Results from the LWN reader survey

By Jake Edge
May 5, 2010

As part of our "media kit" project, we put together a reader survey that ran for the last two weeks of April. Over 1800 readers filled out the survey—our thanks to all of them—and, as promised, here is a summary of the responses.

The vast majority (90%) of respondents were subscribers, and almost all of those folks intend to continue. Less than 5% of responses either never planned to subscribe or may not resubscribe. Three-quarters of subscribers were likely to continue their current level if there were a subscription price increase, with 8% overall likely to drop to a lower subscription level and 16% being less likely to subscribe or renew.

As for LWN content, the weekly edition front and kernel pages are by far the most popular, with 90% reading them frequently. The daily news page (71%), weekly development (70%), security (61%), and distributions (52%) pages were all fairly popular as well. Less so were the yearly timeline (33%), weekly announcements page (27%), and the events calendar (10%).

Pages and features that readers could live without had responses that, unsurprisingly, mirrored those above. No more than 25% of readers could live without any of the daily or weekly pages, with the exception of 45% who would be fine without the announcements page. The events calendar (57%) and timeline (34%) didn't fare as well.

The clear winner for areas that readers would like to see more coverage is "Languages and development tools" at 57%. Roughly 40% would like to see more system administration and desktop Linux coverage, while approximately one-third saw embedded systems and virtualization as areas for expanded coverage. "The business of Linux and free software" was only chosen by 25% of respondents and it would seem that we, perhaps, have the right amount of coverage of legal issues and conferences as only 20% thought those should increase.

Formatting LWN for mobile device display was the most popular choice for that question, with 30% saying that they would personally use it. A PDF version of the weekly edition was next at 17%, but EPub (7%) and Kindle (2%) were not particularly interesting to respondents.

The question about regularly used distributions led to some interesting results, with Ubuntu (54%) and Debian (44%) far ahead of any of the rest. The next tier was led by Fedora (24%), followed by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (21%), other OS (20%), CentOS (19%), and other Linux (15%). All of the rest came in at less than 10%: Gentoo, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Mandriva, and Oracle Unbreakable Linux (with 13 respondents) in that order.

In the single-choice "primary desktop" question, GNOME came out way ahead with 50%. KDE had a 23% share and the numbers drop off quickly from there. 8% use some Linux desktop environment that we didn't list and 7% use another OS entirely for their primary desktop. No desktop environment (5%) was just ahead of Xfce (4%), while LXDE is only used by ten of our readers who responded.

As we move forward, and look at changes we might make—for content, features, and coverage—we will definitely keep these answers in mind. There are some things, like the events calendar, that we do as a service to the community and are likely to stay, even if they are somewhat sparsely used. But when thinking about article assignments and where to focus our efforts, these answers will come in very handy. Thanks again to all who responded.

to post comments

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 3:44 UTC (Thu) by tdwebste (guest, #18154) [Link] (3 responses)

"LXDE is only used by ten of our readers who responded"

Recent Ubuntu changes window control, "left/right confusion" and intermittent gnome/mono performance hangs has pushed me to LXDE.

Guess I missed this survey. My move to LXDE was pushed by Ubuntu changes in March.

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 10:06 UTC (Thu) by ikm (subscriber, #493) [Link] (1 responses)

Mono? Does Gnome now utilize Mono anywhere near its core?

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 7, 2010 20:12 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Nope. The following Q&A on GNOME 3 status explaining the current situation quite well.

http://live.gnome.org/GNOME3Myths#GNOME_3.0_depends_on_Mo...

Fedora 13 status is explained by me at

http://mether.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/fedora-13-desktop-...

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 17:16 UTC (Thu) by Cato (guest, #7643) [Link]

I use GNOME and LXDE on the same PC - GNOME for the main desktop, and LXDE to run games in a second X server (makes Alt-Tab work much better particularly with full-screen games in WINE).

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 4:00 UTC (Thu) by jhs (guest, #12429) [Link] (1 responses)

The events calendar is something you don't think you'd miss; however it is a great way to be reminded of events near you which you don't follow super closely.

In other words, one can do a geographic scan through the events instead of a keyword scan. Here in Southeast Asia, that is very valuable and I for one love it.

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 10, 2010 14:00 UTC (Mon) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

True. Although I don't normally follow the calendar, I think it is it that brought my attention to PgCon last year, which I did end up attending. So it certainly has *some* value.

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 5:28 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (3 responses)

All of the rest came in at less than 10%: Gentoo, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Mandriva, and Oracle Unbreakable Linux (with 13 respondents) in that order.

I'm really surprised the share of Mandriva users is so low, next to last, among LWN readers. I find it a very nice distribution, which had some rough times many years ago, but now chugs along fine. A hidden gem? I wonder if the shares also may reflect the geographical distribution of readers, which was not asked about (IIRC). Mandriva and SUSE/OpenSUSE are probably more popular in Europe than U.S. (A suggestion for a future survey: where are LWN readers living?)

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 5:55 UTC (Thu) by zmi (guest, #4829) [Link] (2 responses)

I just wanted to ask the same question: How strong is SUSE coverage when you look at Europe alone?

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 6:30 UTC (Thu) by chaneau (guest, #6674) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, I live in Belgium and I only know one guy who is using Suse (a german speaking belgian), the vast majority is using either Ubuntu or Fedora (with Ubuntu quite a few % ahead)

This is of course only _my_ experience so I won't draw any conclusions but maybe the results of the survey are not that biased towards the Americans.

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 7:52 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

I believe SUSE is very strong here in Germany, unsurprisingly.

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 7:54 UTC (Thu) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link] (2 responses)

The weekly announcements page is less interesting because most of the announcements appear on the "daily" page as they arrive, not (for me at least) because the announcements themselves are not of interest.

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 18, 2010 21:01 UTC (Tue) by Duncan (guest, #6647) [Link] (1 responses)

Agreed. And the announcements are easy enough to come by at any of probably a dozen FLOSS/Linux/technology related sites. I know I see many announcements three or more times on various daily feeds, before I ever get to the LWN weekly coverage. Similarly with the security announcements.

LWN's value continues to be in its unique coverage, particularly on the kernel and front pages, but also in the feature articles on the security, distribution and development pages.

Meanwhile, personally, I really wish that LWN would finally publish its site sources so I could once again in good conscience subscribe. It is at the cost of some personal inconvenience that I remain a non-subscriber, and I'd love to subscribe again, but my conscience was pricking me for supporting FLOSS with my mouth while my dollars voted for FLOSS vaporware and promises years old (see the years old promise on the FAQ page, a lot has happened since it was made, including a lot of companies making commitments and then keeping them with their own open their code, yet LWN, the would-be beacon of the FLOSS community, continues to promote vaporware sources of its own code), so I couldn't and cannot resubscribe until that is taken care of, despite the personal inconvenience a lack of subscription has been.

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 18, 2010 22:06 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

so does this mean that you would rather leave the linux kernel broken and have the time that Corbett spends on that instead spent on the lwn.net website code?

personally I think there is more value from his kernel contributions (and this is completely ignoring the probability that it's being done on his own time)

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 8:50 UTC (Thu) by Hanno (guest, #41730) [Link]

Thanks for the results! Pie charts might have been nice, though.

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 6, 2010 9:21 UTC (Thu) by Aissen (subscriber, #59976) [Link] (14 responses)

About formatting for mobile devices: there's no need.

LWN is really close to being easy to display on mobile devices. The text-only nature of the layout makes it very easy to display on any mobile browser.
All it needs to do:
- skip the "proxy" page if you're already logged in(and subscriber). If I came from my RSS reader, I already read the summary: just give me the whole article directly.
- eventually (if a technical solution can be found), put the full article in RSS for subscribers. If this could work with any RSS client, it would be really useful.

