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from the or-at-least-not-be-bothered-either-way dept.
[Ed's Comment: Not wishing to ignite yet another flame war regarding the adoption of systemd, I hesitated before publishing this story. However, although it is not an formal survey, it might still reflect the views of the greater linux user community rather than those who frequent this particular site. There is no need to restate the arguments seen over the last few weeks - they are well known and understood - but the survey might have a point.]
http://q5sys.sh has recenlty conducted a survey finding many Linux users may be in favour of systemd:
First off lets keep one thing in mind, this was not a professional survey. As such the results need to be taken as nothing more than the opinions of the 4755 individuals who responded. While the survey responses show that 47% of the respondents are in favor of systemd, that does not mean that 47% of the overall linux community is in favor of systemd. The actual value may be higher or lower. This is simply a small capture of our overall community.
Although the author questions the results could this be an indication that we're really seeing a vocal minority who don't want systemd while the silent majority either do or simply don't care? Poll results and the original blog post.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Marand on Thursday November 20 2014, @10:56PM
The most interesting part would be the correlations. For example, how many of the people who use Linux primarily for web servers are for systemd? Are Debian users more critical of systemd than Fedora users? What is the average age of those in favour of systemd compared to those against it?
Indeed, some of the questions only make sense to have in that context when correlating them with other data (like age, place of living, or education background).
I was thinking the same thing. Presenting all the information separately like they did with the images doesn't really tell anything useful other than ~1/4 of the people polled are against systemd, which is more than just the "small vocal minority" some people claim. The ODS file has the context you want, so maybe someone with more patience than me will pull out some better stats.
One thing I did notice, though, is that ArchLinux is disproportionately represented here, at 37% of those polled, with Debian+derivatives (Ubuntu, Mint, etc.) taking 28%. This probably skewed the results, since only 15% of Arch users voted against, with Ubuntu+Debian making 36% of the negatives. This isn't too surprising, considering some of the comments I've seen on SN about how Arch devs have reacted to anyone even questioning the systemd adoption.
Also, apparently 9 people in the poll listed "FreeBSD" as their current Linux distribution. None were in favour of systemd, though three were undecided. Maybe they'll change their mind when they notice BSD isn't a Linux distribution :)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Thursday November 20 2014, @11:43PM
Looking at the time ODS file, I notice an interesting point:
The last two fields are missing for the first 76 resp. the first 82 entries, but present on almost all following entries. Since the entries are sorted by date, this gives me the strong suspicion that the survey was altered while it was carried out.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday November 21 2014, @03:54AM
Could be. I saw some gaps but just thought it was unsupplied data, like the options were left blank. It's also possible they scrubbed troll responses out; it's odd seeing any kind of poll data without at least a handful of people writing "PENISPENISPENISPENISPENIS" in every text field.
That user disparity, with over 1/3 of the respondents being from Arch, really bugs me though. Bugged me enough that I started looking up information about user bases, which just makes the results even more suspicious.
I know it's not actual user numbers, but distrowatch puts Debian alone at almost double the hits-per-day of Arch over the last 12 months, with Mint+Ubuntu+Debian having 6x the hits of Arch. Arch is 7th in popularity, behind MInt, Ubuntu, Mageia, OpenSUSE, and Fedora. Yet here it's over a third of the respondents, and over 3x the number of Fedora users.
In Wikipedia's List of Linux distributions [wikipedia.org], almost half the chart is filled with Debian offspring, with Redhat offspring being the next-largest. Arch is barely a footnote, yet in this poll, the combined count of Redhat (11%) and Debian (28%) derived distributions only account for 2% more of the total vote than Arch (37%).
I'd joke about the poll looking like it was run on the Arch forums, but I think it's just ballot stuffing by the Arch user base, which has a reputation for being excessively proud of their distro of choice. Speaking of jokes, here's one:
Q: How do you find the Arch users in a community?
A: You don't have to, they'll tell you about it any chance they can.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Friday November 21 2014, @07:02AM
FreeBSD has its own systemd ie. launchd. There are those that want to see its adoption, but there doesn't seem to have been a real push (yet).