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The OS Wars: We Have A Winner

sourceforge.net

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Re: The OS Wars: We Have A Winner

#31

Post by billpatrianakos »

That was not a good article at all. The title is misleading and the content has little to nothing to do with "OS Wars". We all know the users are benefitting from the 3 big competing OSes. Then they go on to basically say "hey, look at us, we're still relevant! We have some Analytics data that you should read as coming from a major authority".

I have nothing against SF at all but this kind of sounded like a call for attention. They talk about this data like its the final word on the subject but leave out so many other really popular resources where people get their apps like App Stores, Package Managers, GitHub, etc.

And what OS wars? This is 2011 not 1997. The OS makers are competing but they're not trying to be all things to all people like in the old days. We've got Linux distros for all types of users from sys admins (Arch, CentOS) to casual users (Ubuntu and other Debian based distros). The Mac has its own uniqueness that appeals to a broad audience and some people want their old standard, Windows. Some are gaining ground, others losing, but it's not like 10 or 15 years ago where people were looking for a winner. Some people are still and I'd say that's kind of dumb and jingoism has a bit to do with that.

This article should have had the title "SourceForge Sees Major Increase in Downloads from NameofOS". I call link bait.

Re: The OS Wars: We Have A Winner

#32

Post by quanticle »

onedognight wrote: post #10

Linux downloads have declined because most developers get binaries from their distribution and fewer and fewer old projects (i.e. those from source forge) need to be downloaded as source. OS X is a backwater as far as binary distribution is concerned and so developers have to use brew or macports. Every time you do "brew install blah" you have a 1/3 chance of downloading a project from source forge.

Another factor is Github. It could be that a lot of the new software for Linux is now hosted on Github, Bitbucket, and other DVCS-friendly sites. Meanwhile, as you say, the more stable stuff on Sourceforge is likely to be handled by distro-specific repositories.

Re: The OS Wars: We Have A Winner

#33

Post by johanbev »

Please note how the "other" category consists of nearly half of the downloads. I would say that this adds a lot of uncertainity in this dataset. Without knowing the distribution of the OS-es that shows up in "other" this data is pretty much meaningless.

Re: The OS Wars: We Have A Winner

#34

Post by bradleyland »

warpdude wrote: post #21
jcampbell1 wrote: post #14

This article is an example of how not to visualize data. The charts are not helpful in any way.

God, yes. It frustrated me so much that I ended up just copying the data into JS arrays and generating my own charts using the Google Visualization API. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25782/sourceforge.html Pretty eye-opening. What's clear is that the 'Other' category brings so much uncertainty to the data that it renders the data virtually useless.

Apparently much of the "other" data are non-browser tools. E.g., curl and wget.

https://twitter.com/#!/rbowen/status/137305778875936771

Re: The OS Wars: We Have A Winner

#35

Post by mappu »

jcampbell1 wrote: post #14

This article is an example of how not to visualize data. The charts are not helpful in any way.

Rather.

It took me a while to figure out the dates were MM/DD/YY. Even then, why is the day included? Are these per-day, and if so, why are they making sweeping generalisations about all of April? If they're just point markers why aren't they in line, and why are the bars separated?

It's great they managed to provide the full stats - in a completely uncopyable format. Let me break out tessaract. http://i.imgur.com/VDtUp.png http://i.imgur.com/nuKxl.png for (only marginally) more helpful visualisations

EDIT: warpdude's ones four hours ago and two comments down look nicer

Re: The OS Wars: We Have A Winner

#37

Post by thenextcorner »

warpdude wrote: post #21
jcampbell1 wrote: post #14

This article is an example of how not to visualize data. The charts are not helpful in any way.

God, yes. It frustrated me so much that I ended up just copying the data into JS arrays and generating my own charts using the Google Visualization API. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/25782/sourceforge.html Pretty eye-opening. What's clear is that the 'Other' category brings so much uncertainty to the data that it renders the data virtually useless.

Follow up conversation at: http://www.bradlanders.com/2011/11/17/visualizing-sourceforg...

Re: The OS Wars: We Have A Winner

#38

Post by thenextcorner »

cavilling_elite wrote: post #20
jcampbell1 wrote: post #14

This article is an example of how not to visualize data. The charts are not helpful in any way.

It also isn't very good to have an "other" category of ~60M averaged when your three "main" are ~60M, ~4M and ~3M. Terrible article.

Apparently, the unknown represent the auto updates right through the application itself, but sourced from SF

https://twitter.com/#!/rbowen/status/137305778875936771

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