April 8, 2010 at 16:58Ubuntu: 12 million users
In anticipation of the release of Lucid Lynx, Canonical has published a new estimate of the number of active users of Ubuntu: 12 million people. This is one and a half times more than in the fall of 2008 (then it was announced about 8 million).
The calculation methodology is unknown because Canonical does not maintain a database of addresses and names, but sends disks to everyone. Actually, now there is no reliable method for calculating the installation of any of the Linux distributions. However, Ubuntu project managers claim that the figure of 12 million is close to reality. It remains only to take their word for it.
For comparison, Red Hat counts its users through the Smolt system .and the number of hits to the repository (24.4 million hits from 20.7 million unique IP addresses for the whole time). The number of active customers a year ago was estimated at 14 million .
This looks rather strange, because according to the logs of sites with high traffic (for example, Wikimedia statistics ), the Ubuntu distribution is the most popular Linux distribution, which is about ten times more popular than Fedora.
The calculation methodology is unknown because Canonical does not maintain a database of addresses and names, but sends disks to everyone. Actually, now there is no reliable method for calculating the installation of any of the Linux distributions. However, Ubuntu project managers claim that the figure of 12 million is close to reality. It remains only to take their word for it.
For comparison, Red Hat counts its users through the Smolt system .and the number of hits to the repository (24.4 million hits from 20.7 million unique IP addresses for the whole time). The number of active customers a year ago was estimated at 14 million .
This looks rather strange, because according to the logs of sites with high traffic (for example, Wikimedia statistics ), the Ubuntu distribution is the most popular Linux distribution, which is about ten times more popular than Fedora.