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Christian Rebischke

18 Feb 2016 18 Feb '16

6:02 p.m.

Hello everyone, Is there any counter for ISO-downloads or something? I want to have a number how much people are using Arch Linux worldwide. I don't need an exact number. Does somebody has some statistics? best regards Chris

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Tim Ohliger

18 Feb 18 Feb

6:42 p.m.

Hi. I do not know about a download counter, but maybe distrowatch.com is what you are looking for. Kind regards Tim 2016-02-18 21:02 GMT+01:00 Christian Rebischke < Chris.Rebischke@archlinux.org>:

Hello everyone, Is there any counter for ISO-downloads or something? I want to have a number how much people are using Arch Linux worldwide. I don't need an exact number.

Does somebody has some statistics?

best regards

Chris

Sebastiaan Lokhorst

7:12 p.m.

2016-02-18 21:42 GMT+01:00 Tim Ohliger :

I do not know about a download counter, but maybe distrowatch.com is what you are looking for.

DistroWatch itself says:

The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics (...) correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions.

So that's not a good measure. The only statistics I know about are at [1], but those are opt-in. So probably not a good measure either. Regards, Sebastiaan [1] https://www.archlinux.de/?page=Statistics

Paul Gideon Dann

19 Feb 19 Feb

7:06 a.m.

The nature of ArchLinux as a rolling-release distro means that ISO downloads are not a good measure of the number of users at all. (Most users downloaded an ISO once, a long time ago, and not for each release as for other distros.) Add to that the fact that there are torrent links for the ISO as well, for which download counts are probably not available. I think the only way to get some kind of measure would probably be to aggregate a count of IPs hitting each of the Arch package mirrors, which would be a colossal undertaking :D Paul On 18 February 2016 at 21:12, Sebastiaan Lokhorst < sebastiaanlokhorst@gmail.com> wrote:

2016-02-18 21:42 GMT+01:00 Tim Ohliger :

...
I do not know about a download counter, but maybe distrowatch.com is what you are looking for.

DistroWatch itself says:

...
The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics (...) correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions.

So that's not a good measure.

The only statistics I know about are at [1], but those are opt-in. So probably not a good measure either.

Regards, Sebastiaan

[1] https://www.archlinux.de/?page=Statistics

Ben Oliver

7:32 a.m.

I can only agree with all the above. The nature of Arch, and free software in general, makes it very hard to track the number of users. Commercially, 'number of users' can be a measure of success so people go to great lengths to keep tabs on how many users they have (or they have an even simpler metric - number of purchases). Not so here, since no one is having to 'sell the numbers' so to speak. Also, bear in mind that single users could be running lots of instances. I run four machines with Arch on them, all with different IPs.

Temlin Olivér

3:24 p.m.

A good statistic would be from the downloads on the filesystem/coreutils/pacman packages, but you would need to get all the mirrors to track that. Also, that still measures the number of machines and not the users. -- Oliver Temlin

sekret＠posteo.se

1:41 p.m.

* Christian Rebischke [18.02.2016 21:03]:

Hello everyone, Is there any counter for ISO-downloads or something? I want to have a number how much people are using Arch Linux worldwide. I don't need an exact number.

Does somebody has some statistics?

best regards

Chris

Ask the NSA, they are probably the only ones who (can) know ;-)

Felix von Zadow

3:48 p.m.

I want to have a number how much people are using Arch Linux worldwide. I don't need an exact number.

Im not aware of a representative survey. But if you're not after reliable numbers, try combining statistics on the total number of linux users world wide [1] with the percentage of Arch users [2]. Tadaa, 2,4M Arch users. If that's not enough for you, just switch sources and use [3] instead of [2] to get 24M Arch users. Distrowatch [4] might actually be a more useful resource. Felix [1] https://www.linuxcounter.net/statistics [2] https://www.linuxcounter.net/statistics/distributions [3] https://brashear.me/blog/2015/08/24/results-of-the-2015-slash-r-slash-linux-... [4] http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

Grady Martin

28 Feb 28 Feb

2:24 p.m.

On 2016年02月19日 18時48分, Felix von Zadow wrote:

Im not aware of a representative survey. But if you're not after reliable numbers, try combining statistics on the total number of linux users world wide [1] with the percentage of Arch users [2].

Tadaa, 2,4M Arch users.

Our numbers are that strong? Let's take over Greenland.

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participants (9)

Ben Oliver
Christian Rebischke
Felix von Zadow
Grady Martin
Paul Gideon Dann
Sebastiaan Lokhorst
sekret＠posteo.se
Temlin Olivér
Tim Ohliger