As a side note, Calibre (open source e-reading software) has a recipe that allows you to download LWN articles directly on your computer or mobile device. It supports a bunch of output formats including EPUB, PDF, text, etc.
http://calibre-ebook.com/

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 6, 2010 9:38 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (2 responses)

The text-only nature of the layout makes it very easy to display on any mobile browser.

At least on older Nokias it does not work so well with the native browser (haven't tried on any recent ones). Opera Mini makes it OK. What would make LWN work on them (and actually on any browser ever made!), would be a format without any kinds of sidebars, ADs and most other formatting. Just P, Hn, HR and so on like in HTML2 of yore. This would give the browser in the mobile device maximum opportunities to flow the text to fit. Because of the lack of ads, this probably would have to be a subscriber-only feature.

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 6, 2010 10:57 UTC (Thu) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

I played with this for about 10 minutes a while ago. As well as moving the left column to the top, (i.e. insert </tr></table><table class="Page"><tbody><tr> where appropriate) I changed the DIV.ArticleText { min-width: } style to 1em (i.e. very small, there really is no point having a bigger value) and reduced the DIV.Comment { margin-left:} to about 4px so the comments don't nest so deeply. It was then quite readable (on my Freerunner running midori).

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 6, 2010 19:02 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

if you add ?format=printable to the normal URL for a page, it will format that page without the sidebar

for example http://lwn.net/Articles/386500/?format=printable for a link to your comment

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 6, 2010 11:31 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (subscriber, #36106) [Link] (4 responses)

Mobile browsers are increasingly capable. I don't think the time invested in a mobile version would pay off since the problem will go away anyway as mobile devices improve.

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 6, 2010 12:38 UTC (Thu) by Aissen (subscriber, #59976) [Link] (2 responses)

That's what I said.

The Android browser can reflow very easily the text on LWN, but I don't know about older Nokias or Freerunners'. I'm sure N900's browser (Fennec) is just as good (or better) as Android's to reflow text.

The problems I highlighted are not mobile-specific but would greatly help reading on mobile devices:
- no need to load two pages on a high-latency network before reading an article,
- even better, reading directly from an RSS reader that adapts to your screen size, and that can cache the content for offline use.

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 6, 2010 14:13 UTC (Thu) by SimonKagstrom (guest, #49801) [Link] (1 responses)

On Android, the biggest problem I see is the menu bar on the left. When using the phone in portrait mode, it means that I have to scroll the display to the right to see the articles.

Having an option to remove it completely or put the menu bar on the right would solve that issue.

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 6, 2010 16:20 UTC (Thu) by Aissen (subscriber, #59976) [Link]

Il feel like the scrolling is the easiest part. It takes a second or so to scroll to the article or double tap the correct text zone and zoom to it.
And once your aligned with text, the flow algorithm takes care of the rest "locking" the scrolling in the vertical direction.

So not a big time lost in comparison with the actual reading.

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 7, 2010 4:27 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

Mobile browsers are increasingly capable.

The screen size / human eyesight combination will remain a limiting factor, no matter what! The maximum is probably what we already see on modern touch-screen phones, where one side of the phone is almost all screen. You cannot make them any larger without losing "pocketability".

Another limiting factor is bandwidth, but that fortunately has never been a problem with LWN with its sparing use of images (thanks!).

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 6, 2010 21:51 UTC (Thu) by biged (guest, #50106) [Link]

I find the presentation on ipod touch (sorry) isn't very readable - I think perhaps the page width pushes the font size down. But the Readability bookmarklet made a big difference (http://tinyurl.com/2fn8u3f)

Readability:
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 7, 2010 2:30 UTC (Fri) by dougsk (guest, #25954) [Link] (2 responses)

I voted that way 'cause The Kindle was mentioned in the survey. I do most reading on a Kindle now, and to be perfectly fair, I'm Lazy. If I can subscribe to LWN on my Kindle and get the Weekly Edition transferred OTA that would be pretty cool.

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 7, 2010 17:59 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

I sometimes read lwn on my kindle, but the user authentication and redirects manage to mess things up every few weeks and are painful enough to go through that I frequently don't bother. If this could be streamlined I would use it a LOT more.

