Hi
How many Fedora Silverblue users worldwide?
With a web search I found no stats
This would really suprise me if you would find something. We do not have Datacollegtion implemented in Fedora.
There’s “countme”, and that is in Silverblue too, see: Opt-out countme is anything but easy - #9 by hricky
From that thread there’s a link to some CSV-format data, though it sounds like there isn’t a readymade graphical version anywhere.
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thanks @hricky please also do the same graph for classic Fedora.
thanks @pg-tips Index of /csv-reports/countme
I can’t download the raw data
I am very surprised we are only 6800 users… That is very less
Ah, thanks. I think I’d seen that on the Universal Blue forum before, but with higher Silverblue numbers.
It looks like the current figure (and the figures now quoted for previous dates) are about half of what was being reported before 12 May.
(Edit - looks like the previous numbers were being overcounted: Over (double) counting · Issue #37 · ublue-os/countme · GitHub)
Yes, Timothée Ravier noticed a problem with the countme metrics.
See:
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Thank you. But even 200k is rather little. Debian has massively more users (all Raspberry alone are much more).
I remember that Fedora used to be much more popular. Does this have something to do with the new owner IBM (e.g. CentOS) (the much smaller user base than before)?
I can’t judge whether the current numbers are small or large, and I also don’t know the numbers from the past.
As for the Raspberry Pi, this may be due to the fact that the Raspberry Pi OS is based on Debian Linux, although I don’t know how these installations are counted.
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Careful - make sure you’re comparing apples to apples. These numbers are weekly active users. So actual desktop installs that are being used, which is what counts for convincing software developers to support you. A lot of Linux reports downloads, and/or include server installs.
Current data says it never was, unfortunately. I’d also take a bet that a lot of Linux distributions we think of as “popular” do not actually have as many desktop users as we think they do. See this post from the same thread for an educated guess at cross-distro analytics.
What this data basically shows us is how small unfortunately the desktop Linux world is, which begs the question how to grow 
Here’s a fresh graph with today’s data, if you’re curious.
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This is a bit old but I did want to chime in as a new Linux user.
Bazzite, as you know, is a gaming distro and as you can see it is the most popular of the atomic “family”.
Gaming is maybe part of the reason, but I think it is very much due to the “Batteries included” approach as well. Obviously it isn’t JUST about that, otherwise Aurora and Bluefin would also have more users, but maybe it’s because they have not been picked up by social media as much as Bazzite, which piggy-backs on SteamOS’s popularity.
I was running Fedora next to Bazzite and I kept encountering quirks with Fedora that Bazzite addressed for me and never had to deal with. Example: starting native Steam requires this line in Terminal for the first time, “_GL_CONSTANT_FRAME_HINT=3 steam”. This does not happen with Bazzite, that uses native Steam.
My Plasma kept crashing as well, and I haven’t made any significant changes to my Fedora install, used Flatpak for most of my apps (aside from Steam), and used dnf when Flatpaks weren’t available or were broken.
The Fedora Workstation install outright freezes when you pick your location, if you do it by typing your location in the search bar rather than clicking on the map. Some people then can’t even install Workstation if they are not aware of this.
Initially when a problem came along I just distro hopped. Now that I know more about what each distro offers I decided to try and troubleshoot and stick to something Fedora related.
Mostly what I am saying is that focusing on the user friendliness and out-of-the box approach is probably going to be one of the ways we can grow.
Here is another example.
Third party repos for Nvidia drivers are also a bit of a pain, with the GNOME experience giving more guidance on how to make that work and KDE giving practically none. For example GNOME tells you to enroll your key when booting next and gives you a one time password if you install the Nvidia drivers via the store. It tells you exactly what to expect as well.
Using the store is what MOST newbies will do, rather than using akmod commands in a terminal (right after trying to download Nvidia drivers from their website and discover it’s a mess).
KDE lets you download the drivers via Discover and then tells you nothing.
Maybe most desktop users have Secure Boot turned off and they don’t encounter these issues. But having it supported out of the box (again) is one of the reasons I like Fedora.
Also the message you get to enable third party repos doesn’t say that it includes Nvidia drivers iirc (I might be misremembering). Again that step is done by Universal Blue for the user.
While I understand the philosophy of not bundling proprietary software, giving users easy accessibility to it IS, imo, truer to “It’s YOUR OS” messaging. Maybe list what they could get access to when enabling those repos.
Promoting free and open source software is fantastic, however trying to force it when there are no alternatives with feature parity is still forcing software people might not want. And not providing support for it, or at least a platform that is capable to do so in a user friendly way also falls into that category.
Going back to how small the Linux world is, there is a reason for it, and barriers to entry are the biggest reason. Don’t forget how people give away their data for free to big tech for that convenience without a second thought.
If we could strike the balance of convenience with minimal hoop jumping, I think the Linux space would grow. And I also do recognise that the Linux space as a whole has improved in this.
But also, when I was looking at videos about beginner friendly distros, Fedora almost never comes up. And I have also seen people saying, “I wish I could recommend it to beginners” or “It’s mostly beginner friendly but…”
As a new user myself, I have to agree. And I have some IT knowledge so I eventually just decided to solve some issues rather than hop onto something else.
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