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.
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.
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?.
This is one of those correlation != causation things, hm?
It might be more a case of the “average” Arch user being more sensitive to small quirks/bugs or certain defaults. Arch is at least comparatively unbiased, which might be why these users pick Arch in the first place.
I would personally agree with where Arch is because I prefer a distribution that mostly works out of the box and already made a lot of the decisions for me that I don’t want to be bothered with. I do still customize quite a few elements to my (sometimes very specific) liking, but I also like that I don’t have to do anything when it comes to configuring my disk layout, or configuring zram, or install and configure fwupd or other packages that kind of just make sense to have.
But I don’t really see why Arch users can’t be as happy with their choice as I am with mine, unless the only reason they “use Arch btw” is that they think that’s unironically something to brag about (or peer pressure, but that shouldn’t be a thing I hope).
This is just fun with statistics. I don’t think your Linux distro has a big impact on your overall happiness in life, but of course you can order the results by any parameter you like.
Often, it’s a third factor that influences both, in this case probably age, which influences happiness and distro choice.
Or maybe having the time and inclination to install Arch correlates with being in a bad place in your life right now.
I know I was tinkering with Linux all day when I was procrastinating and locked away in my room for days.
Arch: for the young'uns with some fire left in them that just discovered open source and want to stick it to M$ and show off in front of friends.
Debian: When those people grow up and start having to do actual work on their computers...
I went through that cycle over the last 25 years. Thought I was hot shit running Slackware on a ThinkPad 380 when all my friends were on Windows 98. Then I got better things to do than running configure scripts all day and tweaking the UI yet again.
I run Slackware because I got better things to do than configure my system.
The installation was a bit more involved than Debian cause you have to set up grub and install flatpak yourself, but then it just sits there, works and never really changes, which is nice.
It’s designed to not surprise you and let you do with it whatever you want, including nothing.
having the time and inclination to install Arch correlates with being in a bad place in your life right now.
True for me. I’m using Arch because I don’t have a system that can run Gentoo ;P
Actually I’ve oscillated between the two for many years. Every few years I switch to the other one and enjoy it for a few. … Only, now I’m stuck on a laptop that would melt if I tried to put Gentoo on it v.v I hope some day I will have a real computer again v.v Among other things 😅 😞
So of the three happiest distros, two aren’t very concerned with mainstream appeal and will carry on contentedly doing their thing while ignoring rankings like this. Sounds about right.