Igor posted on Thu, 09 Jan 2014 16:44:02 +0400 as excerpted: > There is no data to tell what happens with Gentoo (to give that data is > one of the goals of the project). We only have some formal esteems from > unreliable sources. > > According to distro watch: > > In February 2012, Gentoo distro was in 19th place. > In December 2012, Gentoo went to 22nd place. > In December 2013, Gentoo is down to 32nd place
There was some discussion of this previously. The conclusion was basically that gentooers don't tend to be the trend-watching type, nor, really, are we really interested in the trend-watching type, as that's not gentoo's base or target user. Instead, our users tend to be independent customizers that aren't so interested in what the majority thinks, but, rather find gentoo's general support for letting them make of their gentoo installation what they will a very good match for their needs. If that's not the best match or if their needs change, the fact that gentoo takes more work than many distros because you have to actually configure and build it, tends to have them quickly off to some other distro that's a better fit for their less time/interest, more cookie-cutter needs. In a way, then, gentoo in the Linux ecosystem is what Linux itself is in the more general OS ecosystem, and gentoo tends to get only the self- selecting independent thinkers who value the ability to make their OS what they want while never-the-less automating much of the process (thus we aren't Linux from Scratch), in the same way that the same group, but to a somewhat lessor extent, tend to be Linux users. And just as a significant subset of those Linux users and devs value their (software) freedom and independence enough to not be willing to sacrifice it just to have Linux more popular and maybe exceed MS, so a lot of Gentoo users and devs aren't willing to compromise on gentoo's ideals of highly customizable individuality just to see us rise in rankings such as distro-watch. If it happens, great, but it won't greatly affect the way gentoo is developed, and if it doesn't happen, no big deal anyway, since that's not something we consider significant or important, particularly /because/ we recognize that sort of user isn't what gentoo's targeting in the first place. > According to Linux Counter > > In January 2012, Gentoo distro had 5.32% > In January 2012, Gentoo had 4.04% > In November 2013, Gentoo had 4,21% I guess one of those January 2012s is supposed to be something different... Same thing here, really, tho the reason is a bit different. I know *I* certainly haven't registered with linuxcounter, and don't expect I ever will, either. I see it as useless at best, and yet another way to be tracked at worst. (I /do/ deliberately keep my browser's user- agent string set to Linux instead of setting it to say the latest MS Windows version, and deliberately kept 64-bit back when 32-bit was the norm for similar reasons, so sites that I visit and thus care about can count that, but I most certainly do NOT let the various third-party tracing sites do their thing, using tools such as firefox plugins noscript, request-policy and cookie permissions, as well as privoxy, to help me keep that information out of third-party-tracker's hands.) Tho interestingly, that does show percentage stabilizing or even increasing a bit between the second and third samples. What it means, however, I'm not going to attempt to guess. For all I know it simply means a few gentooers don't object to being tracked as strongly as they once did, which is actually slightly disturbing to me, tho it's their life so they get to decide, not me. > And from my experience of Gentoo forums, gentoo.wiki - I vote for Gentoo > at least not gaining new users. That would be a more interesting number, there. But you don't provide stats for that one, and personal perception such as yours above for those constantly involved is notoriously inaccurate. Someone who left for a couple years and came back tends to see changes much better, for the same reason you don't tend to notice changes in a friend as you grow old together, unless you're separated for a few years and then meet again. I wonder what the forums stats counts are. I know there's mailing list activity stats as I've seen them posted occasionally, but I'm not sure if there's anything like that for the forums... That would give us some concrete numbers to work with. > If in several years the number of users is not increased - we can tell > about stagnation. As I've personally argued about Linux, if popularity comes at the cost of loss of freedom, etc, it's not worth it. There's worse things than seeing numbers stagnate, and losing our ideals in a likely futile pursuit of popularity (what's the chances of gentoo topping Red Hat even if we forsook all that makes gentoo gentoo and tried? that's not what we're good at or care about) is one of them. > It's all not very well thought after at this stage but immediate goals > are like this: > > > * Knowledge of [... multiple suggestions for tracking various things potentially objectionable to gentoo users.] I suspect that the various gentoo stats efforts failed for the same reason I suspect fewer than normal gentoo users are registered with linuxcounter... Gentoo users tend to be the independent sort, and have a distinct aversion to being counted or tracked. A few might opt in, but not enough to get particularly good or reliable data, and if it were opt- out or worse-yet hard-coded, we'd likely lose a lot of gentoo users over it, not just because of the tracking objection itself (many can patch that out if they have too, as I did gentoo/kde's hard-coded semantic- desktop stuff here, when they tried to dump the flag in early kde 4.11, tho fortunately they returned it before 4.11 stabilized), but because that sort of hard-coding would be a betrayal of everything that a lot of gentoo users have come to gentoo FOR, so were it to happen, it'd be time to leave. Meanwhile, those of us who have been around gentoo for a few years have seen the "gentoo's stagnating/dying and here's what it must do to be- popular-again/survive" thread several times over, by now. Gentoo's still here; I'm still here. Those ideas... aren't... until they come around for another round, as they seem to do every couple years... And FWIW, gentoo's number of devs rose until it hit something around 300, then it fell back a bit (I think it reached 350 or so before they started actively retiring devs who had disappeared for quite some time, but I believe the number of active devs has never much exceeded 300, if that), but has remained relatively steady around 250-ish devs, 200 or so active depending on definition of "active", for several years now. Sometimes it goes down a few, then it goes up a few, but overall it remains about the same. Which actually fits various organizational/group dynamics models, apparently, too. There's (apparently, this was posted one of the other times a discussion like this came up, and it makes sense, but I've not looked into it further) some studies to the effect that there are several group size thresholds. IIRC (and I may not) the maximum effective size for small groups was 20-50. At about that point, conflict goes up and groups either adapt and change their practices to grow, or drop down below that number again and tend to stay there. There's another such threshold at 250-350, forcing further group practices adaption to grow further. A number of FLOSS groups reach that one and never pass it, and gentoo has been right there for some years now. But if that threshold is passed, the group can grow relatively unrestrained again, to a size of several thousand. I believe Debian is one of the few all-community examples of passing the 250-350 threshold, but that they're stuck at the next one, 2500-3000. I think the kernel has passed the 250-350 barrier now too, with git and the distributed hierarchy of kernel lieutenants, codified signed-off-by practices, etc, helping with that. Before the distributed git and bitkeeper before that on the technical side, however, and before the hierarchy of kernel lieutenants was established, there was a real crisis, as Linus really was becoming the bottleneck, and nobody really knew how to fix it as there's only so much one man can do. But they worked thru the issues and busted that cap, and the kernel's moving faster than ever thought possible, before. If that is indeed the case, then in ordered to grow, gentoo needs to figure out how to get past that 250-350 developer threshold, and until/ unless we do, we'll "stagnate" in at least active developer numbers. IOW, it's primarily a social/organizational problem, not a technical problem, tho as with the kernel and bitkeeper and then git, the right technical tools can help. Actually, in that regard it's very possible that gentoo's long planned and worked toward cvs-to-git conversion will help finally bust that barrier for gentoo as well. Time will tell I guess, but that's one more reason to try to help make it happen. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
