Re: Linux users being more experienced - turns out that the failure rate on Linux is about 50%. More than that I can’t deduce though.
Re: exe prejudice - well, then there’s exe prejudice. It can’t be ignored but it can be factored in. The truth is, if the consumer was aware of what Webstart and Java offered they’d never touch another exe download (we’re going to start highlighting this on our site soon to encourage Webstart usage).
Re: that bit of code that does the detection - we did actually use that for a month on our site but it kept ballsing up or misbehaving at a time when we were getting 20,000 visitors a day. In the end it created so many support calls we got rid of it. Nowadays I dare say we could use it again because our traffic’s a lot more reasonable!
Re: affiliate stats skewing - fortunately I can filter out all my affiliates from the results and look purely at the ones from my own download page. And the results look like: 28% of installs are Webstarted from Puppy Games, and 72% are Win32 exes from Puppy Games. Still 3 times as likely.
Cas 