Such polls / surveys are extremely questionable. I wouldn’t even know what rating to give, if someone asks me how happy I am. This is a dumb question to ask to begin with. Let alone everyone has a different standard to what 10/10 or 5/10 means. And then only 6000 (+ some) have been taken part.
The following data was obtained from polling done between January 22nd and February 9th, 2023. A few details about the polling conducted:
6,022 people answered the questions.
This is significantly larger than the vast majority of national polls conducted during Presidential Elections in the USA (most of which have less than 2,000 respondents).
The poll was presented to audiences of several shows and news sites in order to obtain a large, diverse sample of computer nerds.
The questions were wide-ranging, 100% optional, and no personal data was collected.
Let’s start from a very high level:
6,022 computer nerds & enthusiasts were asked the following simple question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy would you say you are (in general)?”
In polls the demographics of the participants are selected so they are statistically significant.
When you poll visitors to a website there’s no telling what biases might be at work. For example, Arch is a popular distribution so its prevalence in the results could simply be an indicator of that.
Last but not least, correlation does not necessarily mean causation, and that goes especially for an uncontrolled sample. There’s a famous example that says “100% of the people who drink water die after that”.
You can’t compare to the President Elections in the USA. The answers are very serious and with a huge impact, so people will choose wisely. And they are complete randoms. Compared to the question to nerds how happy they are in a rating between 1 and 10 and then connecting the happiness to the operating system they are using. It’s like asking how happy people are and then connecting this to the current president. Who said other factors didn’t play a role?
Not exactly, I use EndeavourOS, almost Arch. But I use Firefox, BTW. I was more unhappy when I used Ubuntu and even more when I was using Windows before this. No idea what rating to give though. What even is 8/10 happiness??
You can just take it for what it is: How people respond when asked to grade their happiness from 1 to 10. Of course it’s subjective, but it’s interesting that arch users rate their happiness lower overall.
Same. I call bullshit. First of all, for me Lunduke = Bullshit. Second, the moment it said people voluntarily participated in this survey, you just know that the demography of the survey takers will be extremely biased.
You’re assuming that Arch causes the unhappiness. Maybe unhappy people naturally tend to use Arch, so as to avoid further pain from painful distros like Pop! OS?.
I used to enjoy listening to him on YouTube simply because he didn’t yell in his videos like every other YouTuber. He had a bit of a Bob Ross vibe to him, but then he went off the deep end.
I’m done recommending stuff, because my use case is not necessarily your use case. I can only tell you that Brave is the sweet spot for me, at the moment.
Even though most people don’t agree with the stats, I think it makes sense because Arch users are never satisfied with their setup. It could cause many of them to choose an average number.