Hi, I do think that its useful information to know what applications are popular and which are not. We currently use this in gnome-app-install to provide a "popularity" column so that the users get a idea what applications are popular and which are not that popular. Its currently not ideal because the sample size of users is limited. But it should become very useful.
Not in every case its the popularity that matters for a decision as you pointed out in the screensaver example. Sometimes there are technical issues, sometimes legal issues that overwrite the popularity. We would love to ship better multimedia support out of the box for example, but for a lot of packages we can't because of legal issues even though the packages are very popular. So popularity contest is useful for ubuntu. And it is totally opt-in and the description explains whats going to happen when the checkbox is checked. I think that its not fair to compare this to the MicroSoft approach :) Cheers, Michael -- popularity-contest https://launchpad.net/bugs/81211 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
