anikin wrote:The total vote numbers are pretty much consistent with my theory, that this is not a healthy community. Have a look at this forum. Where are all those thousands and thousands of mythical Puppy users? Why don't they join this forum and participate in the discussion?
measuring the health of the community by its active membership (the way youre doing) is a mistake. puppy is in some ways, a niche distro probably becoming more of one-- but thats not necessarily the case, and not necessarily a bad thing if its true.
despite its (openly admitted) lack of accuracy, distrowatch and downloads DO say more than the active forum members. youre not even counting the 90-9-1 ratio, which is pretty realistic for almost any forum (as a place to start.) if you just count the number of people working on woof and multiply that by 90, thats at least 100s.
you are trying to measure health without a convincing model of what health would be. this frees you to say pretty much anything arbitrary is a "bad sign" for puppy. i wont go so far as to say the number of forum members "doesnt matter," just that it has very little relevance to any claim youre making (other than "there arent a lot of forum members.") youre not quantifying anything, just sticking two data points together and saying "ooh, this is bad."
bad how? bad the way you say it is? a circular argument, in other words. you need to flesh out your argument to make it have substance. why not start with why it matters to you-- at least that will give us some clue as to what the rest of your criteria is, since there isnt enough to go on that youve shared with us so far. we can count the active forum users ourselves. either because we dont get it or because youre mistaken, it doesnt say as much to us as it says to you-- feel free to help us out-- tell us more if there is more.
http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm
There are people out to sell Linux, but they are very much the minority.
Linux is not interested in market share. Linux does not have customers. Linux does not have shareholders, or a responsibility to the bottom line. Linux was not created to make money. Linux does not have the goal of being the most popular and widespread OS on the planet.
All the Linux community wants is to create a really good, fully-featured, free operating system. If that results in Linux becoming a hugely popular OS, then that's great. If that results in Linux having the most intuitive, user-friendly interface ever created, then that's great. If that results in Linux becoming the basis of a multi-billion dollar industry, then that's great.
It's great, but it's not the point.
if puppy were windows, then windows would be in serious trouble.
if puppy is windows, you really need to let us know-- more likely you are committing the very common fallacy of comparing significantly different things using criteria that is unfittingly similar-- also known as conflation.
strictly for fun, i will answer your circular argument with a circular argument:
where are the puppy users, what are they doing instead of using the forum?
using puppy, of course!