Freespire's sketchiness and a word on DistroWatch

Linspire's sister distribution Freespire is reportedly using sketchy tactics to inflate their rank at DistroWatch... again.
I have to admit that I've seen the advertisement in question on Linux Revolution, but the URL pointed to the Freespire wiki.



DistroWatch's ranking index provides a rough sketch of the relative popularity of almost all of the various Linux distributions out there. Why would you want to be near the top? DistroWatch's 50,000 hits/day seems like a decent reason (it makes my blog look like, well, a blog). After keeping an eye on it for many years, it seems like at least the top three distributions are probably correct in their popularity with desktop users. The index is also a good way to find out what the next big Linux distribution is going to be (openSUSE has jumped quite a ways recently).