On Tue, 11 Jan 2005 07:47:14 -0800, M. Edward Borasky <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > OK ... here's my thinking. I visit DistroWatch every day and look at the > "Top Ten": > > 1 Mandrakelinux 1346 > 2 MEPIS 1329 > 3 SUSE 1083 > 4 Fedora 1056 > 5 Ubuntu 1024 > 6 Debian 960 > 7 KNOPPIX 860 > 8 Gentoo 655 > 9 Slackware 565 > 10 Damn Small 549 > > What's wrong with this picture? Well ... I would expect Mandrake, SUSE > and Fedora, with huge marketing budgets behind them, to be the top > three, even though, from what I hear, Fedora is the least stable, more > like a branded "sid" than anything else. :)
[snip...] Honestly, I don't care about our rank. I'd use Gentoo if it were ranked 1000. Many of the things I like best about Gentoo are the same things that keep us out of the top 5. Unnecessary gui tools, automated installers, and so on. The fact that Mandrake is at the top of that list is very telling about the kind of people that determine those rankings. If you realy agree with them, you are free to use Mandrake, but I dont want to turn Gentoo into Mandrake just for meaningless rankings. What I'm getting at is this: To me, and I'd imagine, most Gentoo users, Gentoo is about being a good (in my oppinion the best) distro; _Not_ necessarily the most popular distro. The two are not always the same thing, and I'd hate to give up the things I like about Gentoo in an attempt to steal users from Mandrake, Red Hat, and Suse, who are perfectly happy using those other distros. Colin -- [email protected] mailing list
