Re: reflections on LJ's reader's choice awards

[Alan Cox <alan redhat com>]

> Desktops: lets face it, KDE kicked our asses here. 40% to 24.5% are not
> good numbers. I have no idea what the ratios *really* are in the wild,
> but I think this number means we have been slipping somewhat.

Don't trust the figures. I've been involved in polls like this from both
sides and some of the factors are odd. It'll depend upon who posted the URL
of the survey to their user mailing list, who did a new release or was
in the news recently and the like.

Personally the number I'd have liked to have seen would have been

	"Bits of both  ??%"

> Distros: Red Hat dominant again. Significant to GNOME because RH is
> *still* the only major Linux distribution that pushes GNOME. See that

Debian is not as minor as many business end people think.

> because *they* want to make Linux better. I'm hoping that distros are
> corporatitized enough that they aren't just making decisions based on
> religion, but have done some analysis of why they move with one
> environment or another.

THe figures I've seen point at the things being very much common sense. 
SuSE have a lot of KDE users - especially in Germany where you it really is
dominant for example. Certainly the folks I knew at SuSE (half of whom alas
are now otherwise employed or worse) had an agenda but it was a 'this is
what our users want, this is what business tells us it wants' agenda.

> See those high numbers for Star Office? That means *real honest to
> goodness people* are using Linux. Those Star Office votes are probably

The star office beta is making waves. I get a continual stream of we are
consideirng star office feedback from people I meet. They are staring at MS
office prices and Gartner's predictions and trying to reconcile them with
slashed IT budgets. Interestingly many of the people I talk to now are
much more interested in SO on windows than going the full leap just yet.

Alan