Fedora usage stats

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I’ve always enjoyed @mattdm ‘s Flock presentations on the growth/status of Fedora (and now with matt moving on this is even more timely!). I was just enjoying @castrojo’s stats on universal blue (downstream atomic images of Fedora), and was wondering if we could present our Fedora countme stats (for those who haven’t disabled it) in an easily digestible and publicly viewable graph like this.

Without this, the closest publicly available usage data that most people know about are Steams OS leaderboards, and distrowatch. Both not super optimal.

Or does this already exist and I haven’t found it? Thank you everyone!

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Yeah, @gwmngilfen and I are working on this. That and even better. :slight_smile:

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Amazing! Thank you!!

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Not only is distrowatch “not super optimal”, it’s not remotely close to measuring actual users. It’s just clicks on a page. Don’t make me tap the sign :smiley:

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Wait, why do I feel I’ve just been volun-told about this … :rofl:

But yeah, I’d love to do some nice data viz. Fedora has tons of interesting and unique data, and we absolutely should showcase it.

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@popey Yeah I was trying to be polite :slight_smile: Steam’s survey also only reflect gamers, on steam, who were surveyed.

And yet when no one has any info to go off, these are the sources that are quoted.

Now contrast that with the universal blue post above: Bazzite has 27K weekly active users, and Fedora atomic desktops have roughly 24k combined (Silverblue, kinoite, aurora, bluefin). 50-ish k total for image mode. Now those are numbers you can take to an app or game developer and hold some water!

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If helpful @mattdm @gwmngilfen , it appears u-blue runs this automated script in a CI once a day that auto-visualizes the csv from https://data-analysis.fedoraproject.org

EDIT: I do see there’s something similar here already, though I’m slightly confused as to what I’m looking at? Index of /csv-reports/images. I gather from this fedora hit about 500K installs before something happened in F40 and we stopped counting?

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Here’s some fun and wild maths for a Friday evening. :nerd_face: Feel free to ignore everything in this post, even though it’s based on actual data with added wild speculation on top :D.

It's madness below here

I just dug up some historical data (I am a data packrat) . I can’t reveal the source, sorry. In 2019, a very, very popular generic app used by nerds and normal people alike had this proportion of installs:

Distribution Percentage
Ubuntu 18.04.2 LTS 27.2%
Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS 10.1%
Linux Mint 19.1 5.6%
Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS 5.5%
Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS ~4.7%
Linux Mint 18.3 ~4.2%
Ubuntu 19.04 ~3.8%
Linux Mint 19 ~3.3%
Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch) ~2.8%
Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS ~2.3%
Ubuntu 18.10 ~2.0%
Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS ~1.8%
Ubuntu 16.04.4 LTS ~1.5%
Arch Linux ~1.5%
Manjaro Linux ~1.2%
Ubuntu 14.04.6 LTS ~1.0%
Remaining distributions ~22.5%

Note: All percentages after the first four are approximations based on visual interpretation of a graph, not raw data. The remaining distributions (adding up to roughly 22.5%) each represent less than 1% of the total and include various versions of Fedora, elementary OS, Deepin, openSUSE, other Ubuntu versions, KDE neon, Gentoo, and Kali Linux.

Back then I had access to some other data sources, and was able to corroborate some of this. The hand-wavy numbers are in the right ball-park, based on the data I saw.

Let’s do some aggregation:

First, we can aggregate the distributions by their base family:

Distribution Family Total Percentage Breakdown
Ubuntu ~56.9% 18.04.2 LTS (27.2%), 16.04.6 LTS (10.1%), 18.04.1 LTS (5.5%), 16.04.5 LTS (4.7%), 19.04 (3.8%), 18.10 (2.0%), 16.04.3 LTS (1.8%), 16.04.4 LTS (1.5%), 14.04.6 LTS (1.0%)
Linux Mint ~13.1% 19.1 (5.6%), 18.3 (4.2%), 19 (3.3%)
Debian ~4.3% Debian 9 Stretch (2.8%), Debian 8 Jessie + Debian 10 Buster (~1.5%)
Arch-based ~2.7% Arch Linux (1.5%), Manjaro (1.2%)
Fedora ~2.5% Various Workstation Editions (27-30)
elementary OS ~1.8% elementary OS 5.0 Juno + 0.4.1 Loki
openSUSE ~1.5% Leap + Tumbleweed versions
Other ~17.2% Including KDE neon, Gentoo, Kali, Deepin, CentOS, and others

Some interesting observations:

  1. Ubuntu and its direct derivatives (including Mint) account for about 70% of all installations
  2. Debian and Debian-based distributions (including Ubuntu and its derivatives) represent over 74% of all installations
  3. Rolling release distributions (like Arch, Manjaro) make up a relatively small percentage
  4. The “Other” category shows significant fragmentation in the Linux ecosystem, with many distributions having small but dedicated user bases

Now for the madness. Let’s take the graph @nikodunk just posted, and use the (estimated) numbers for contemporary Fedora releases, and wildly extrapolate to the other percentages.

  1. Looking at Fedora in the graph around May 2019:
  • Fedora 29/30 appears to be around 300K unique IPs
  • From our previous analysis, Fedora represented ~2.5% of the total Linux distribution share
  1. If we use this as a reference point, we can attempt to approximate total numbers:
  • If 300K = 2.5%, then 100% would be approximately 12 million unique IPs

Let’s wildly plug numbers in and calculate the approximate numbers for the major distributions based on our previous percentages:

Distribution Percentage Estimated Unique IPs
Ubuntu (all versions) 56.9% ~6.8M
Linux Mint 13.1% ~1.6M
Debian 4.3% ~520K
Arch-based 2.7% ~320K
Fedora 2.5% ~300K (our reference point)
elementary OS 1.8% ~220K
openSUSE 1.5% ~180K
Other 17.2% ~2.1M

However, I should note several important caveats:

  1. The Fedora numbers are from Yum unique IPs, which might not directly correlate with actual installations
  2. Different distributions might have different reporting mechanisms
  3. Some users might disable reporting
  4. IP addresses can change, leading to overcounting
  5. NAT and shared IPs can lead to undercounting

Now let’s dial the madness up to 11, and extrapolate forward all distros, if they grew at the same rate as the Fedora graph (of real yum data) shows.

Looking at the graph around early 2024 (the end of the data), it appears Fedora’s numbers have increased to approximately 450-500K unique IPs, representing roughly a 50-67% increase from the 300K in 2019.

Using the higher estimate (500K = 67% increase) and maintaining the same proportions, here’s what we’d get:

Distribution 2019 Est. 2024 Est. (+67%)
Ubuntu (all versions) ~6.8M ~11.4M
Linux Mint ~1.6M ~2.7M
Debian ~520K ~870K
Arch-based ~320K ~535K
Fedora ~300K ~500K (reference point)
elementary OS ~220K ~367K
openSUSE ~180K ~300K
Other ~2.1M ~3.5M
Total ~12M ~20M

However, this comes with several important caveats:

  1. Different distributions likely have different growth rates
  2. The rise of containers, cloud computing, and WSL might affect these numbers differently across distributions
  3. The methodology of counting unique IPs might have changed over time
  4. Some distributions might have gained or lost relative market share
  5. None of this takes into account new distros (such as Pop_OS! and other popular Arch builds)

It’s fun, and very wild speculation. But still better than distrowatch numbers. :smiley:

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How FUN! Great speculation and reasoning - thank you for sharing and all the work collating this! :smiley:

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