDEnewbie]

I have never seen the distro near or in the top ten, in fact, it seems to be mainly between 30 & 40. Now I know this is probably not a big deal at all, but imho there are some pretty horrible distros far higher up the list.

Is there a reason for this?, surely Kubuntu should at least be regularly within or close to the top ten.

[Qqmike]

First off, if you'll do a search here, you'll find some good discussion(s) on this.

[claydoh]

basically we don't have the theoretical avid fanboi base that theoretically goes out and in theory accesses their fave $DISTRO page on DW many times, which is one theory.


Page hit stats mean crap. Of course those distros who have low numbers will always say that , but really no one can know what causes one distro to get more hits on DW, Buzz, marketing, a desire for a distro/community to get higher numbers in the rankings all factor. In our case, being "just another Ubuntu" probably has an effect there.

I would bet good money that PCLos does not have as many users as we do, or that Mint and Mageia don't have as many actual users combined as Ubuntu. You come up with your own conclusions for why they rank so high on this list.

I think that judging the size of our small dev team, and that of our forum, we do alright

[dmeyer]

I have never seen the distro near or in the top ten, in fact, it seems to be mainly between 30 & 40. Now I know this is probably not a big deal at all, but imho there are some pretty horrible distros far higher up the list.

Is there a reason for this?, surely Kubuntu should at least be regularly within or close to the top ten.

Fun fact: Kubuntu was part of the largest planned Linux rollout in the world for the Brazilian public schools system.

Honestly though, distrowatch is a pretty terrible metric. Its a great aggregator site for news and reviews but otherwise its not very useful.

[StormNinja2]

basically we don't have the theoretical avid fanboi base that theoretically goes out and in theory accesses their fave $DISTRO page on DW many times, which is one theory.


Page hit stats mean crap. Of course those distros who have low numbers will always say that , but really no one can know what causes one distro to get more hits on DW, Buzz, marketing, a desire for a distro/community to get higher numbers in the rankings all factor. In our case, being "just another Ubuntu" probably has an effect there.

I would bet good money that PCLos does not have as many users as we do, or that Mint and Mageia don't have as many actual users combined as Ubuntu. You come up with your own conclusions for why they rank so high on this list.

I think that judging the size of our small dev team, and that of our forum, we do alright

Interesting coinsidence! I am a member of PCLinuxOS Forums as well as this--- That said, in my opinion, popularity is fleeting. It is more important that the Distro( regardless which) serve the needs and purposes of the User well and this in turn with create loyalty as well as word of mouth advertising that the Distro is a Great Alternative to offering of the "Big Box" and "Office Supply" stores. In fact earlier today, I was reading about a couple of other Ubuntu-based Distributions that I had never heard of( and I've read and perused hundreds!). The Two in question seemed great and I intend to burn a couple of ISOs to check them out. I don't believe they even make Distro Watch's list and to that end-- I am running a completely off DW Distro on one my machines and it performs like a champ.

I conclude by echoing the opinion the statics seen on DW have little relevance and at the end of the day--I am going to use what I like--not what is necessarily popular.

Just my two cents.

[Rod J]

I've always been disappointed how far down the Distrowatch list we are too. Nice to know it probably doesn't reflect true usage numbers after all.

[Simon]

My TOP TEN reasons;

1. Because Kubuntu is premium OS the rest are unleaded.
2. Bill Gates is in charge of the Distrowatch list.
3. It is a conspiracy in league with water fluoridation.
4. The Red Hat people are jealous cry babies.
5. Debian just knows it is God.
6. Mint paid cash to be number one.
7. Kubuntu is not very good at playing softball and gets picked last a lot.
8. Kubuntu is not a member of Google Plus.
9. The webpage designer for Distrowatch can't spell Kubuntu.
10. Kubuntu lawyers have a restraining order against them for stalking.

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

[PaulW2U]

I've always been disappointed how far down the Distrowatch list we are too.

Despite the relevance of what the list might or might not show, the Ubuntu family have always been at a disadvantage. Which other distributions have their figures split by desktop environment? :?

Nice to know it probably doesn't reflect true usage numbers after all.

It doesn't. The list is (now) titled "Page Hit Ranking". See http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity. DistroWatch freely admit that the listings are a light-hearted way of measuring visitors to their web-site.

There are dozens of distributions in that list that I've never heard of. Presumably, many others haven't either. I suspect that out of curiosity their reviews are visited and that sends them even higher up the list.

[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.

[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]

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.

[oshunluvr]

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

[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]

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]

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.