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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: 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.