PCLinuxOS Magazine: From The Chief Editor's Desk...
You and I both know that there are a lot of people who get caught up in "the numbers." We see it periodically when someone posts in the PCLinuxOS forum that PCLinuxOS fell two places in Distrowatch's "ranking." That "ranking" is a measurement of how many "hits" that distro's page has received in a day, averaged out.
For what it's worth, PCLinuxOS still sits in the top 20 of the top 100 distros, as ranked by "hits per day" on Distrowatch. PCLinuxOS, at the time I'm writing this article, is solidly ranked 16th in the Distrowatch HPD rankings.
I was around many years ago when PCLinuxOS actually (and briefly) held the number one rank for HPD on Distrowatch. It was somewhat chaotic, uncharacteristic for the calm that typically envelops the forum. Texstar and many others have stated they don't want to be the number one ranked Linux distro. It brings all the "weirdos" out from the woodwork. It makes you a target. After all, who does everyone aim for? Who does everyone look to "dethrone?" Of course, it's the "Big Guy" on top.
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For the few of us that work on producing this magazine every month, it raises some questions for us. Like, are we not writing interesting enough articles? What could/should we be doing differently? What are we doing that isn't liked? Or, has our readership numbers just fallen to such lower levels because fewer people are using PCLinuxOS? These are all valid questions, I think.
One of my guidelines on deciding what to write about every month goes something like this. First, cover PCLinuxOS first. Second, cover Linux. Third, cover computing and computing issues and advances. Fourth, cover things that PCLinuxOS/Linux users might find interesting. So, to that end, I do know that users of other distros do also read "our" magazine. I've heard it many times.