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A Linux Mint 12 preview
The Linux Mint Blog looks
forward to the Linux Mint 12 release. "Going forward, we won't
be using a custom search engine anymore. Linux Mint is the 4th most popular
desktop OS in the World, with millions of users, and possibly outgrowing
Ubuntu this year. The revenue Mint users generate when they see and click
on ads within search engines is quite significant. So far this revenue's
entirely gone towards search engines and browsers. Our goal is to give
users a good search experience while funding ourselves by receiving a share
of this income. Search engines who do not share the income generated by our
users, are removed from Linux Mint and might get their ads blocked."
(Log in to post comments)
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 15:18 UTC (Mon) by patrick_g (subscriber, #44470) [Link]
The big news is "MGSE (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions). With this we will be able to use Gnome 3 in a traditional way (bottom panel, tray icons, etc).
I hope these Extensions will be available on all distros.
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 15:28 UTC (Mon) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]
Agreed on all counts; their solutions for the direction of GNOME are much more important and exciting than their search engine choices, and even though I'm a longtime KDE user I hope what Mint is doing makes its way to other distributions.
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 17:04 UTC (Mon) by andrewsomething (subscriber, #53527) [Link]
There source seems to be hosted on GitHub:
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 8, 2011 1:14 UTC (Tue) by elanthis (guest, #6227) [Link]
Now if only they had bothered to merge the two panels' functionality, so I didn't need to bounce back and forth between the top and bottom of a 30" monitor ever. There's no real reason to have both; the top one doesn't even have anything on it, really, so it's not like you need two panels to fit all the functionality. App menu, modern dock, notification icons, calendar, workspace switcher... that's all you need. IMO, anyway.
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 8, 2011 3:55 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
> Now if only they had bothered to merge the two panels' functionality
Yes, would be really nice to have.
However, they did excellent work there nonetheless. Once a "true" workspace switcher extension crops up (the one that actually shows windows on workspaces), I think the sanity will be completely restored.
PS. Amazingly _multiple_ people/groups produced slightly different solutions to what is "overview bug". If that's not indicative of the brokenness of it, I don't know what is.
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 8, 2011 19:07 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
There is no logic in your PS. Happily using gnome-shell, and various people will be using KDE, XFCE, Windows, etc.
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 8, 2011 20:12 UTC (Tue) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]
> There is no logic in your PS.
Apparently, none that you can see.
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 9, 2011 0:13 UTC (Wed) by csigler (subscriber, #1224) [Link]
Have you not heard of open source developers and users scratching their own itch? Really?
MATE Posted Nov 7, 2011 15:37 UTC (Mon) by nteon (subscriber, #53899) [Link] This was the first I've heard of MATE, a "non-intuitive and unattractive desktop for users, using traditional computing desktop metaphor. Also known as the GNOME2 fork".
The age of the Great Forks Posted Nov 8, 2011 6:55 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] So MATE is to Gnome, what Trinity is to KDE. There really seems to be serious resistance against new developments in both major desktops, for people to bother making forks of such huge software systems.Personally I feel "late-model" KDE3 is possibly the most usable Linux desktop system I have used, and curiously it is even relatively light-weight by today's standards. So Trinity, if it keeps going, might be interesting.
MATE Posted Nov 8, 2011 8:39 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (subscriber, #27950) [Link]
It doesn't really seem to be under development though. There are a few more forks like this. Only noticed renaming of the modules, not any bugfixing / development.
Free Software, so (IMO) nothing wrong with more developers going in another direction.
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 16:00 UTC (Mon) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]
Reading this snippet I felt I need to check the date, but it's not 1st April...
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 19:08 UTC (Mon) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link]
I really do hope they succeed in fixing GNOME 3 with MGSE.
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 19:27 UTC (Mon) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] This sounds like the "fixing" e.g. Garfield presumably went through... (Yes, I'm a long time Gnome user, and I did hate Gnome shell with passion for a forthnight or so, now I'm comfortable with it and I'm sure I would find Gnome 2 weird).
Search engine bit is confusing... Posted Nov 7, 2011 19:33 UTC (Mon) by aorth (subscriber, #55260) [Link]
The paragraph on search engines was a bit confusing and strange...
> So far this revenue's entirely gone towards search engines and browsers
Huh? They (Mint) are spending money on browsers and search engines?
> Search engines who do not share the income generated by our users, are
Blocked? Like... in /etc/hosts?
Search engine bit is confusing... Posted Nov 7, 2011 21:10 UTC (Mon) by geuder (subscriber, #62854) [Link]
> The paragraph on search engines was a bit confusing and strange...
n++
Search engine bit is confusing... Posted Nov 8, 2011 7:01 UTC (Tue) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
The revenue bit should say that revenue came from search engines and browsers - same model as Firefox.
I'm not wild about the distro blocking ads that it doesn't like, but I usually block all ads anyway. In fact only linuxmint.com is unblocked (on my Ubuntu box) so I can help fund this distro.
The MGSE and MATE work looks great, so people have a choice of an upward compatible UI as well as the shiny GNOME 3.
I also really like this: "quality matters more than the time-frame" - if only Ubuntu did the same, so you didn't have to wait several months after an Ubuntu release before you dare use it... (or in the case of Lucid 10.04 on Intel graphics, not use it at all because it doesn't work).
