F18 - huge drop in user numbers

[inode0]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 9:26 AM, Jiri Eischmann <eischmann at redhat.com> wrote:
> 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.

I don't think we should read a one week snapshot number as part of a
trend. There was a clear drop in usage at the F15 point but there has
been stable or slightly increasing usage since then (still not a
robust recovery of what was lost but their wasn't a downward spiral,
just a one time large drop).

> 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.

While I am just using my intuition about human behavior now I suspect
after an unusual period of two months with weekly reminders in the
press that things were so wrong with F18 that it couldn't be released
there are probably a significant number of users who are just being
more cautious than normal at this point waiting to see how much luck
other early adopters have with the release before diving in. At least
that is my optimistic the sky isn't falling take on it at this point.

John