On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 10:46 AM, Jude Nelson <judecn@???> wrote:

> Regarding usage data, do you think Debian's popcon numbers will yield any
> useful insights?
>

I believe there might be significant self selection bias issues WRT who
participates. Given that, to save anyone else the time, 9K konsole votes,
31K gnome-terminal votes, emacs23-common 6K, apache2.2-bin 52K, number of
submissions 170K.

I wouldn't give more than 1 sig fig, but it appears "at least half" of
machines don't have gnome installed despite it being the default
environment, "less than a sixth actually use gnome" and "about three times
as many run gnome vs kde".

I agree with T.J. sheer popularity is not a worthy goal, but it can be
useful for prioritization and at least 5/6 of Debian popcon participants
don't actively use gnome so a "much larger fraction than 5/6 don't use
gnome" could be a realistic estimate for this project, so making gnome a
major goal is probably un-necessary if almost everyone isn't going to use
it. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be included if it can, or that it
shouldn't be allowed, solely means its not that big of a deal if it makes
it or not for most users. "Eh" shrugs shoulders. That is where I disagree
with T.J. WRT popularity, yes it would be an impressive technological
achievement to ship a non-systemd Gnome, but if almost no one is going to
use it anyway, its not terribly important. If a tree falls in the forest
and no one hears it, etc etc. Where I admit T.J. could be right, is what
if "every" non-systemd gnome user from the whole linux ecosystem piled into
this theoretical non-systemd gnome, then the numbers could swell quite a
bit into being a important fraction (faction?) of the distro.

T.J. seems to be proposing more of a freebsd model, where xmonad is part of
Debian but not part of Freebsd 10.1, although the UI is virtually identical
"apt-get install something" vs "pkg install something". That would be a
big change from the Debian way of doing things, but, it clearly seems to
work very well for freebsd. I'm liking freebsd quite a bit over recent
months.