Btw, why are you actually even surprised by it?

Well, because Redhat was the first linux distribution I used, and I did so four about 6 years personally and then another decade professionally (various versions, from CentOS to RHEL) and IME it's by far the worst distribution I've used, and RPM is, and always had been, a clusterfuck of a package management system. The excuse for use in Enterprise was that companies could pay for 24/7 service support, and that is often a deciding factor, especially if OPs has a strong voice in the decision process; but by god is it a horrible system.

I'm actually pretty oblivious to any Redhat controversy; I don't bother reading anything Redhat-related anymore.

I'm not surprised that it's widely used, for the same reason I'm not surprised Microsoft is widely used: because of the enterprise decision process. But the popularity surprises me.

Did they provide raw scores?

Yup! Here:

Thanks!

Ah, would this comment help?

I saw that; absolute values would be preferable, but I can work with percentages - two decimal places of accuracy should be fine. It's not like we're trying to do science here.

I’m more interested in a ranked-choice version of this poll.

Me too. I suppose you could retro-actively use the raw scores for this. I'm curious of your findings!

I think you can't, because it requires each voter to rank their preferences, which requires a specific form of voting mechanism. I didn't participate in the poll, but if it was run as ranked choice, and if we had access to the raw, per-voter results, and if the sample size was sufficiently large; then yeah - we could run a full Condorcet count and get some interesting answers!

The hard part about doing an "should these two distros go into the same bucket" evaluation is determining how closely related distros are. For example, I wouldn't consider Mint to be Debian because there are no number of packages you can remove from Mint to make it pure Debian without breaking it. Believe me, I've tried. At some point, there's are very Mint-specific packages which, if you remove them, the system won't boot. A dedicated and knowledgeable enough person might be able to swap packages out and keep a running system, but the Mint-ness is woven in pretty deeply into some core package dependencies. I suspect the same is true for Ubuntu->Debian, but maybe not for Kubuntu->Ubuntu. I know you can go from Arch->Artix and back again, although it's a bit of work. I don't know if you could remove enough of EndeavourOS to get pure Arch and still have a bootable system (I haven't tried).

So, you could just bucket everything by package manager - does it use apt? Then it's Debian! Although, now with Snap, how much is Ubuntu based on Debian anymore, anyway? Anyway, this is the last, uninteresting way.

More interesting is bucketing by whether it's reasonably possible to convert one distribution to another. I suspect you could turn Arch into Endeavor by changing some source package lists, running an upgrade and maybe installing a package or a dozen. Figuring this out for every distribution would be hard.