Linked by Amjith Ramanujam on Fri 15th Aug 2008 04:15 UTC, submitted by computerishcat
The traditional market share numbers would say that Linux is currently at less than 1%, but some more recent numbers suggest that it might, in fact, be almost even with the Mac. This all brings the question of how many Linux users are there really? Unfortunately, we may never know. Certainly, there is no way of knowing currently, but it should be possible to at least get a rough estimate.
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Member since:
2006-01-24
My numbers on this are entirely made up, but I think in principle this is sound:
The fact of the matter is that probably 90% of linux users out there are using only 10 different distros. Most of those distros have some manner of package management (be it yast or apt), and are probably hitting less than 30 distinct servers. Given that most distros in my somewhat limited experience have automatically updated themselves, shouldn't it be fairly easily be possible to ask canonical/suse/redhat/debian how many times a particular update common to almost all installs has been downloaded? That'd be pretty darn anonymous, fairly inclusive (excluding only those who have automatic updates turned off, or who don't have that common library due to some quirk of their install). That really shouldn't be terribly hard, should it?