Popular Distro Troubles

[peteh]

I've been doing little survey of my own - not very scientific, I admit. If you look at the number of queries on the popular distros openSUSE seems to have a lot less than Ubuntu and RH/F, to pick just 3.
Does this mean openSUSE is a lot less popular than the others or just more trouble free to operate?
There's a thought for you.

[bigtomrodney]

Well having used Ubuntu and openSUSE recently I would think that in the case of these two it is certainly a case of Ubuntu being more popular. SUSE certainly comes with a lot more manual configuration. Granted it has YaST to do a lot of it graphically, but some key points like codecs are still kinda messy. That's important to a new user. Even the one click installs for codecs were broken for the first few weeks of release. Ubuntu on the other hand lacks a config tool like YaST but for the most part just works including with regards to codecs.

Also I think something to note is that Ubuntu is still seen as a gateway to Linux and a lot of its users are first time users to Linux also. There is a sharper learning curve when you are completely new to Linux than just switching distro.

[techieMoe]

I've been doing little survey of my own - not very scientific, I admit. If you look at the number of queries on the popular distros openSUSE seems to have a lot less than Ubuntu and RH/F, to pick just 3.
Does this mean openSUSE is a lot less popular than the others or just more trouble free to operate?
There's a thought for you.

Well, as you said the survey isn't very scientific so you can't very well draw any useful conclusions from it. The trend you noticed could mean either of the things you suggested or it could mean something else entirely. Maybe more people who use openSuSE are afraid to ask questions or there are just a vast minority of users on this particular forum who use it compared to Ubuntu or Fedora.

[Freston]

Most popular according to distrowatch:

1) PCLinuxOS
2) Ubuntu
3) openSUSE

Could mean anything really. Maybe openSUSE has a popular dedicated forum. Perhaps they have many non-English speaking users that rely on support in their native language. openSUSE is big in Germany for example, and I know Germans have a very active Linux community. But I dunno... could be anything...

[elija]

Maybe people who use Suse have more of a clue than those of us who use the
Ubuntu family...

[bigtomrodney]

I wouldn't worry about PCLinuxOS for two reasons - distrowatch themselves say not to use them as a benchmark, and more importantly there have been accusations that the rating for PCLinuxOS had some suspicious activity talked about with regards to its hits on distrowatch. Consider how little chatter there is generally about that distro anyway...