What were the big themes this year? Which stories on OSNews were the most popular? We dove into our database (well, Adam did), and compiled a list of 2010’s ten most popular stories on OSNews. As a metric, we didn’t look at silly things like hits or whatever, but at the only metric that matters on OSNews, the only metric which really indicates what our registered (and thus, loyal) readers loved to argue about this year: number of comments. Yes, that headline is intentionally confusing.
So, here’s the list. The big number is the number of comments, obviously.
- 303 4chan Hits PayPal, MasterCard, Others for WikiLeaks Snubs
- 254 Finally: Ubuntu Ditches X, Switches to Wayland
- 212 Improving the Linux Desktop
- 212 Is Chrome Overtaking Firefox as Power Users’ Browser of Choice?
- 211 Shuttleworth Responds to Ubuntu’s Critics
- 208 Apple Unveils Stunning New MacBook Airs, Gives Lion Preview
- 202 Cops Seize Four Computers, Two Servers from Gizmodo Editor
- 190 Apple Unveils iPad
- 189 A Little Positive Apple Analysis
- 186 10 Things Linux Does Better Than Windows
Interestingly enough, both Linux and Apple are popular subjects (both have four stories), while there’s only one Windows story (and even that one is actually a Linux story). The most popular story doesn’t come as a total surprise to me, but I’m fascinated to see that Chrome story up there.
The numbers 11 through 30 on this list are almost all stories related to the HTML5 video debate, which makes that ‘storyline’ by far the most popular topic on OSNews this past year. To further indicate that really, nobody seems to care about the alternative operating systems scene any longer, the only alternative operating system in this list can be found at number 13 with 171 comments: New Amiga Sports Programmable Co-Processor, Dualcore PPC. Go Amiga, I’d say.
Well, indeed, there are some interesting topics.
But why there isn’t anything about Sun Microsystems/Oracle? Those news have been the most important news for me…
I think, that means, i’m a loser
Seriously, it is really interesting, that Apple News have been commentet so often. Maybe because Apple polarizes`?
I won’t be the first to say that comments are not a good measure, since the article with the most comments ever is Linus’ troll “Use KDE”.
The HTML5 debate has been most beneficial; it’s something that affects all operating systems, including alternative ones. Thanks to HTML5 content being available I can even watch YouTube on MorphOS. No such thing was possible with Flash (and never will be).
HTML5 will allow alternative operating systems to play on a level playing-field.
For *popularity*, it is actually a damn good measure.
For *quality*, not so much.
Just for people’s curiosity, the 10 most commented articles on osnews, ever:
1. [590] Torvalds: ‘Use KDE’ http://osne.ws/9zw
2. [539] Keep Internet Out of UN Control, Says US http://osne.ws/9hy
3. [434] FSF Launches Campaign Against Microsoft Vista http://osne.ws/cwx (How’s that going BTW FSF?)
4. [374] OS X Hacked Onto Generic x86 Hardware http://osne.ws/8v6
5. [368] Editorial: X Could Learn a Lot from Vista, Windows… http://osne.ws/gz3
6. [339] “Why Linux Is Not (Yet) Ready for the Desktop” http://osne.ws/gli
7. [338] What’s Your “Killer App?” http://osne.ws/emr
8= [333] Show Us Your Desktop! (2006) http://osne.ws/czw We should be doing another one of these in a day or two
8= [333] GNOME To Split from GNU Project? http://osne.ws/hg2
10.[306] Why KDE Rules http://osne.ws/a4e (nice to see KDE trolling book-ending the list
)
Edited 2010-12-29 19:29 UTC
For popularity, wouldn’t you actually want to measure the number of people who commented, as opposed to the number of comments? If only two people care about a certain topic, but care enough to leave 500 comments, I don’t think that’s more popular than 100 people who care about a topic, but leave only 2 comments each.
No, it’s actually a horrible measure. Did you measure total comments, or total unique commenters? If it’s just total comments, it’s likely that only 4 or 5 people kept dialogging back and forth, driving the total up. Your metric doesn’t tell you how popular it was, just that a few people really liked to argue about it.
Some metric of how many people read the article, or clicked on the link for the source article would probably mean more. And yes, I recognize that there are flaws and compromises with methods of measuring that.
What you measured would more likely be labeled as most controversial, not most popular.
What about a most-read ? That is what I would call most populair.
Anyway: the browser is the new OS. 🙂
The browser is only the “new OS” to people who don’t understand what an OS is. Perhaps it’s the new “software suite”, but to say it’s an OS is to be lulled by marketing nonsense. (Given how people these days are so GUI-centric, this misconception is understandable.)
The concerning thing about the “browser as OS” mentality is that it plays into the whole “cloud computing” sham. (If we called “cloud computing” for what it really is, “data storage outsourcing”, it wouldn’t sound nearly as sexy to the easily-swayed.)
