F18 - huge drop in user numbers

[Jiri Eischmann]

Hi,
frankly I'm not sure which mailing list I should write this to, but I
guess the marking one is the best fit.

I was really surprised (in the negative way) by the Fedora stats [1].
Repository connections in the first week dropped by 52 percent compared
to F17 and F17 was already low compared to releases before. F18 has
pretty bad reception, but such a huge drop is hard to believe.
The number of direct downloads is down by 7 percent.

Are these numbers still comparable or the way they're calculated has
changed? If not, it's a pretty bad trend.

The difference in drops between direct downloads and repository
connections is also interesting. It seems like a lot of users downloaded
F18, but never installed it, and connected to repositories which pretty
much correlates with my observation at linux portals, forums, mailing
lists. I've seen so many comments of users who said they didn't have
balls to install F18 on their hard drives with other systems and stayed
with F17 or switched to another distro.

Jiri

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics