Monthly Stats – March 2009

Donations & Sponsorships:

Many thanks to the following donors and sponsors for financially supporting Linux Mint:

Donors:

  • $100, Bill S. (Canada)
  • $100, Jack W. S. (Denmark)
  • $100, Richard M. (UK)
  • $50 (2nd donation), Herbert L. (UK)
  • $50, Andrew B. (USA)
  • $50, Jamie G. (UK)
  • $50, Larry B. (USA)
  • $50, Clive B. (UK)
  • $41, Andreas S. (Germany)
  • $34, Peter K. (Netherlands)
  • $34 (2nd donation), Lothar S. (Germany)
  • $30, Robert P. (USA)
  • $27, Bernard L. (Norway)
  • $25, Gary B. (USA)
  • $25, Dean Di P. (USA)
  • $25, Tim B. (USA)
  • $25, William S. (USA)
  • $25, Paul B. (USA)
  • $25 (2nd donation), Jim D. (Australia)
  • $20, Felipe M. V.  (Mexico)
  • $20, James T. (USA)
  • $20, Yance F. (USA)
  • $20 (4th donation), Jaxon L. (USA) – http://um-reloaded.blogspot.com/
  • $20, Syrinx (Canada)
  • $20, Jose D. G. (USA)
  • $20, Matthew W. (USA)
  • $20, Seth S. (USA)
  • $15 (3rd donation), Brian B.  (USA)
  • $15, Jacob S. (USA)
  • $15, Andrew M. (Australia)
  • $14, Asgeir K. (Norway)
  • $14, Eniko V. (Italy)
  • $14, Marion T. (UK)
  • $14, Germano S. (Italy)
  • $14, Robert B. (UK)
  • $10 (2nd donation), Richard Garrison (garrisonr – USA) – http://www.richard-garrison.com/
  • $10 (3rd donation), Henry W. (USA)
  • $10, Steven M. (USA)
  • $10, Dan B. (USA)
  • $10 (2nd donation), Jindrich Radic (Czech Republic)
  • $8, Israel V. (USA)
  • $7, All-Access Customer (USA)
  • $7, Matthias Z. (Germany)
  • $7, Frantisek Z. (Slovakia)
  • $7 (2nd donation), Wilken S. (Germany)
  • $7, Eoin S. (Ireland)
  • $7, Giuseppe P. (Germany)
  • $5, Alex K. (USA)
  • $5, Sean D. (USA)
  • $5, Timothy K. (USA)

Sponsors:

Money raised in March:

* Donations: $1256
* Sponsors: $300

http://www.linuxmint.com/donors.php
http://www.linuxmint.com/sponsors.php

User Stats:

Repartition of Linux Mint users across releases:

  • Linux Mint 4.0 Daryna: 7.99%
  • Linux Mint 5 Elyssa LTS: 19.76%
  • Linux Mint 6 Felicia: 72.24%

Web Stats:

  • Visits: 1,277,408 (+18.66%)
  • Pageviews: 2,437,531 (+17.62%)
  • Page impressions: 1,019,289
  • Search queries: 2,630,797
  • Forum users: 14266
  • Forum posts: 131709

Rankings:

  • Distrowatch (popularity ranking): 1482 (3rd)
  • Distrowatch (traffic share): 2.5% (3rd)
  • Alexa (website ranking): 37,932th

Events:

Summary:

  • We’ve had a really successful month. If we ignore the depreciation of the US dollar our income went up 31%. Both sponsorship and donations were up as well. Of course we’re comparing a 31 days month with a 28 days one, but still, the results are extremely good.
  • The activity also grew on the forums and the traffic got bigger on our start pages, indicating a growth of our user base.
  • Our Distrowatch rankings went down but their website only covered 2 of our releases this year. In comparison Ubuntu hit their frontpage 6 times with 4 Alphas, 1 Beta and 1 revision release. This is not a complaint and Distrowatch have explained their stand on this, but our apparent lack of activity partly explains the figures. We’ve also lost our novelty factor and if Mint is still quite new in some circles it is well known by now among Distrowatch visitors. The traffic share is at 2.5% which is very good but not accurate since it’s only based on the figures for April, which just started.
  • 20% is the share of Elyssa LTS among Linux Mint users. It is quite low. Mint 5 LTS will get updates, the latest tools and innovations, long after Mint 6 and even Mint 7 will be made obsolete. It represents the best alternative for people who don’t want to upgrade every 6 months. In fact people moving away from Linux Mint 4 Daryna, which is about to reach end of life, are typical users who do not follow Linux Mint with each new release and instead of migrating to Linux Mint 6 Felicia which will be replaced by Linux Mint 7 Gloria in a few months they would be better off opting for Linux Mint 5 Elyssa LTS. We made changes to our download page to put more emphasis on Mint 5 LTS and we’ll make our best to promote it more efficiently. This is a sign of a lack of communication and we’ll address it.

