I’m surprised to see Fedora ranked so highly.
I actually think it’s to be expected.
If it was done last year, then -with the whole “Red Hat gOiNg ClOsEd SoUrCe” fiasco- it might have dropped. But most peeps seem to have forgotten about that, or just stopped caring (most prominent example for me personally would be Chris Titus; who went from an outright hater that wouldn’t even touch Fedora derivatives (like the many uBlue projects) to outright praising Bazzite).
In case one’s out of the loop, these two articles by Jeff Geerling should give a complete yet nuanced take on the matter. TL;DR: Red Hat made it harder for projects like Oracle Linux to cannibalize their work, but this came at the price of closing off public access to RHEL’s complete source code, and using a EULA Subscription Agreement to try to stop customers from sharing the source code. Which, actually is allowed under the GPL licence; even if some would argue goes against the spirit.
Btw, why are you actually even surprised by it? While Fedora has historically made drastic changes that might have alienated its user base (read: being the first that went all-in on the likes of systemd, Wayland etc.), they’ve demonstrated to show some restraint in the last couple of years; acknowledging even that such radical changes aren’t desirable. In turn, the community rewarded such efforts, making it go from “Red Hat’s testbed distro” to a very respected mainstream distro. In the more recent ProtonDB reports, one can see how significantly it has managed to close the gap in usage between its ecosystem and the other big shots (read: Arch and Debian/Ubuntu).
Did they provide raw scores?
Yup! Here: https://nextcloud.thelinuxexp.com/index.php/s/PQPoRZo7n8dSkjw
one is which could be determined from vote counts
Ah, would this comment help?
I’m more interested in a ranked-choice version of this poll.
Me too. I suppose you could retro-actively use the raw scores for this. I’m curious of your findings!
Regarding what you said about Red Hat, I’m sure that -at least historically- RPM-based distros were simply a pita to work with when compared to the alternatives. I’m a relative new Linux user (only about 3 years so far), so I’ve only seen its better days :P .
I’m not particularly well-versed on some of these terms. However, isn’t it possible to retroactively make the gradings work as ranked choice? So, say a user gave:
Wouldn’t this imply that they rank EndeavourOS higher than Arch, and both of them higher than Manjaro? Sure, we won’t always have strict orderings. But I’m pretty sure this doesn’t necessarily constitute a problem.
Regarding ‘distro-buckets’, I think that defining a distro different from another whenever (an attempt at) applying the inverse of the changes doesn’t produce a functional system is cool. I hadn’t considered that before. But, as you’ve noted yourself, this is a gargantuan effort and (probably) not worth it. Like, e.g. let’s look at Deepin, it’s mostly Ubuntu with the Deepin desktop environment. However, their respective auras are very different. I think we’d lose a lot of nuance by placing them in the same bucket. Just my 2 cents*.