Ubuntu: 12 million users

On the eve of the release of Lucid Lynx, Canonical has released 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, 8 million were announced).

The calculation methodology is unknown, because Canonical does not maintain a database of addresses and names, and sends disks to everyone. Actually, now there is not a single reliable method for calculating the installations 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 believe their word.

For comparison, Red Hat counts its users through the Smolt system and by the number of calls to the repository (24.4 million downloads from 20.7 million unique IP addresses for all 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, here is Wikimedia statistics ), the Ubuntu distribution is the most popular Linux distribution, which is about ten times more popular than Fedora.