The term is overly broad. This is only one of its meanings. Another meaning of cloud computing is “processor outsourcing” – or you could say SMP over an internet bus, like @home but you’re SETI and the service provider’s computer crunches your numbers. There aren’t too many general-purpose services of this kind but a lot of what we use (e.g. google) is really providing us processing power we can’t/don’t want to provide ourselves.
Goog point which warrants further exploration.
The degree of intimacy one is willing to seek with the OS managing the Apps and the Device they are executed on depends on many factors:
1) First experience
For those of us whose first experience on a computer was a mainframe with I/O via a card keypunch and a line printer, the OS will likely always remain the collection of programs and utilities used to manage the hardware resources.
For those of us whose first experience has been an internet linked device, the OS will likely only be its visible expression (the Apps and how they are activated and where the content is stored).
By now, users with the later experience dominate the user base/community even though they are not (and will never be) as vocal as the first generation of computer users.
2) Willingness to explore
The “mass” is essentially a passive consumer of content (music, video) or a node in a social network. What is the proportion of creative and/or curious users enjoying the quest to understand and ultimately control the devices they use? Is-it 1 in 100? 1 in a 1,000? 1 in a 1,000,000?
For the vast majority of users, the Browser IS the OS.
Let me put it another way: if someone’s programming experience is limited to contributing to web browser projects, can they rightfully call themselves an “operating systems developer”? Likewise for a 1960’s mainframe user who created some punch cards?
Simply put, the interface is not the operating system itself. When you use a browser, you are transferring bits of data between two machines. The browser simply translates that data into text, pictures, audio and video.
To use the well-worn car comparison, a browser is the equivalent of a dashboard, yet nobody ever confuses a dashboard with the engine itself, nor do they ever refer to it as the “visible” engine. Is the dashboard an interface with some potential for interaction with the engine? Sure, but experience with repairing a dashboard doesn’t make one an engine mechanic.
The “browser as OS” mantra is just breathless hype to me. (Not that the tech sector is subject to breathless hype…)
Well, there was a smiley.
But seriously, maybe the browser/webserver combination is the new SDK/API ?
Yeah I know what you mean about cloud computing, I don’t buy it (much). I have no problems when I’m able to do my own ‘hosting’ though.
Edited 2010-12-30 16:51 UTC
Having the browser/webserver as the next generation SDK/API is an interesting thought.
Going back to the early days of the transition from the command-line to the graphical user interface, much was said about the “device browser” a.k.a. “Finder” in the Mac world and “File Manager/Explorer” in the Microsoft world. Much was also said about the BeOS Tracker and how great it was to the point of being a distinctive feature of BeOS.
In essence, the browsing/exploring concept, coupled with search engines, apps servers/stores, content servers/stores, and the safe handling of active content allow web resources to be treated in similar ways as local resources. This from a very user-centric horizon.
Anyways, the cloud concept has some appeal – although in my mind, the “home hosting base” should be home, not in half-way accross the world. Doubt this would be practical with a dial-up connection
The most popular stories were indeed ones that did not involve alternative Operating systems. But, that does not *necessarily* mean that “no one cares” about the topic of alternative operating systems.
It *could* mean several different things:
1) “No one cares” …
2) OSNews has not done a good job writing articles about Alternative Operating systems.
3) There was not much news about alternative Operating systems.
I’m leaning towards number a mixture between number two and three myself.
Number two is somewhat something we can’t really do anything about – but all of you, our readers, can! SUBMIT STUFF!
http://img251.imageshack.us/i/unclesamah.jpg/
@Kroc : Your email has had me thinking for some time, but I think I should find an answer today.
Edited 2010-12-30 08:53 UTC
I do care about alternative OSes so, please, keep informing us about what is happening in the Amiga (the one in which I am) worl, Haiku world, Linux world, RiscOS world and so on…
Thanks for your hard work !
It’t the alternative OS that make things interesting, a series of articles about Linux on the desktop does seem to attract some rather err repetitive conversations.
I think the real problem of alternatives is that well, they’ll dying off, init? :sadface:
Not sure I understood that… Do you mean that there are less alternative OSs made nowadays, or that they die before completion ?
I would think an obvious metric of popularity (besides page-views, which probably correlates with number of comments fairly highly, and number of different readers) would be the number of recommendations. When I deem an article important, I always recommend it. Is there a way to find out which articles have the highest number of recommendations??
Defining a metric which truly reflects the reality of what is being mesured is challenging.
In this case, the use of “number of comments” essentially ignores the “News/Page 2” stories which typically gather less than a dozen of comments. It is rare to see 50 comments or more for these stories. Should there be two categories – “Article” and “News”?
