Monthly Stats – August 2011

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Donations & Sponsorships:

Many thanks to the following donors and sponsors for financially supporting Linux Mint:

Donors:

  • $150 (5th donation), Andreas S.
  • $138.8, Anton D.
  • $100 (4th donation), Gregor M.
  • $100 (2nd donation), Joseph C.
  • $100, Anant S.
  • $100, Warren B.
  • $75, Lynn G.
  • $69.4 (5th donation), Eric H.
  • $69.4, Juergen V.
  • $69.4, Adalberto M.
  • $69.4, Felix V.
  • $69.4, Thomas M.
  • $55.52 (5th donation), Pasi K.
  • $55 (2nd donation), Herbert L.
  • $50 (2nd donation), Robert K.
  • $50 (2nd donation), Joshua B.
  • $50, David I.
  • $50, Malcolm P.
  • $50, Matthew H.
  • $50, Edward R. aka “Tecknomage“
  • $50, Douglas B.
  • $50, Lockert P.
  • $50, Erwin D.
  • $50, Tsuguo S.
  • $50, Stephan H.
  • $50, Reed W.
  • $50, Raymond M.
  • $50, Samson S.
  • $48 (2nd donation), Thomas S.
  • $45, Arthur
  • $41.64 (7th donation), Laurent P.
  • $41.64, Robert K.
  • $40.25 (3rd donation), Hartmann M. aka “hkmle”
  • $40 (3rd donation), Richaed Meade aka “Dick”
  • $37.02, Matt R. aka “kiswa”
  • $30 (2nd donation), Jonathan L.
  • $28 (18th donation), Olli K.
  • $28, Klemens M.
  • $28, Richard P.
  • $28, Tomaso aka “t.munari”
  • $27.8 (23rd donation), Manuel F.
  • $27.8, Sjur M.
  • $27.8, Barry Flanagan
  • $27.8, Patrice C.
  • $27.76, Janne S.
  • $25 (23rd donation), Slavoljub aka “slw”
  • $25 (3rd donation), Happy Nerds Workshop aka “linuxdevman (aka scotts)”
  • $25 (2nd donation), James S.
  • $25, Adam D.
  • $25, David K.
  • $25, Marcus K.
  • $25, Michael M.
  • $25, Douglas R. aka “darco”
  • $25, Chris B.
  • $21.57, Chris GE
  • $20.82 (2nd donation), Andrea D. N.
  • $20 (14th donation), Antonio M. aka “Rob Brill’s book-keeper”
  • $20 (5th donation), Ian M.
  • $20, Lawrence L.
  • $20, David R.
  • $20, J K. R. L.
  • $20, Robert W.
  • $20, Petter J.
  • $20, Kent K.
  • $20, Mario W.
  • $20, Jose M.
  • $20, Holger W.
  • $20, Ashish K.
  • $20, CW P.
  • $16 (8th donation), Robert D B.
  • $15 (8th donation), Jun Q.
  • $15 (4th donation), Geoff Perry
  • $15, Scott M.
  • $15, Mjn H. aka “Malcolm”
  • $13.9 (14th donation), Marco R.
  • $13.9 (3rd donation), Zoe Q.
  • $13.9 (2nd donation), Jarkko K.
  • $13.9 (2nd donation), Michel A.
  • $13.9, Kurt W. aka “Hal”
  • $13.9, Martin W.
  • $13.9, Matus Laco
  • $13.9, José J. A. A.
  • $13.9, Sampsa P.
  • $13.9, Stéphane T.
  • $13.88, Marko S.
  • $10 (8th donation), Kiril Sotirov
  • $10 (6th donation), Tony C. aka “S. LaRocca”
  • $10 (5th donation), Craig Stock aka “craig10x”
  • $10 (4th donation), Coaching intern
  • $10 (4th donation), Michael C.
  • $10 (3rd donation), Jake Basile
  • $10 (3rd donation), Astap A.
  • $10 (3rd donation), Richard G. aka “Trollboy”
  • $10 (2nd donation), David Fronczyk aka “azdavef”
  • $10, Charles K.
  • $10, Richard S.
  • $10, Anton K.
  • $10, Tom R.
  • $10, Sigbjørn A.
  • $10, Blake M.
  • $10, Billy W.
  • $10, Philip R.
  • $10, Debasish D.
  • $10, Hrvoje R.
  • $10, Peter Meloncelli aka “driekus”
  • $10, Marcello P.
  • $7, Benjamin W.
  • $7, Francesco M.
  • $7, Mirko Z.
  • $7, Tobias S.
  • $7, Ludovic B.
  • $7, Mirko R.
  • $7, Julien
  • $7, Thomas G.
  • $7, Steffen B.
  • $6.94, Peter R.
  • $6 (3rd donation), ohio/michigan mold test kits
  • $5 (7th donation), Michael K.
  • $5 (3rd donation), Johnny R. aka “Jraz“
  • $5 (2nd donation), James H.
  • $5 (2nd donation), Chris aka “Roezer“
  • $5, Payam M.
  • $5, George S.
  • $5, Miguel A. G. R.
  • $5, Antonina K. aka “Tonya”
  • $5, Belmonte B. S.
  • $5, Erick V.
  • $5, Sławomir B.
  • $4.16, David T.
  • $3.14, Nicholas C.
  • $3, Maximilian S.
  • $3, Bruno P.
  • $3, Ron Panduwana
  • $3, Eulalio P.
  • $3, Radegast aka “scame”
  • $2.77, Ivo G.
  • $2, Dmitry C. aka “RFDX”
  • $2, Yan L.
  • $2, Computer Checks
  • $2, Omer N.
  • $1.95, Wilson C.
  • $1 (2nd donation), Snoring Solutions
  • $1, Wrishiraj Kaushik aka “Wrix“
  • $1, Louis S.

