On 12/17/2011 04:36 PM, Philip wrote: > Would it be possible to include something like a voluntary survey > with a round of updates? That would be better than raw numbers, and > the users who care enough to fill it out would probably provide the > best data.
Would this definitely be "better than raw numbers"? How do you know this? That's a *very* bold statement -- do you have data to back it up? It could accidentally be a very biased sample; "users who care enough" might all be significantly more experienced and techie than "users who do not care enough", for example, and so exhibit rather different usage patterns. And now, if we were to trust the survey data, we might accidentally skew our decisions based on this biased sample, and lose our less-techie users... not what we want. Or, maybe, our experienced users all have lots of work to do and lots of spam email, and will reflexively reject all survey requests, but newcomers are so enthusiastic that they will fill them in; in that case you could get the opposite bias. It seems to me that you cannot be sure your survey data would be "better" unless you have done all kinds of work (perhaps field trials, and appropriate statistical analysis of the results) to demonstrate that. Have you in fact done that work? As you must be aware, since you will already have researched this field in some depth before proposing something new, the existing popularity-contest package is a well established attempt to gather this kind of data, from all those who enable it, based on what people install, rather than on what they run. Debian automatically graphs the data it provides, all the way back to at least 2004, for example: http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=bash There is Ubuntu data at http://popcon.ubuntu.com too. I do not know whether popcon in its current form can distinguish between data from Lubuntu and data from Ubuntu; I suspect not. Will whatever new survey you are proposing clearly do better than this? Would enhancing popularity-contest and its associated infrastructure so it *does* distinguish between the various flavours of Ubuntu be as useful, or more useful, than your proposal? How do current numbers of users (as reported by popcon) installing lubuntu-desktop or lxde-common compare to those installing ubuntu-desktop, for example? Overall, I recommend using existing tools and data over trying to build a new survey mechanism from scratch. Jonathan _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~lubuntu-desktop Post to : lubuntu-desktop@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~lubuntu-desktop More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp