Please don’t get me wrong, this is not meant to be rude slander. MX Linux is not a bad Distro at all (even tho I’ve always opted for Debian instead) and peops are free to use what suits them best.
But compared to other Distros (like Arch, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian or Mint) there doesn’t seem to be much excitement about it. I hardly see articles about MX and I have barely seen people outing themselves as MX users which makes me wonder:
Are MX users just low key quiet, am I escaping their presence or is there a different reason for MX’ high HPD score?
Btw: feel free to take a shot every time I write MX :p
Because:
The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch was accessed each day, nothing more.
So people see it on the list and click on it wondering “what the heck is this MX Linux thing”. And that boosts the ranking. And now that it’s at the top, it attracts more curious clicks, thus it continues to remain on top.
And now that it’s at the top, it attracts more curious clicks, thus it continues to remain on top.
That’s exactly how I learned about MX and started using it.
lol same, around 2018 IIRC, I was tired of Mint/Cinnamon, I wanted something simple, check DW, download MX, never looked back.
It was around the end of last year for me. Got truly sick and tired of using Arch and derivatives for 2+ years and having them crap out all the time. Went through a bunch of distros, but MX felt the best and had the best support for xfce. Slapped nix on top to install userland packages, and it’s pretty damn good.
I haven’t tried MX Linux. So they set the distrowatch page as start page in the browser, and users never change it?
No, people go on the distrowatch website, see mx linux at the top and wonder what it is because it seems to be popular but they’ve never heard of it, so they click on it, which boosts the ranking and makes it remain at the top. A website can’t change your browser’s start page.
Distro watch numbers have been a meme forever. If you want your favorite distro ranked higher make a robot to refresh its distro watch page and that distro’s rank will go up. That’s all distro watch has ever been.
they count clicks on a distro’s page on their site, not usage or anything else.
if they dared put hanna montana linux on there, it would be the perpetual #1 listing.
now is my chance to brag that I’ve been running HML on a eee pc netbook that’s mounted on a wall in my bathroom, for about 4 years now, as a music player and in case of emergency internet searches when showering and it does its job wonderfully.
Hey, my wife wanted me to tell you that you’re not welcome in our house, because now I’m about to do the same in our bathroom (with another distro, of course) 🤣🤣🤣
Hannah Montana Linux is no longer maintained unfortunately, so they wouldn’t put it on there anyway. You can upgrade it to the latest Ubuntu with some work, but you lose a lot of the theming in the process.
Someone should make a new one as a “snap-free Ubuntu alternative”.
Let’s make something like https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=hikarunix top 10 then.
Distro watch rankings are just which page gets the most hits. Get a bunch of different IPs to load LemmyLinux and it’ll be number one (and then actual people will click on it to see what it is and why it’s number one).
I too had the thought that some people might mess around with the hpd numbers but I don’t want to make accusations without solid proof ^^
Back in the naughties PCLinuxOS was at #1 and people suspected them of cheating. I’m sure some people do try to game it, but there’s plenty of organic and bot traffic to compete with.
Besides, I think the popularity thing’s kinda backwards - I’d never visit Ubuntu or Fedora because I know what they are, but I’ll be clicking on something novel out of curiosity.
Are MX users just low key quiet, am I escaping their presence or is there a different reason for MX’ high HPD score?
That’s definitely a factor. People write and talk about new and exciting stuff, MX is neither. There’s no point in writing an article that goes: MX experience - same as a year ago because nothing changed, see ya again in a year.
i think xfce people in general don’t fuck around with all that distro gobshitery. it’s fast, works and isn’t fancy.
gnome and kde people more likely to want to show off all the bullshit effects they’re wasting all that ram on.
You wanna know what my ram has in it . . . data, glorious data.
Albeit being inefficiently monged into terrible statistical models by some shitty code i wrote.
I especially like it because it’s trying to follow UNIX philosophy. All of its tools are separate and you can use them outside of Xfce or replace them altogether. For example KDE is still not at the point that you can launch the panel outside of it.
gnome and kde people more likely to want to show off all the bullshit effects they’re wasting all that ram on.
It’s not that much lighter than them though. KDE has gotten really close, and truly light DEs like LXDE and LXQT destroy Xfce on that front.
