Month: October 2009

“Patches welcome”

Posted on by lucas

When you merge a patch, especially a patch that has been waiting to be merged for more than 6 months, it is polite not to publicly mention that the patch required changes to the way it originally looked (a lot of patches do, especially when you didn’t provide much feedback during the 6 months waiting period), or that merging the patch required cleaning up, and introduced bugs.

Also, crediting the patch author in public communications doesn’t hurt.

If you fail to do that, people might feel that patches are not so welcome after all.

XMPP/Jabber clients and OS usage statistics (5)

Posted on by lucas

(Previous editions: 2005, 2006, 2007 and march 2008)

Here are my (almost) yearly stats about XMPP/Jabber clients (OK, the last one was 18 months ago).

1250 users were online on the Apinc Jabber server when I ran the poll, and 1192 clients answered. This year, I’ve also used Disco to poll the clients, allowing to detect Telepathy (thanks Sjoerd for the tip!).

Clients:

  • Pidgin 43% (2008: 27%)
  • Gajim 19% (2008: 20%)
  • Psi 9% (2008: 16%)
  • Kopete 7% (2008: 14%)
  • Adium 5% (2008: 6%)
  • BitlBee 2% (2008: <=2%)
  • Telepathy 2% (2008 unknown)
  • Other clients with less than 2%: iChat, Pandion, Miranda, mcabber, Smack, meebo, Trillian. All other clients had less than 5 users online.

The systems and distributions stats are biased, because some clients don’t disclose that information, or worse, give wrong information (Psi reports running Debian when on Ubuntu).

Systems:

  • Unknown 57% (Pidgin doesn’t report the OS) (2008: 36%)
  • GNU/Linux 24% (2008: 40%)
  • Windows 15% (2008: 17%)
  • MacOS 2% (2008: 5%)
  • Others 0% (3 FreeBSD, 2 OpenBSD)

Linux distributions:
164 clients reported a Linux distribution (249 last year).

  • Ubuntu 44% (2008: 45%)
  • Debian 23% (2008: 36%)
  • Arch Linux: 9% (2008: 1%)
  • Gentoo: 9% (2008: 10%)
  • Fedora: 7% (2008: 5%)
  • Mandriva: 5% (2008: 3%)
  • Slackware: 2% (2008: 1%)

Comments:

  • The top 5 clients are the same, in the same order, but Pidgin’s lead is increasing. Gajim stays stable at the second place, while the two Qt-based clients, Psi and Kopete, both lose a lot of market share.
  • Apparently the Mac hype is gone, at least for Jabber users. Or it’s just that all Mac users use Pidgin, which doesn’t report the OS.
  • Regarding Linux distributions, Arch Linux gained a lot of market share over the last year.