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 7, 2010 18:03 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

what would people think about making a format optimized for mobile devices (smallish screens in portrait mode) be limited to subscribers only, or only to those subscribers who are at a level where they can disable advertisements?

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 14, 2010 2:49 UTC (Fri) by abadidea (guest, #62082) [Link] (1 responses)

There IS a need for mobile reformatting; the three-column format (the ads being the third) is too wide for most mobile screens. Depending on the browser, this results in either massive horizontal scrolling or text that's too small to read. Sometimes inline images also cause problems. Trust me, I am obsessed with miniature computers and also lwn.

May I also take this opportunity to BEG for justified text? :)

Formatting LWN for mobile device display

Posted May 14, 2010 19:29 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

adding ?format=printable clears the left column.

the advertisements can be eliminated based on your subscription level, give LWN a few more bucks ;-)

Popularity of Ubuntu and Debian

Posted May 6, 2010 9:24 UTC (Thu) by rganesan (guest, #1182) [Link]

You noted that the vast majority of respondents were subscribers. Do you have data on how many of them are Debian Developer subscriptions? HP sponsored LWN subscriptions for Debian Developers. I wonder if this is skewing the results somewhat.

DISCLAIMER: I am a Debian Developer myself

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 10:38 UTC (Thu) by fatrat (guest, #1518) [Link] (1 responses)

There was a rather vital option missing from the desktop option - "Other OS". There's plenty of people who use OS X (or even Windows) on the desktop but Linux on servers, and so read LWN. I'm one.

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 13:32 UTC (Thu) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]

> There was a rather vital option missing from the desktop option - "Other OS"

Maybe I am misunderstanding, but we did have that option for the desktop question and reported it in the article: "and 7% use another OS entirely for their primary desktop."

jake

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 15:10 UTC (Thu) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link]

"Three-quarters of subscribers were likely to continue their current level if there were a subscription price increase..."

Personally, I felt this question was much too open-ended. How *much* of a price increase are we talking about? If the increase were under, say, two dollars, I would be likely to continue subscribing, but it's a different matter entirely if we're talking about doubling the current price. So I responded "less likely to continue", even though I would be OK with a certain degree of price increase.

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 15:37 UTC (Thu) by guinan (guest, #4644) [Link] (2 responses)

http://lwn.net/Articles/377060/

"At recent events, your editor asked many readers what part of the LWN Weekly Edition would be missed least if it went away. The answers were surprisingly consistent; it seems that relatively few people plow through the long lists of software releases which have long appeared on this page."

It looks like the survey disagrees with this. I understand its a matter of resource allocation, but I hope to see the Development page get more attention in the future.

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 16:45 UTC (Thu) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe people really like the articles at the top of the development page, but don't care about the rest of the page? That would be consistent with both reports.

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 10, 2010 14:11 UTC (Mon) by yodermk (subscriber, #3803) [Link]

Yeah. I liked the project update list that was formerly there, but its usefulness was limited.

I'd like to see, in addition to the main article, maybe 2 or 3 shorter articles on the Dev page. There's a lot of cool stuff happening; it would be nice to hear of more of it. Not just new projects, but new developments in existing projects. And more on the "big" creativity applications for users - what's new in Scribus? Inkscape? OpenOffice? Video editors?

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 6, 2010 22:37 UTC (Thu) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link]

A look at the user agent strings in your web server logs and a comparison to the respondents answers might generate some interesting statistics about who responds to these things.

I think mine might have indicated a doubling of the Gentoo quota.

(I was on hols. when this was run. Remember kids: an anecdote != data)

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 10, 2010 15:38 UTC (Mon) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link]

What I would most like to see from LWN is more on the feature side than the content side. I'm now spoiled by Slashdot's D2 system and get frustrated on sites that don't let me use keyboard navigation and collapse read comments.

Results from the LWN reader survey

Posted May 11, 2010 15:21 UTC (Tue) by rilder (guest, #59804) [Link]

No matter what happens, keep the kernel page.