10 Year Gentoo Census

[NeddySeagoon]

Team,

About 10 years ago we had Is the Gentoo population aging or getting younger? an informal census of users.
At that time there was no poll, so its time to do it again ... this time with a poll.

The poll will run for 30 days and the results are hidden until the poll is completed.

[sublogic]

I know what I am, but would it be useful to define the date ranges ?

[Juippisi]

I have absolutely no idea how "old" each generation is supposed to be. Maybe that says something?

[fedeliallalinea]

A little wikipedia search: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generatio ... enerations

[stefan11111]

From the other thread:

TheLexx,

I would say the users are probably ageing. I know I am. I'm 10 years older now than when I started with Gentoo

I've been playing with computers for 50 years now, so to add to your questions ...
do you remember acoustic couplers
do you remember bulletin boards
do you remember the 4004 DRAM chip (4k bits, not bytes)
do you remember the great Prestel hack, or even Prestel at all?

There are many more ...

No, I didn't have a computer at home in 1963 and I was probably the only one in a school of about 1100 that had computer programing as a hobby.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

How old are you?
Also, care to guess my age from what posts you've seen me make?

[duane]

If you use the names of generations, I suspect there will be people (like me) who select the generation they identify with rather than any particular range of years. And of course, that might change during their life. I'd rather see them grouped by computer game generation. I was born after Spacewar and before Pong.

I'm not sure what use knowing the age of a population of forum readers is.

[Hu]

I'm not sure what use knowing the age of a population of forum readers is.

The idea is to gauge whether the forum is attracting and retaining users of particular age ranges. If the forum is mostly composed of people who are already 70+ years old today, then in 20 years many of them will be gone, no matter how compelling the forum or its content is. If the forum has many people who just recently turned 20, they might be here for decades to come. Attracting younger users who are competent and willing to become helpful contributors is key to keeping the forum useful even as existing users age out.

[Goverp]

Some of us old fogies have been here for 20 years or thereabouts. Which means we started when we were 20 years younger, and already grey-haired, not young whipper-snappers of 20. ... Of course, by 2043 we'll all be running (or rather the AI will be running) Genthree Lennix on quantum computers

[NeddySeagoon]

sublogic,

I expected Gentoo users to use the search engine of their choice.

duane,

I'm sure there will be a few wildly inaccurate responses.

Over the (almost) 20 years I've been here. I've seen the forums get busier and quieten down.
I'm not sure if the documentation is getting better, so users need less help, younger users don't like waiting for a response, so they have moved to more instant messaging platforms, or Gentoo use is declining.

If we are all old farts here now, the forums will eventually die out. We even have Gentoo Old Timers Club

I don't expect the results to be of any practical value. The forums represent a small section of the userbase.

stefan11111,

In the interests of still not giving any numbers, I'll just say that I'm within months of my biblical expiry date. :)

[stefan11111]

sublogic,
I don't expect the results to be of any practical value. The forums represent a small section of the userbase.

From this forum's stat counter, there are 156207 registered users. How many people are using gentoo if this is a small section?

[NeddySeagoon]

stefan11111,

That's 156207 accounts registered since 08 Apr 2002.
How many of those users are still using Gentoo 21 years on ?

[szatox]

I've been playing with computers for 50 years now, so to add to your questions ...
(...)
In the interests of still not giving any numbers, I'll just say that I'm within months of my biblical expiry date.

Alright, so about 33 years old with 50 years of experience.
Dude, that's a truly impressive commitment to overtime

I expected Gentoo users to use the search engine of their choice.

The result kinda depends on who you ask though.
Say, I recall being classified as X, and then I'm suddenly Y and a millenial on top of that.
Or maybe, living on the old continent, I simply don't have enough burgers in my blood to make sense of those labels. Well, whatever, the recent labels ain't interesting enough to deserve more research.

[NeddySeagoon]

szatox,

I've been playing with computers for 50 years now, so to add to your questions ...

I wrote that 10 year ago :)

[Leonardo.b]

I don't want to get old, damn world. It's so sad.
I wish I could live forever.

I was born in 2000.

[Logicien]

My thoughts are based on the fact that older you get more simple you want things to be to handle them. Gentoo is not a simple clics distribution so, I think that young people constitute the majority of Gentoo users.

[flexibeast]

My thoughts are based on the fact that older you get more simple you want things to be to handle them. Gentoo is not a simple clics distribution

i'm 48, been using Linux since the late 90s, and moved to Gentoo (with OpenRC) a year and a half ago because it gives me more opportunity to be able to handle things i want to, and to not have to handle the things i don't.

Prior to that, i'd long ago moved away from using DEs to instead using WMs (i've been using i3 for a while now). For me an important form of 'simplicity' is not just the simplicity of the UI, but also how simple it is to (a) do things off the happy paths provided by the UI, and (b) how simple it is to diagnose, and hopefully fix, issues when they arise. As i've got older i have increasingly less patience with having to fight 'user-friendliness' and 'simplicity' that feels like it creates various problems for me as it solves others.

So while it's true that the Gentoo install process wasn't "point'n'click simple", the end result is simpler for me because i don't have to spend time and energy wrestling with functionality and/or systems i don't want or need.

