Re: Debian architectures, according to popularity-contest

[Petter Reinholdtsen <pere@hungry.com>]

[Stephen Gran]
> While I have to agree that the presence or absence of ads in LJ may make
> or break some consumers decisions about what hardware to go with, I just
> feel I have to note that arm has been a long supported platform within
> Debian, and there are hundreds if not thousands of machines running
> arm/Debian, even if they are not reporting to popcon.  In fact, if I was
> running Debian on arm, I would hope my machine wasn't wasting precious
> CPU cycles reporting to popcon.

Claim like this come up again and again, for various architectures.  I
doubt that it is relevant for the accuracy of the statistics.  I
believe there are a large percentage of machines without
popularity-contest installed for all the architectures, and that this
do not skew the result significantly for any of the architecture. If
it wasn't, I would expect the more powerful architectures to become
more and more popular as the number of submissions increase.  This has
not happened.  The relative population count for various architectures
have not changed much while the amount of submissions have more than
doubled.  For example, m68k have had around 0.04% of the population
all the time. :)

I suspect the frequency of people treasuring their CPU time too much
to spend it on popularity-contest is about the same on all
architectures. :)

I believe the availability of hardware have a lot more impact on the
popcon statistics than the amount of people not running
popularity-contest.

Friendly,
-- 
Petter Reinholdtsen