Re: 2006 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards

[John Williams <john williams lists gmail com>]

On Mon, 2007-02-19 at 18:06 +0100, Claus Schwarm wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> On Mon, 19 Feb 2007 15:44:17 +0100
> Andreas Nilsson <nisses mail home se> wrote:
> 
> > Rather than some numbers on what desktop enviroment that people who 
> > visit linuxquestions.org happens to like for the day, is there any
> > way we could mesure how GNOME is doing compared to Windows and OSX
> > since 2003 to now?
It's relatively hard for now, and nigh on impossible for the past, as far as I can tell

> The only reliable way would have been a proper survey with true sample
> data, done every year. John Williams is better educated to comment
> here how many respondents would be needed to get sufficient results.
Not many.  Around 1,000 is sufficient if all we want to do is compare
two or three percentages (e.g. GNOME, KDE, Windows) with a margin of
error of around +/- 3% at the 95% confidence level.  

> To answer your question: No, there's no convenient and inexpensive way,
> in my opinion -- especially not for previous years.
It depends what you mean by "inexpensive".  A few (more than 2, less
than 10) thousand euros should do the trick.

The hard part is getting the sampling frame right.  It basically
consists of sending invitations to participate to people such that every
computer user, regardless of which OS or DE they use, has an equal
chance of receiving the invitation.  If you can come up with a way of
doing that I, for one, am all ears.  An ad on Google immediately springs
to mind, but I am sure that is prohibitively expensive.