Sponsors:

Money raised in August:

* Donations: $3631.06 (146 donors)
* Sponsors: $1366.03 (126 sponsors)

http://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php
http://www.linuxmint.com/sponsors.php

User Stats:

Repartition of Linux Mint users across releases:

  • Linux Mint 11 Katya: 43.29%
  • Linux Mint 10 Julia: 25.84%
  • Linux Mint 9 Isadora LTS: 15.14%
  • LMDE: 4.42%
  • Linux Mint 7 Gloria: 4.42%
  • Linux Mint 8 Helena: 3.33%
  • Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna: 2.33%
  • Linux Mint 6 Felicia: 0.74%
  • Linux Mint 5 Elyssa LTS: 0.47%

Web Stats:

  • Visits: 3,157,017
  • Unique views: 3,983,188
  • Pageviews: 5,484,934
  • Page impressions: 2,896,962
  • Search queries: 8,906,192
  • Forum users: 54,484
  • Forum posts: 447,906

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 2185 (2nd)
  • Distrowatch (traffic share): 1.4% (2nd) (made irrelevant by Firefox 4′s decision to hard-code user agents and most distributions not setting it up anymore)
  • Alexa (website ranking): 12,162nd

Events:

Summary:

  • The LMDE Update Pack 3 is currently being tested and features the new Linux 3.0 kernel. Reports so far are promising and no significant regressions have been observed.
  • The stable release of LMDE should come out early this month. The feedback we gathered from the RC was extremely positive and allowed us to fix important bugs and to bring additional improvements. Some of the most notable issues in the RC were related to the installer, its handling of fstab, mounting of partitions and creation of partition tables on empty hard drives, this is all being addressed at the moment. Developers and people interested in the code can follow its development on Github.
  • A network of mirrors was started for the Latest Debian Repository. This repository is currently hosted in Denver, USA and mirrored in Romania and Australia.
  • R&D started on Gnome 3. Although the new desktop is extremely different than what we’re aiming for, it looks extremely promising from a technical point of view and easy to modify and improve upon. We’re planning to do some R&D on Gnome 2 as well in order to assess the work involved in maintaining it within Linux Mint. Of course, all you probably want to know is whether Mint 12 will come with Gnome 3, Gnome 2 or something else.. and I’m afraid you’ll need to wait a little more before we can tell you for sure. At this stage it might go either way, or it’s possible we might support both versions of Gnome going forward. We’re aware of what the community wants, we’ve got a precise idea of what we want to achieve, and based on the technicalities, and confidence we have in these two technologies, not only now, but for the future, we’ll take our time and make the right decision.
  • Many improvements were made to the Community Website. It’s faster than before, it takes less resources on the server, it now shows more statistics and it lets you follow the evolution of tutorials and ideas and see when the team reviews them. There’s a graphical breakdown of tutorials, devices, ideas, according to their format, status, brand and other criterias to give users a better overall idea of what is going on. The most significant changes are not visible though… all forum moderators were also promoted to community moderators and their rights were changed to let them review tutorials, process ideas and rebrand/recategorize hardware devices. As a result, hardware devices will be easier to find, tutorials will be reviewed faster, ideas processed more often and their author will get a better follow-up.
  • Proxima Centauri was promoted to Forums and Community Administrator.
