Why Even Talk About Linux Popularity?

November 30th, 2011

It seems like such a waste of time- in the past several weeks most of the ‘news’ my various sources have cobbled together based on my interests have been a slew of “Ubuntu no longer the most popular” ‘news’ stories. Give me a break.

I saw one reaction to this on omgubuntu.co.uk that dismissed the numbers and the comments were, I think, unfair. The author rightly notes that all these ‘news’ stories are based on Distrowatch visitors. And not based on the their platform as reported by the browser, but the pages on the Distrowatch site that people visit. In other words it’s useless. Before you rip me apart, follow my logic here.

Gus uses Windows but keeps hearing that the wise and powerful think Linux is where it’s at- but he’s confused about the idea of ‘distributions’. A friend suggests he look at Distrowatch to help him decide on a distribution to try.

Gus visits Distrowatch. He clicks around, looking at Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu. He decides he doesn’t know enough and doesn’t install anything.

Distrowatch tallies his visit- 1 new visit each for Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu!

Gus sees in the news that Linux Mint is actually the best. He checks back at Distrowatch and looks at Linux Mint. He decides he’s still not ready.

Distrowatch tallies a new visit for Linux Mint.

Gus sees more and more articles about Linux Mint and returns to Distrowatch, trying to muster his courage to install.

Distrowatch tallies a new visit for Linux Mint.

At this point, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu all picked up a visit, and Linux Mint picked up 2 and he still hasn’t installed! News people somehow equate those visits with distribution usage. The irony behind this whole conversation is that the resources at Distrowatch are geared to people wanting a new or different distribution. A real user isn’t going to visit the page when he’s happily using his chosen distribution of Linux every day.

‘News’ writers: you’re ridiculous and you are the problem here. Distrowatch doesn’t pretend that their stats have anything to do with users. Write some real news articles please.

All Linux distributions: can you please settle on a centralized way to track actual usage? Managed by someone else. Maybe it just counts via your update mechanism. I don’t know.

Until they do, can everyone stop whining about who is best and get back to making great apps for Linux?

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The Basics

Here are the basic Tuxrocket Guidelines for making an app succeed. It comes down to this: act like you’re a company that a customer has purchased an app from. I don’t mean free support or anything. But provide a decent product with the kind of resources a normal human being needs.

Build a Website

Make yourself a nice website. Use a stock theme if you have to, but get a nice one. Ask for some opinions from ‘normal’ people. Plain HTML is fine. You don’t need a state of the art wiki, bugtracker, etc.

And get yourself your own domain name- host your project on SourceForge or elsewhere, but that is not a website. I’m talking top-level domain.

If you can do it, put a user forum on your site. Not for developers or hackers. For users. How to use the app. Feature requests. Help.

Read all about it.

Create a Beautiful UI

Your app should be a pleasure to use- an experience so slick that users look forward to opening it every day.

Read about making it great.

Get a Nice App Icon

Get an app icon that sums up your app and also makes it a pleasure to see your app in a user’s deskbar.

Learn more.

Distribute Packages

Don’t force users to build and install source code. Along with the source download, use the openSUSE Build Service to create packages for the most popular Linux distributions. And work towards getting your package included in the official distributions or repositories.

Get started.

Market to Users

You need to conduct electronic warfare. Every software company out there pays people, in some cases many people, to sit around coming up with ways to appeal to users. The reason they have to do this is because they have to convince people to hand over cash for their software. You, however, probably do not have that problem. You just have to interest them enough to try your app.

Get going.