19 comments

  1. hi, I want to say that Penguin Community recommends Linux Mint.

    We presented a few projects to some companies and schools to install Linux and use OpenSource.

    We, as a community, as Linux users, we believe in you… You do an excellent work.

    I just have this little comment: Please, give KDE edition more attention. Make it more stable, faster and simple.

    =D

    we love you people =D

  2. I would donate if the irc channel had no part in censorship of it’s people. Especially with words like “WTF”

  3. We give the KDE edition lots of attention – that’s the reason it’s so late. KDE 4.2 is not all that good even if it’s much better that previous KDE 4
    This means a lot of work to get things going
    @ Steve J Berry
    We can’t be responsible for what’s said on the IRC.
    We take action to reduce abuse of it
    We have a bot that kicks out users with bad language and also manual supervision but that can’t stop abuse completely and it’s hard to cover everything
    I hope everyone in the IRC tells the abusers to use a better language

  4. @Steve J Berry
    I realise I interpreted you the wrong way
    You were kicked and I think banned in the IRC for the use of bad languge – what’s so hard about not using foul language
    The IRC is not a private playground it’s official Mint
    It was unfortunately seriously abused with lots of bad language some time ago which makes the bot necessary

  5. I’m glad I was able to make you post twice, to try to explain your reasons for censorship. It’s still not acceptable to me to accept censorship, therefore I will not donate since IRC is Official Mint idealism.

    I may continue to propose mint to new users, but I will expertly explain that the IRC channel practices Censorship openly, so Beware.

    I hope others do not take my words and prevent from donation – I’m sure censorship is perfectly acceptable to some people, I’m just not sure who.

  6. Steve: “La liberte des uns s’arrete la ou commence celle des autres”. It was my personal request to the mods on the forums and the ops on the IRC that the public places we set up for users to communicate with each other be kid-safe, welcoming and professional. Nobody is telling you what you can or can’t say, nobody is telling you to keep your ideas to yourself, what we’re doing here is a simple statement: We do not want foul language in our place. The same way you can’t smoke in a McDonalds, or go to work in your PJs, we don’t want foul language in our IRC channel.

    Now, if you’ve been abusively kicked or banned by an op, you’re welcome to send me the details by email. As for foul language, I’m sorry, but you need to respect the rules we set up. Like everything else in Mint, the IRC channel will be as I want it to be, and that includes no foul language.

    As for donations, we’re happy to receive them and I like to think we do because of what people get out of our work. We value your feedback and you have to respect our stance. You donating to us has nothing to do with this and it doesn’t add anything to this conversation.

    I’ve said it before, Mint is not a democracy and it’s got nothing to do with freedom of speech. It’s a vision which I’m implementing and to achieve this I’m actively listening to everyone’s feedback. We’re creating spaces for people to interact to voice their ideas and be constructive, but for one purpose only: to constantly improve on what we’re building. It is my desire that our community extends to teenagers and younger users and will not have foul language go against that in our IRC channel.

    Thanks,
    Clem.

  7. @ Timmi
    The donor is someone who donates money to us (thank you all)
    A sponsor provides us with something we need like SevenL Networks who sponsors the forum server – in return the sponsor may get some advertising space (also thanks to the sponsors)

  8. Just to elaborate on Husse’s answer, a sponsor is basically someone who donates every months via a paypal subscription. Our biggest sponsors give us free services instead of money, but traditionally a sponsor is somebody who donates automatically, on a monthly basis.

  9. Steve J. Berry should give some thought to pulling his head out… and maybe try locating his wincrap cd.

    Thanks Clem and everyone for the hard work.

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