  • In South Dakota, USA, Aspire High School migrated all their computers to Linux Mint.
  • We’re currently in talks with a computer company whose name everybody knows and we’re very excited about a possible partnership with them (and before you ask, no, it is NOT Apple or Microsoft). Talks are ongoing at the moment.
  • The Summer months are usually relatively quiet, but August was a surprise for us, with our daily income going up 40%. This income is largely generated by the community, the donations and the traffic (in terms of advertising) it represents. It varies according to the level of support we get from our users, the size of our user base and the health of the advertising markets. Such a result is outstanding and extremely motivating for us, and the fact that it came in August was simply fantastic. I’d like to thank all the people who support us directly (via donations and sponsorships) or indirectly (via search queries, traffic, promotion) and who participate in making Linux Mint as successful as it is today.

40 comments

  1. Clem…perhaps with all the new “extensions” for gnome3 i keep seeing on various websites, it would be possible to have gnome 3 with the “classic mint desktop”…

    That would probably be welcome by the community i am sure, if you can do it…(or at least have it as one of the available options to use for the many of us that aren’t fond of unity or shell)…

    Reply

  2. @Clem : Good to see that Gnome 2 is not going the way of the dodo without a fight, but you mentionned for LMDE a change of Kernel, are you aware of the power consumption it is occuring ? There is also a incident open in Ubuntu related to that.
    cf Phoronix articles “power regression”

    Reply

  3. @ Clem : more precisions “power regression that’s caused by a change in PCI-E Active State Power Management.”
    Apparently it can tax the battery well over 50% not trivial on my netbook i would say…

    Reply

  5. Alright, keep rolling. I appreciate the work of Linux Mint!
    But unfortunatelly, there’s again no information about the the status of LMDE KDE. What’s the matter?

    I hope there will be a RC soon.

    Reply

  7. KDE.. KDE… beautiful but, let’s be frank, useless.

    I loved Gnome and their no non-sense philosophy they once had and now seem to have lost.

    I’m happy 2D desktop environment like XFCE and LXDE are pushed to rolling instead. Computers in the forms of keyboard, mouse and monitor are better off with a 2D environment, and without frills (KDE/Gnome3).

    Unless of course you don’t really work with a computer. In that case you should buy yourself a tablet. I can hardly imagine banks, multinationals and institutions doing about their business with KDE or gnome3!

    Reply

  8. @Fabio, I like KDE, works great here.. Kubuntu / Mint KDE is son bastard. Mandriva 2011 is very beautiful, but very slow… PCLinuxOS has the best KDE.

    Reply

  9. Hi Clem,
    Thanks for all the hard work, it is very much appreciated by all of us. I personally don’t care what the desktop base for Mint’s main stream is, just as long as it works for us and isn’t a retrograde step from the current Gnome desktop most of us love.

    I’m in the process of putting my computers over to LMDE and have a great deal of respect for what you and the team have achieved in the latest RC edition. May be it isn’t as easy and smooth as the Ubuntu base, but it is getting there and makes me think before I do things in it as well!!

    Reply

  10. Congratulations on the increased income.

    There is just one thing that I’ve gotten complains about when it comes to Linux Mint. And that is the custom google page. It displays results that are vastly worse than the normal google page, and it looks horrendous.

