I find this to be very interesting

[smurphos]

They only count downloads from the isos they host - not the official mint site and mirrors. And as it stands it appears that for 18.3 they only host Cinnamon and Mate 64bit - no XFCE, no KDE, no 32bit. More useless 'stats'

http://iso.linuxquestions.org/linux-min ... mint-18.3/

[majpooper]

well - RHEL is always going to be popular - isn't it ?.

I have no idea. I avoid RH because typing yum into a terminal gives me the willies.

+1

[Fred Barclay]

I recall reading somewhere (maybe Clem wrote it) that many sites like that determine distro market share by recording the user agent string in Firefox.

Firefox on Mint identifies as being on Ubuntu, so that will clearly skew the statistics to many more Ubuntu (and much fewer Mint) machine than reality.

[smurphos]

Torrent stats might be interesting - unfortunately, Mint don't appear to publish completed downloads from their tracker but just a quick check of the current stats on the 4 64bit 18.3 isos might be interesting as an indicator of the relative popularity of the 4 variants. Stats obtained via Transmission.....

Cinnamon - 4214 current seeders and 173 leachers.
Mate - 1308 current seeders and 45 leachers.
KDE - 917 current seeders and 29 leachers
XFCE - 800 current seeders and 28 leachers,

Just a note that I looked at this as I spotted the Cinnamon Iso on a torrent aggregator type site in the top 20 most seeded torrents - just under Star Wars The Last Jedi....

Edit to add - worked out how to get the completed download stats from the tracker.....so just from torrent downloads the 64bit 18.3 isos have been downloaded around 340,000 times....

Cinnamon 18.3 64bit - 206317
Mate 18.3 64bit - 59787
XFCE 18.3 64bit - 40118
KDE 18.3 64bit - 31033