We of course all know the story of the Haemorrhaging Horse.
My horses is bleeding!
So, here's a great recipe for slaughtering horses:
1. Start with a sensational headline:
"Ubuntu savaged by rivals infected with fondleslab fever" (Note the l33t speak techno jargon injected to make the headline seem super-cool.)
2. Add a bogus tagline:
"Help, the penguins are revolting!"
3. Choose a writer (Gavin Clarke in San Francisco, one home of the Ubuntu California LoCo team) that's a member of the Ubuntu Non-Consumer Community (i.e. not an Ubuntu person) and evidently not a member of Ubuntu California.
4. Make a dubious claim:
"The penguins are on the march: they are leaving Mark Shuttleworth's Ubuntu and migrating towards other Linux distros, fresh data suggests."
5. On a popular and widely read website:
the Register
6. Back the claim by citing a kernely web site that doesn't really track the popularity of free (or non-free) operating systems, but claims to:
"Distrowatch's annual web rankings claim Ubuntu's top spot has been snatched by ... during the last 12 months. In the past month alone Ubuntu's been kicked to fourth place by ... and ..., who slid in to take the second and third spots behind ..."
So, where does this leave the 99.999% of us that are actually a part of the Ubuntu consumers|developer|contributor|LoCo-team|core|cct|Canonical|member Community?
We are left with two choices:
1) We ignore it and hope that the noise goes away and that people don't buy the hype.
2) We do something about it.
I vote for #2. Here's what we should do:
a) Don't spread the article. (I didn't link to it. I hope you won't too.)
b) Fix the web browsers in Ubuntu to accurately report user-agent strings with the word "Ubuntu." (Drop the L word while we're at it please. Developers, we need you to help with this one.)
c) Get over to Distrowatch ASAP and register your vote. Tell 500 of your Ubuntu friends to do the same. (Everyone in the community please.)
d) Ubuntu California: Embrace Gavin. Teach him what Ubuntu really is. He works in your city, not in some remote anonymous tube on the interwebs. Have an Ubuntu Hour. Invite him. Throw a party. Invite him. Maybe even buy him a nice computer with Ubuntu pre-loaded on it. Gift wrap it. It's Thanksgiving.
In conclusion, we can let this stuff spread or we can fix it. Let's choose to fix it before the horse is dead. Amplify the signal.
--
What is Ubuntu Community? What is the Ubuntu Non-Consumer Community? For a precise definition, please refer to the Ubuntu Community Lexicon depicted here.
I heard all the big, bold statement about how Mint is becoming the most popular distro. So I tried it with Mint 12. But what is this? It is a tons of trickssy DE in the name of 'Classic' or 'Convenience'. They give a Mate Desktop. But when I run compiz with it by "compiz --replace", CPU becomes hot and every thing freezes. I test that several times. And the Gnome-Shell modified by Mint is worse that original Gnome-Shell. Put aside the all bad stuff, half-integrated Mint KDE release. Everywhere I have been reading that KDE is improved with version 4.7 and also test it with Ubuntu. But when I tested KDE (which is also 4.7) with Mint, I cannot run it without deleting the partition where it installed. All the False Claim about Mint. They even did not change the Slideshow images of the ubiquity installer, How this type of distro can be a contender of ubuntu
Forced Unity in 11.10 was just the last straw for a lot of users/developers including myself. From what I recall moving the close button to the left several releases ago was when the GUI brain damage started. All statistics are faulty to some extent, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if the general trend away from Ubuntu to Mint is actually happening. I for one dropped Ubuntu, and I was previously a core-dev, to use Mint. I stopped working on Ubuntu due to it heading in a direction that I could no longer support.
On the topic of reinstating an Ubuntu user agent, I think it's a critical community bug, as few third party developers will bother with Ubuntu when there's no hard evidence that we're as popular as we are. Unfortunately, the Ubuntu Firefox maintainer doesn't believe Ubuntu should patch it back in, and I believe governance standards give him the right to that decision.
So... Chromium? I don't know really.
c) Get over to Distrowatch ASAP and register your vote. Tell 500 of your Ubuntu friends to do the same. (Everyone in the community please.)
Ugh please no, it will just encourage people to argue about wrong numbers.
@Jorge:
Perception is reality. Though I concur with you that Distrowatch numbers are largely irrelevant, I think we are in the minority. Those members of the Ubuntu "Non-Consumer" Community believe in Distrowatch. We need to meet them where they live and remove the excuse.
Uhm.. people reaching for distrowatch as a metric is a natural result of Canonical execs touting _unsubstantiated_ userbase numbers for YEARS without telling us how those numbers are derived. Canonical execs has repeatedly and consistently shoved _unsubstantiated_ userbase growth to the press as a talking point. How do people fact check those _unsubstantiated_ claims on growth? They reach for the only public numbers they have available to them as surrogates. Googles trends, distrowatch, wikipedia. All of them showing downward trends in Ubuntu now. All of them.
Is reaching for those different stats the correct thing to do? No, is it a reasonable leap for the laypress to make after Canonical has been so vocal about touting userbase estimate numbers? Yes.
What needs to happen is for Canonical to come clean and _explain_ how they get their userbase growth metrics. Because of this interest in the size of the Ubuntu userbase was created by Canonical pressing the point about userbase growth to the laypress. This isn't going to get better until Ubuntu as a project _demands_ its project lead be transparent about the methodology to etimate userbase numbers he's handing out. When Shuttleworth says there's been growth in the last year but none of the public trending data shows any growth at all... that is a credibility problem and it can only be solved by explaining how things are estimated.
-jef
I always remember that post (I'm Jef Spaleta) from Jono bacon when i read some post from Jef Spaleta... it's funny
-- just a user
@Jef:
Thanks for your response. Thoughtful and insightful as always.
My mind now goes back to the oem tool that Canonical produced a while back that sent some segments of the Ubuntu Community into a rage, but might very well be the one most useful thing to bring stats to a broader audience. canonical-census. https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/canonical-census
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