With a strongly debated topic, there are often strings of replies between two or three persons. Such exchange could easily account for up to a half of the total number of comments counted. This does not make such story “a popular one”.
Some suggestions for metrics:
Most Read: number of unique readers of the story
Most Impact: number of readers commenting (or recommending to others?)
Most Debated: number of comments left
Most Dear to One’s Heart and Soul: number of comments by one reader
…we’ll make it the number one topic instead! Heh, a topic about the top topics becoming the top topic.
My wish for 2011? That Thom steps down as “editor” of this site, since he misuses it as his personal blog.
Back to good ol’ OSNews with proper editorialship and lots of interviews, please.
I looked for my old desktop screenshot I knew I posted some time ago (http://www.osnews.com/thread?197389) and I so miss the old KDE 3.5. It was perfect, really good looking, faster that this new KDE 4 abomination with its virtuoso, nepomuk and other useless integrated crap. I would post my xmonad SS, but it’s actually so simple that I could post a black image as well.
How I miss the old days of good software…
“To further indicate that really, nobody seems to care about the alternative operating systems scene any longer…”
As long as the sample set is restricted to the list of people who approve articles, yeah, nobody cares any more.
Apple flagging JAVA as “depreciated technology” seems like an odd story for 2010, see http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/10/21/125222/Apple-Deprecates-Th…
The only thing similar to that that is really popular is the .NET framework. Could an official Microsoft implmentation of .NET and Visual Studio for Mac OS X be in the works for 2011 or 2012?
It might not be as far-fetched as you think.
Perhaps IE for Mac OS X will make a comeback?
It could happen.
Yes it’s crazy, but when crazy stuff happens, this is site is where we read about it!
Something is SEROUSLY wrong here when the people creating the articles (and approving them) on OSNews are “unable” to write articles about alternate operating systems.
The biggest question is WHY are you involved in OSNews then? Did you just want to hijack this website? Did you feel that your main stream OS wasn’t getting enough attention?
It is THE job, YOUR job to either start gathering news on alternate OSs or to leave OSNews in the hands of people that will.
People like me are only coming to your site because I have groups of webpages that open up together as a group in my web browser.
Eventually I will remove you from that group and stop coming here.
I am VERY interested in other OSs. Between family and my job I literally don’t have time to play around with OSs like I used to. I used to have five “PCs” which ran eight different operating systems as the “main OS” plus the equivalent of vitural machines running other OSs inside of those including four server OSs and three different email systems.
I RELY on websites to fill my hunger for news and play on these systems. Play doesn’t always mean games so much as finding out what these operating systems can do that is unique that that OS. It isn’t always “what” is can do but “how” it does that.
I still think it is pathetic that Windows and Mac don’t have live icons like OS/2 (now eComStation) has. Meaning that if you create a “shortcut” to a file or program and move that file or program the shortcut will follow it and always work. Where, with Windows and OS X and Linux and … they don’t.
As far as appearance, OS/2 is ugly. I love the little things you can do with it though like changing the outline color for Windows to anything you want. And you can change the background for any windows to something unique to that window. Every window can also have its own font and font color (which is important since every window can have its own background).
There is NOTHING like this on this website. Then why don’t I write articles about it? I already covered that.
If you don’t know what to write about, write about Haiku and what they are up to. Write about eComStation. Write the benefits of replacing X on Linux with another graphics system and what the benefits, and drawbacks, of those are.
If you need subjects to write about, I bet we could come up with a lot of them. It is YOUR job at OSNews to fulfill our lust of alternate OSs or die from our boredom of your using only mainstream OSs and reporting on them.
It is not our fault that you don’t but yours. Either buck up and do what the site is about or hand it off to someone else.
Can I be clearer than that?
Written on my iPad with a wireless bluetooth keyboard.
Edited 2011-01-01 19:08 UTC
You’re wrong on that point regarding OS X. Read up on HFS aliases or just try moving a file that you have a shortcut too on the desktop. The shortcut continues to work.
[previous quote]I still think it is pathetic that Windows and Mac don’t have live icons like OS/2 (now eComStation) has. Meaning that if you create a “shortcut” to a file or program and move that file or program the shortcut will follow it and always work. Where, with Windows and OS X and Linux and … they don’t.[end previousquote]
[quote]You’re wrong on that point regarding OS X. Read up on HFS aliases or just try moving a file that you have a shortcut too on the desktop. The shortcut continues to work.[/quote]
You’re correct. OK, Windows still doesn’t have live links. Talk about still being in the dark ages.
Saying that alternative operating systems are dead because they get fewer comments than articles on mainstream operating systems is ignorant bordering on silly. Of course tey get fewer comments, fewer people care about them than they do Mac OS X or Linux. But that doesn’t mean that they are dead, it just means that they have a smaller following which is exactly what you’d expect.