    It would be a great improvement if you could get something in the style of what Mozilla and Chrome does where searches go trough the normal google page but with the fallowing in the adress: ?sourceid=chrome

    Reply

  11. LMDE is blowing everything else out of the water. Pure Debian wonderful ! Who needs Ubuntu ? I for one certainly don’t 🙂

    Reply

  13. Clem, let me congratulate you and the team for the achievements, I moved to LMDE and it rocks, I really love it! My only beef is the lack of information about KDE, I don’t understand why the silence. Overall, Linux Mint is awesome.

    Reply

    1. @jediafr: The stable ISOs will come with update pack 2 and with the same kernel as in the RC. Version 3 will only become available as part of Update Pack 3. We’re certainly not changing a kernel or applying a new update pack post-RC 🙂

      @bonefly: The fundation for it is LMDE. We’re in the process of updating it so it’s natural for Boo to step back and wait for a stable release. Note that Kendall is doing the same for Fluxbox at the moment.

      @Rovanion: I completely understand. This is the ideal solution indeed and we are trying to secure a partnership with them to be able to do it. So far we’ve been unsuccesful at getting in touch with the right people within Google Inc.

  15. thx for the continuation of wonderful improvements clem.
    i’ve had LMDE installed for almost 1yr;iso,smxi,now mintupdate-debian/incoming and it is stable
    much, very much appreciated for workhorse computers YO!
    company?partnership? ASUS? hehehe

    Reply

  16. Clem, what is the status of Mint Debian KDE. Although I may eventually switch to Gnome 3 if and when you adopt it, for now KDE is my desktop of choice.

    I appreciate all of your hard work to maintain the quality of Linux Mint. Keep up the good work.

    Reply

  17. @Sly Clem explained in post #15 here that Boo and Kendall have to wait until the gnome version of LMDE is finalized before completing the work on their distros…That’s the status…

    Reply

  18. @clem: A customized gnome3 will not only give linux mint it’s unique identity, it will also be in accordance with the linux mint’s way of doing things. Also in long run, maintaining a tweaked gnome3 will be easier than maintaining an outdated gnome2. My humble opinion.

    Reply

  19. btw,
    “We’re currently in talks with a computer company whose name everybody knows and we’re very excited about a possible partnership with them (and before you ask, no, it is NOT Apple or Microsoft).”

    Who is in the same league with Apple and Microsoft?…Google?

    Reply

  20. @ Carlos, I agree with you pclinux has the best kde, the way gnome 3 and unity is working, it won’t be a bad idea to switch over to kde or LMDE.
    LMDE RC I am trying, it is working fine. But has anyone noticed that either in Katya 11 or LMDE RC flash player on facebook is not working properly.

    Reply

  21. Clem! Loving Linux Mint as always. I’ve installed Linux Mint on literally hundreds of machines, and I can give you the list of most common bugs and tech support calls:

    1. The panel crashing and notification area issues (missing volume icon).
    2. Difficulty finding and installing .deb and ppa packages.
    3. The custom Mint Search in Firefox.

    Other than those issues, I rarely if ever get complaints or calls.

    On a personal note I’m loving LMDE and have switched over on all of my personal machines, however, I’d like to find an easier way to install .debs and PPAs like in stock Mint. Things I’m missing:

    Dolphin-emu
    Wiican
    Bsnes

    A host of other ppa and .deb installs that I can find / work in stock mint.

    Thanks again for the best OS that currently exists on the planet!

    Reply

  22. Always good to hear the news of what’s ahead. My current machine is runnning LMDE with no issues. I just installed Mint 10 for a friend (2nd laptop, not her main one), and if she is happy with it I will change it to Mint 12 when that arrives. I’m checking out Fedora 16 in early November, so comparing that experience to Mint 12 will be quite fun.
    I know that you guys are working on a KDE version for Mint, and you will let us know when there is important news about it. Take your time.