Search engine bit is confusing... Posted Nov 8, 2011 19:56 UTC (Tue) by endecotp (guest, #36428) [Link]
> The paragraph on search engines was a bit confusing and strange...
Here is how I parse it:
In the past:
In the future:
Have I got that right?
If so, it does seem a bit odd.
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 19:48 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I'd really love to know how Mint knows its the 4th most popular OS and how it estimates its userbase numbers in the millions.
Anyone know what their methodology for supporting either of those claims?
-jef
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 20:22 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
I see it usually mentioned via Distrowatch statistics. Not sure how useful those numbers are, but it is the one people quote a lot.
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 20:38 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
I very much doubt Mint is relying on distrowatch as the basis for either of those claims. First distrowatch doesn't try to scale interest relative to Windows or osX..so there's no way you can use those numbers to claim 4th most popular OS. Second, distrowatch stats cannon be scaled to userbase size. So there's no way to claim millions of users from these rankings.
Now the movement of Mint in distrowatch rankiing is indeed very interesting. But distrowatch is not a trendable metric as it stands. The distrowatch numbers are very easily misinterpreted because of the way distrowatch has chosen to represent the average over a long timescale.
For example. Right now Mint is leading on the 6month 3month 1month and 7day averages. This does _NOT_ mean that 6 months ago or 3 months ago or even 1 month ago that Mint was dominant. 3 weeks ago Mint was not leading those long time averages. There is a significant spike in interest ongoing for the last couple of weeks and its big enough to impact even the 6 month average.
Spikes in interest will retroactively impact all the other timescale estimates. People continually misinterpret what those numbers mean. What Distrowatch really needs to do is to take their 7 day average and then provide an historic trending plot of that. There is far more information in the historic trend of the 7day average than the continually updated 6month average.
And even then, distrowatch's 7day average is at best a measure of "interest" or "buzz". Once you are a user of distribution you are less likely to click through a distrowatch page to read about the distro you are already using. People still looking for something different than what they are using are more likely to click on competitors. This makes it very difficult to use distrowatch as a userbase estimate (and they admit as much in their writeup of their stats). It is at best an estimate of "buzz". What is fascinating to me is that distrowatch as a "buzz" metric is completely uncorrelated with google trends metric. The current uptick
-jef
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 22:18 UTC (Mon) by Topaz (guest, #60130) [Link]
Distrowatch numbers are also easy to manipulate.
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 22:21 UTC (Mon) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]
That's easy :
1st one is Windows, 2nd one is Mac OS X, 3rd one is Ubuntu and they are almost as popular as Ubuntu according to distrowatch, so they are 4th.
While that's a joke from me and I am in no way affiliated to linux mint and completely clueless on that point, I strongly suspect that's the real explanation.
Counting Windows as a single OS would be false IMHO, so I suspect that the 3 first place would me microsoft products ( xp, 7, and 2k8 ). That let OS X as 4th, and likely 5th, or vista. Then we can start to find various Linux distribution and based on my own experience at the lug and various events, Linux Mint is no in the top 5.
What amaze me is the number of comment on the blog, and the fact that no one question neither the stats, nor the whole business plan and the lack of detailed financial report ( cause 3500$ a month is enough to pay one person full time, and that's not negligible ).
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 23:26 UTC (Mon) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]
"1st one is Windows, 2nd one is Mac OS X, 3rd one is Ubuntu and they are almost as popular as Ubuntu according to distrowatch, so they are 4th."
That is exactly what they are thinking.
I don't know what the browser string of the browsers on Linux Mint looks like, but it doesn't show up on these reports:
http://stats.wikimedia.org/archive/squid_reports/2011-09/...
I guess as Linux Mint has a distro based on Ubuntu and one on Debian it probably has Ubuntu or Debian in the string as well.
So we can't compare.
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 23:43 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
User Agent string is no longer a valid way to compare distros at all. Neither Chrome nor Firefox (circa Firefox 7) list the linux distribution by name any longer in the user agent string. The list "linux" and some cpu information now. I've personally made the wikimedia stat script maintainer aware of this change in the last couple of months.
Any linux distribution shipping officially branded firefox by default and conforming to the constraints that Mozilla places on trademark usage will no longer be differentiated in these stats. It's already started to impact the Ubuntu stats significantly in the last couple of months, There is an accelerated downward trend in "Ubuntu" over the span of several months that can only be reasonably accounted for by this user agent string policy change. I fear that people will misattribute the drop in Ubuntu wikimedia user agents stats I expect to see after the 12.04 LTS release as a reduction in Ubuntu usage. And that would be a real shame.
-jef
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 23:48 UTC (Mon) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]
I guess that means distrowatch will in the future also not be able to differential. So those are also useless.
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 7, 2011 23:57 UTC (Mon) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]
Distrowatch doesn't use client user agent strings. Distrowatch makes no effort as far as I am aware to tell what you are currently running as you view the site. It's strictly about which pages on their site are viewed by the most ip addresses every day.
You should read up on how they get their stats.
http://distrowatch.com/stats.php?section=popularity
-jef
A Linux Mint 12 preview Posted Nov 8, 2011 6:42 UTC (Tue) by misc (subscriber, #73730) [Link]
While Distrostat is useful by itself, who really go see every day the page of his distro on the site ? Everyday or even once in a while.
There is usually project blogs that carry much more informations, and others specific source of news ( at least in the case of ubuntu and others ).
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