Right I'm more awake now, its was late a night went I sent my last mail. A special thanks to Matt for his reply ;-)
Right lets make this clear, I'm not here to push Gentoo, I was originally responding to the original question, is Debian losing users to Gentoo? Rather than bother arguing the point again, heres an interesting link: http://www.distrowatch.com/stats.php?1#04 The shows that the top 4 Distributions are: 1) Mandrake 2) Red Hat 3) Gentoo 4) Debian Whats really interesting in this list in that a source based distribution can make it into the top 5, the others are nowhere near. Anyway 'nuff said really on that point I think. I know its not exactly solid figures, but interesting nevertheless. Whilst its fine to say we don't care about this, and I tend to agree on that point, if Debian slips more this tends to mean less users. Less users means less testing, which means either a longer, God forbid, period between stable releases, or a less stable stable release due to lack of testing. It could also more less developers coming into the fold, which in turn affects releases and packages that can be offered. Now that we have X 4.2.1 in testing, maybe its a good time to do a point release? Get stable up to date, as testing is fairly up to date and seems stable at least on my boxes (x86). Radical thinking I know ;-) Whats really important here is not Gentoo and how its doing today, but Debian and how its starting to be perceived as outdated and outmoded and not the techie's choice anymore. This seems to be forgotten, but is more important than anything else. You may not care about people's perception, but that was due, partically, to UNIX's down fall when MS turning up with Windows. Everyone perceived UNIX to be complex and where quite happy to dump it in favour of NT. Perception, unfortunately, counts for a lot, technical excellance gets forgotten. Its crap I know, but that the way of the world. Jon __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com
