FPL's 2016 in Review: Part I (Fedora 24 and Fedora 25)

[Matthew Miller]

There's too much for me to summarize everything that's happened in 2016
— and http://communityblog.fedoraproject.org is probably the better
place for group recaps — but I wanted to give a quick summary of the
reception of the F24 and F25 releases, and look a little bit at the
data we have around that.

First: Fedora 24 and especially Fedora 25 did really well in the press.
Ars Technica liked F24 but experienced some problems, but called F25
the "best Linux distro of 2016". They liked the smooth upgrade process,
Wayland, and GNOME 3.22, MATE Compiz with GTK 1.3, Atomic, and
particularly the SELinux Troublenshooter in Cockpit for Fedora Server.
The full review is worth a read, if you haven't seen it already:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/12/fedora-25-review-the-best-linux-distr...

Also, the Fedora Media Writer got a _very_ positive reception. From PC
World, for example:

"If you’ve never tried running a Linux operating system, this is a
   great time to dip your toes in the water. Total novices might want
   to try Fedora 25 because of the ease of writing the image to a USB
   stick."

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3144644/linux/fedora-25-makes-linux-easy-enou...

I mentioned this on Twitter, but for the non-tweeting among us, it's
also noteable that F25 one of the fastest uptakes of any release. In
the mirror connection stats, Fedora 24 beat "N-2" release F22 in 13
days, and its predecessor F23 in 53 days. Fedora 25 beat F23 a day
faster — 12 days — and surpassed F24 in just 46 days.

We should be cautious comparing today's mirror numbers with those from
a few years ago, because — as I try to emphasize whenever I present
these! — they're based on IP addresess (counted once per day) rather
than any invasive tracking, so are subject to inflation by short DHCP
leases or people moving around a lot during the day and deflation
(possibly significantly) by NAT, proxies, and local mirrors — not to
mention systems which just plain aren't configured to check for updates
daily. The numbers on the Y axis shouldn't be taken as "number of
Fedora systems". I do think, though, that it provides a generally
useful comparison release-to-release - and it's the best we're going to
get without opt-out per-system tracking.

So with that said, in June, right before the Fedora 24 release, F23 hit
the highest on this metric ever, surpassing previous champion Fedora 8,
which for whatever reason was a statistical anomaly — over twice the
peak level of F7 and 70% higher than F9. I don't want to overstress
that (with an eight-year difference between those peaks) due to the
networking factors mentioned, but in any case it's nice to report that
the current numbers are higher. As I mentioned in a devel-list thread,
F24 never quite got there, simply because F25 came out so shortly on
its heels.

If we look at the the total number of Fedora systems across all
versions, we've had a great couple of years. After a peak in 2010,
there was a sort of slump and downward trend, flattening off at F20.
This dramatically reverses with Fedora 21 and the launch of the Fedora
Editions marketing strategy as part of Fedora.next, and we're currently
at about 50% higher than we were two years ago.

https://mattdm.fedorapeople.org/stats/GeologicAgesOfFedora2016.png

Not everything is perfectly rosy, though: the chart shows an obvious
dip in 2016, which we are just now climbing back out of. This is odd
and concerning. I'm still digging into what may have caused that, but
check this out:

https://mattdm.fedorapeople.org/stats/FedoraAges+Archs_2015-2016.png

I've superimposed lines for architectures, and it appears the drop was
_almost entirely_ in i686, which fell significantly from April through
July of 2016. I have no really great explanation for this, and Stephen
Smoogen is helping me dig into it further. (PS: Sorry, ARM - you're on
the chart, but not yet making much impact on the total.)

So, anyway, I *think* that dip is a one-time oddity. I think that it's
real; unlike the overnight F12-F15 numbers drop we saw in Oct. 2014 due
to a change in SSL configuration, it's a gradual decrease. (I've filled
in estimated/projected values for the long-tail decline of those
releases on the "Geologic Ages" chart, by the way.) But, whatever
happened, it seems to have leveled off, and the total-systems number is
growing again. We'll see what happens in 2017, but I expect the growth
to continue, especially with Fedora 25's positive press and fast early
uptake.

(Stay tuned for part two, where I look back on the aspirations for 2016
we discussed at the beginning of the year!)