    Reply

  24. I can hardly wait to see the latest LMDE out the door. I have to reinstall my LMDE because I just abused it the last few months with plenty of test software and I also had the Gnome 3 migration issues with the terminal and task manager so my system is quite messed up at the moment and I’d like to revive it. 🙂

    There is one issue I keep having with Linux Mint for more than a year. First I thought it was something in my PC but after we painted the house I started working on my laptop for a few days and I just let it on for a few days. I run Isadora on this laptop and I ran all the other LM versions on my PC. Google stops working after a while. Sometimes it takes 3-4 days of uptime for Google to fail on me, other times it only takes a day until it dies. And when I say Google I mean virtually everything on the web related to Google. The Google sites won’t load at all and whatever site has Google AdSense, Analytics etc only load after a very long wait (until the browser decides to drop the connections to the Google web services).

    I don’t know what’s wrong. I just reboot and everything comes back to life. But if I can’t restart my PC I just use bing or yahoo search to find whatever I need. I looked in the forums but I couldn’t find a similar issue mentioned by someone else. Sorry for pointing this out here but I hope it’s more visible and someone else will confirm they also have this issue.

    Summary: Google web services stop working in Linux Mint on PCs with long uptimes. Versions tested (that I remember of): Helena, Isadora, Julia, Katya, LMDE.

    Reply

  26. I’ve had a vision of a GNOME 3 heavily customized and tweaked by Mint, to the point where it is instantly recognized as Mint’s Desktop, just like the GNOME 2 customization currently is.

    Reply

  27. I’ve been testing Fedora 15 — just to see GNOME3 work. GNOME3 doesn’t appear to be all that horrible — though it is definitely different looking. It’s just not terribly tweakable yet. Perhaps the solution for a happy marriage of Mint with GNOME3 will be something akin to Zorin’s “Look Changer” application.

    Reply

  28. Gnome 3 is fine in classic mode.

    How about a less bland theme for the next version. Just a suggestion. I liked where things were going before the switch to the metal look. IMHO, it’s a step backwards.

    Reply

  29. I switched back to 10,
    it is rock solid now and for me its the only stable distro, without power-consumption.

    Please, consider to port the power-management.

    Reply

  30. I would love the installation bugs to be worked out of 11. It would not install on my 6month old laptop or any of the PC’s at work.

    Good thing 10 is so great,

    Reply

  32. ANOTHER VOTE HERE FOR GNOME 3 WITH HEAVY CUSTOMIZATION FROM MINT. THAT IS MERGING THE USEFUL AND THE PLESANT. GNOME 3 WON’T BE THAT MUCH HATED, WILL IT.

    Reply

  33. Yep… Mint 12 should be Gnome 3 with heavy customization to make it into the traditional Linux Mint desktop we all know and LOVE….

    I’ve been reading that the gnome 3 “fallback mode” reverts the desktop back to gnome 2 style desktop…

    Perhaps Clem can use that, customize it to look like Mint desktop and then code it in like that (not being a programmer i don’t know exactly how that works) but i’m sure Clem will be able to figure something out….

    Reply

  35. Well, here my two cents – Mint could offer two options: a heavily default tweaked costumized GNOME SHELL environment, like activating the “Activities” corner with a mouse double right-click, and perhaps a taskbar instead of workspaces, or actually a “workspace horizon” as a kind of bottom panel.

    Another option would be a fall back mode to emulate Linux Mint as it is right now, but with all video graphics goodies out of the box like Compiz and such stuff. Out-of-the-box. That would leaddddd the way.

    Actually as I write now, only 11 points difference that keeps Mint from number one in Distrowatch.com podium.

    Reply

  36. I think the basic idea is to revamp the GNOME 3 fallback mode into what Linux Mint menu & panel has been. With 3D acceleration out of the box if possible. The back of a splash screen would be good too. Perhaps an addition of a “blue mint” theme, in case someone gets tired of all greenish stuff. Perhaps a little more like Windows XP, which is still the most used OS all over the world, and keeps being because it never changes and people like it.

    If Mint gets the idea, the “XP” idea, it will take the lead.

    Reply

  38. Could you please have your own site for LMDE on distrowatch. They have the best overview about features in the distros. I wouldn’t know where to go to look up e.g. the kernel-version or the version of firefox which is in a distro. And I dont know where to look to see all the features of LMDE…

    Reply

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