Notice: Elementary OS is on-topic on Unix.SE

Question

As part of the process to create new sites, the Community team reviews proposals to make sure they would be good additions to our existing set of sites. One reason we close proposals is when they significantly overlap with existing sites. Starting a new site is a major investment of time and effort, so we'd prefer new topics go to existing communities whenever possible. That way allows users to to take advantage of existing moderation teams, experienced users, tagging schemes, meta policies, and so on.

One good reason for splitting a site is when the culture of the new topic conflicts with the culture of the existing site. An ideal case study is the Unix/Ubuntu split. Despite extensive overlap in topic space, the split has largely been successful. Before today, I didn't know much about elementary OS. It looks like a community that shares a lot with Ubuntu, but also distinct from it. In other words, a good potential split.

However, when I look at the proposal commitment metrics, I see a potential problem:

In order for this proposal to reach private beta, it will need more users who have experience with other sites on the network. It's important for a portion of early users to know how the various reputation, voting, and privilege systems work. Therefore, I suggest that those who have committed to this site but haven't used Stack Exchange in the past, head over to the [elementary-os] tag on our Unix & Linux site. That way, you will:

1. Learn how Stack Exchange sites work,
2. Increase the commitment progress of this proposal, and
3. Get answers to you existing elementary OS questions.

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In terms of the metrics I use for evaluating spinoffs, here is the baseline for Unix.SE:

N     median_views avg_score closed_rate avg_answers accepted_rate answer_rate median_tta 
----- ------------ --------- ----------- ----------- ------------- ----------- ---------- 
61205          335       3           6.7         1.6          51.6        85           36         

And here are the same statistics for the [elementary-os] tag:

  140          295       0.8         4.3         0.8          37.1        64.3        261    

Overall, I think this proposal is a good candidate for a split if people are ready to use it on day #1.

Proposal: elementary OS

Answer 1

I'm in two minds about the creation of a site about Elementary OS. I generally oppose splitting off sites about a specific distribution. Ubuntu is an exception: I supported and continue to support Ask Ubuntu as a separate site, because it has an audience that is rather different from Unix.SE.

1. Ubuntu is the distribution with the largest user base.
2. Ubuntu favors a standardized user interface.
3. Ubuntu cares a lot about users who don't care what's under the hood.

Most other distributions fail these criteria. Even Ubuntu users who do tinker and who do not use the default user interface may be more comfortable on Unix.SE. The difficulty that casual Ubuntu users may have with Unix.SE is that they're likely to be confronted with questions like “what window manager are you using”, and answers that say “run this command” without explaining things like opening a terminal and switching to the intended directory. This isn't to say that you have to know what a window manager is to ask questions on Unix.SE, but we tend to make the default assumption that people do know, which is a poor fit for people who only know and care about a single environment.

How does Elementary OS fare with these criteria? 2/3:

1. Not a huge user base.
2. Yes, that's the point.
3. Yes.

That's different from, say, Debian, Fedora or Arch, all of which fit comfortably on Unix.SE.

With respect to your criteria:

• You don't have a measure of the number of active users. The tag [elementary-os] on Unix.SE does not mean “I'm using Elementary OS”, but “my question is specific to Elementary OS”. While the relative popularity of distribution tags is somewhat correlated with the popularity of the distribution on the site, a lot of Elementary OS answers are to be found under other tags such as [ubuntu], [apt], [bash], etc.
• On the other hand, I think the low scores and low answer rate does indicate a misfit between Unix.SE's primary audience and Elementary OS's. The difference is not as great as the numbers might seem to indicate — all distribution tags have lower answer rates and higher TTA than average (I think this is because many of the questions with a distribution tag are questions that should not have a tag but that few people were interested in and nobody bothered to retag). But Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora, CentOS all have >1.5 average score, ~80% answer rate and <120 median TTA, which is far better than Elementary OS.

So if Elementary OS can muster a large enough community on Stack Exchange, I think it will fare well on its own site.