Desktop Debian rocks

Posted Sep 2, 2009 8:32 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: Desktop Debian = Ubuntu by jordanb
Parent article: Con Kolivas returns with a new scheduler

Alternatively, try finding out some hard data. For example, Debian's own popularity contest. Taking base admin packages as a baseline (83696), of which over 95% are regularly used, you may find that about 56% use X11 libraries regularly, about half installed desktop-base and 26% use metacity. GNOME is even more popular with 56% having installed gnome-keyring and 32% using it regularly. KDE is less popular with only 23% installing kdebase-data and 10% using any package regularly (interesting, didn't know there was such a disparity with GNOME), while XFCE shows up at 3.7%.

You might say that these are servers being admin'd graphically. Let us see typically desktop-y applications: quick browsing shows regular users of Firefox (iceweasel really) at 33%, libgstreamer at 27%, evince at 26%, libgphoto2 and openoffice both at 25%. To put these figures in perspective, Apache is at 44% and Samba at 27%.

There are lots of bias in the sample: only utter geeks would install popularity-contest, and only properly connected machines will show up. I would counter that both things pretty much describe Debian's audience. IMHO saying that 50% of Debian users have it as a desktop is a good estimation.