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Re: Desktop Linux Survey
by Phase II on Thursday 23/Aug/2007, @15:14
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Thanks for bringing this up. You're not the only one who has caught mysterious shifts in the vote results. Some days ago, triggered by another comment and having the results from the day before in mind, I checked about two days and three days after vote start and already saw a noticably shift in a certain vote constellation.
see here http://dot.kde.org/1187268289/1187269736/1187272356/1187273173/1187274305/1187288798/1187331858/1187343466/1187344416/1187353058/1187362815/
After about 2 days the results were about settled (a number people from most continents/timezones having voted so that results weren't easy to skew anymore) so it could be expected that only total vote counts would go up after that.
But still, one vote constellation (which was: openSUSE, Gnome, Firefox, Evolution and "None -- I don't run Windows apps on Linux") would rise noticably after these about 18.000 votes. After the final 38.500 votes the results shifted like this:
Vote option | percentage after about 18.000 votes (after about two days after start; sorry, only rough numbers) | percentage after about 27.000 votes (half a day later) | final percentage after 38.500 votes
openSUSE ~9,5 ->16,5 -> 21
Gnome ~37,5 -> 42,5 -> 45
Firefox ~54/55 -> 58,5 -> 60
Evolution 14 -> 21,5 -> 32
None -- I don't run Windows apps on Linux ~22 -> 30 -> 39
To summarize, it was as if almost nobody voted for any other option anymore; massive shifts, even percentages which more than doubled!
Even for persons who are not familiar with distributions of votes and normal shifts which may occur, it's not hard to see that this is very, very, very unlikely. Or to summarize, the poll has been manipulated.
That no suspicious votes have been seen by desktoplinux.com doesn't mean there haven't been any.
(Perhaps someone can calculate the total number of votes which exclusively went to that combination. As the other vote options didn't change drastically, mostly only went down, I didn't track these.)
Sadly this poll is clearly manipulated and cannot be taken as a reliable source for the percentage a distro or application has on Linux. As I already wrote in the first comment, I also wouldn't trust these kinds of votes if it hadn't deliberately been manipulated.
P.S.: I don't really care for the manipulator (aka the one with the bot net?), but, well, I don't think he did any good for the options he pushed. His work is obvious, so is he really helping this certain distro, desktop, application or attitude he voted for? Perhaps publicity, but as it is so plain and simple obvious, it's quite certain that people will point at it, which reverses to bad publicity. The most certain thing one can say is: no reliable numbers this year. |
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Re: Desktop Linux Survey
by Div on Thursday 23/Aug/2007, @16:27
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Honestly, your numbers are poor and mean nothing.
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Re: Desktop Linux Survey
by André on Friday 24/Aug/2007, @01:32
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Since you seem to have better insight into this than the rest of us: please share with us why you think these numbers are poor and mean nothing. Better yet, please explain the observed shifts yourself.
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Re: Desktop Linux Survey
by jospoortvliet on Monday 27/Aug/2007, @02:21
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I've asked some ppl here (I work in a research institute) about how to analyze the results with statistical software, and see if it's significantly wrong. So I told them about the results (25.000 votes in 3 days, so on average a little under 350/hour. Then Friday night, from 3 to 4 o'clock - 3000 votes, 2700 Gnome+Suse+F etc, 300 random around KDE. How do I analyze this, see if it's likely to be random or not.
They said you don't need to analyze that, a child can see such numbers aren't normal.
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Re: Desktop Linux Survey
by theriddle on Tuesday 28/Aug/2007, @15:07
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Agreed. Any brainless 2-year-old would know these #s are unreal.
Unfortunately, no-one else would bother to check out and will gloat about how GNOME has overtaken KDE. The fanboy who screwed the results will get what he wanted.
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Re: Desktop Linux Survey
by Carewolf on Friday 24/Aug/2007, @02:03
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So lets analyze the numbers.
openSuse:
18000 * 9,5% = 1710
27000 * 16.5% = 4455
38500 * 21% = 8085
Differences:
18000 early votes: 9.5% openSUSE
9000 middle votes: 30.5% openSUSE
9500 late votes: 38.2% openSUSE
GNOME:
18000 * 37.5 = 6750
27000 * 42.5 = 11475
38500 * 45 = 17325
Differences:
18000 early votes: 37.5% GNOME
9000 middle votes: 52.5% GNOME
9500 late votes: 61.6% GNOME
Strange, but no smoking gun. You need time stamps to prove the "10000" strange votes.
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Re: Desktop Linux Survey
by scratching my head on Friday 24/Aug/2007, @09:44
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The News page at opensuse.org ( http://news.opensuse.org/ ) has this to say about the survey:
### . What’s striking is that popularity of openSUSE almost
### . doubled form (sic!) roughly 10% in 2006 to close to
### . 20% in 2007 survey.
Oh yeah, really striking...
I'm an openSUSE user myself, and I like the distro quite a lot, as well as their fine developers (I don't like their upper/top management types though).
But with these DesktopLinux figures, something smells fishy....
And also compare them to the figures that Novell's own recently published user survey showed: KDE there was by far the most popular desktop environment still, dispite the lots of "anti-KDE" bruhuahua that seemed to originate from their management level for a certain period....
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