[duane]

I don't want to get old, damn world. It's so sad.
I wish I could live forever.

Forever's a long time.

My thoughts are based on the fact that older you get more simple you want things to be to handle them. Gentoo is not a simple clics distribution so, I think that young people constitute the majority of Gentoo users.

I've been looking for a simpler distribution for some time now. Unfortunately, I haven't found any that will do everything I want, so I keep coming back to gentoo.

So while it's true that the Gentoo install process wasn't "point'n'click simple", the end result is simpler for me because i don't have to spend time and energy wrestling with functionality and/or systems i don't want or need.

So true. And if I have to recompile a dozen packages for my needs every time they update, what's the point of a binary distribution?

[pjp]

If you use the names of generations, I suspect there will be people (like me) who select the generation they identify with rather than any particular range of years. And of course, that might change during their life. I'd rather see them grouped by computer game generation. I was born after Spacewar and before Pong. :)

I'm not sure what use knowing the age of a population of forum readers is.

It seems that if you're near an edge of a generational boundary, it would be natural for some to perceive being associated with the "wrong" generation. It seems odd that a person might perceive being from the generation prior to the one into which they were born, then shift to one or two generations after their birth. Or maybe you didn't mean that much of a change.

I'm not sure what use knowing the age of a population of forum readers is.

The idea is to gauge whether the forum is attracting and retaining users of particular age ranges. If the forum is mostly composed of people who are already 70+ years old today, then in 20 years many of them will be gone, no matter how compelling the forum or its content is. If the forum has many people who just recently turned 20, they might be here for decades to come. Attracting younger users who are competent and willing to become helpful contributors is key to keeping the forum useful even as existing users age out.

Maybe the results will help with resource allocation for the Big Forum Upgrade.

[xineg]

49 years old generation X, started using gentoo in about 2004 and never used anything else.

[szatox]

It seems that if you're near an edge of a generational boundary, it would be natural for some to perceive being associated with the "wrong" generation. It seems odd that a person might perceive being from the generation prior to the one into which they were born, then shift to one or two generations after their birth.

Quite frankly I've never heard about generations in any context not related to burgerland. On the old continent it simply isn't a thing.

So, living a significant chunk of my life on the internet I do have some understanding of the system, but the boundaries are blurry (starting with gen X/Y cutoff), terms are used in an inconsistent manner, and it looks like different people mark draw the lines in completely different ways.
So, if you want to get anything more accurate than "we have more old farts than ankle biters", you definitely should properly define the options rather than "expect people to use their favorite search engines".

I don't want to get old, damn world. It's so sad.
I wish I could live forever.

I was born in 2000.

Damn kids those days! When I was your age...
Actually, never mind, 20yo me had been thinking about retiring by 35

[GDH-gentoo]

Quite frankly I've never heard about generations in any context not related to burgerland.

Here were I live, we've heard these generation names, but don't really use them either.

"Millenials" is the most frequently used name I've seen, to refer to the younger generations that started entering the workforce in recent years, which more or less seems to match the Wikipedia's definition. Like older people somewhat mockingly commenting "millennials discovering X" with X = some difficult or disillusioning aspect of adult life

I wish I could live forever.

Forever's a long time.

+1

EDIT

[...] I'll just say that I'm within months of my biblical expiry date.

And are you strong? I hope I've got that reference right...

[szatox]

Well, since we're talking about Ys and Xes

Code: Select all

Question: Find X
4X = 23 + 5 * 2
Answer:
IF4gLS0gaXQncyByaWdodCBoZXJlCg==

Anyway, Neddy, pjp, do you have direct access to forum's database?
I think I came up with a better way to do that gentoo census: Instead of asking people which generation they belong, just pull yearly post count by account age. And this can be repeated for any year in the past. I think it would also be more relevant, as activity is more important than head count. Also, it could be analyzed for activity trends in regards to absolute and relative time (date is absolute, account age is relative)

In fact, I'd be interested in seeing some graphs from this. Can you get us some spreadsheet with anonymized user's statistics? I wonder what we could discover in this data.

[s0ulslack1]

My thoughts are based on the fact that older you get more simple you want things to be to handle them. Gentoo is not a simple clics distribution so, I think that young people constitute the majority of Gentoo users.

Your in-experience in the real world is showing.

[stefan11111]

My thoughts are based on the fact that older you get more simple you want things to be to handle them. Gentoo is not a simple clics distribution so, I think that young people constitute the majority of Gentoo users.

Your in-experience in the real world is showing.

From my experience, old people are less tech literate the older they are. This may be because of where I live, as this forum has shown me that this is not always the case. Also, women tend to be less tech literate than men.

[NeddySeagoon]

stefan11111,

From my experience, old people are less tech literate the older they are. ...

I'll nibble. In my experience, younger people want things to just work. They are not interested is what goes on in the background to make it work.
They are beginning to develop an interest with the growing 'right to repair' and the problems that short life gadgets cause.
I'm not sure that that constitutes "tech literate" though.

In the interest of full disclosure, its generally known that I'm an old fart and I admit that I may be biased too.