those numbers are nonexistent for most distribution, since forcing telemetry isn't really a cool move in the free software world
The number of IPs hitting their software repos can be a decent way of estimating active users. Also, ISO downloads and so on.
There’s also the check connectivity to Internet ping that network manager does. Arch Linux defaults to Arch’s servers, etc.
Local repo mirrors are pretty standard in the enterprise world are they not?
Any company invested enough to host a local mirror will not give a blank install of Ubuntu to their employees though.
You can argue that other distros are popular as well, but when it comes to the "I've heard of this Linux thing, let's try it out" crowd Ubuntu is the goto option, no doubt about it. And the impact on this crowd is exactly what is discussed in the article.
Hundreds of thousands of people using eg. Debian plus a software profile plus a sources.list file with an intranet address don't count as using Debian?
I'm not arguing about the contents of the article, I'm discussing specifically the relevance of generating usage statistics based on IP hits and ISO downloads.
For the purpose of the article: no they don't.
If you want to discuss telemetry or how to measure popularity of Linux Distros, please submit and link me an appropriate post, I'll be happy to discuss it there. But it simply adds nothing to the discussion here.
those numbers are nonexistent for most distribution, since forcing telemetry isn't really a cool move in the free software world
The number of IPs hitting their software repos can be a decent way of estimating active users. Also, ISO downloads and so on.
There’s also the check connectivity to Internet ping that network manager does. Arch Linux defaults to Arch’s servers, etc.
Local repo mirrors are pretty standard in the enterprise world are they not?
Any company invested enough to host a local mirror will not give a blank install of Ubuntu to their employees though.
You can argue that other distros are popular as well, but when it comes to the "I've heard of this Linux thing, let's try it out" crowd Ubuntu is the goto option, no doubt about it. And the impact on this crowd is exactly what is discussed in the article.
Hundreds of thousands of people using eg. Debian plus a software profile plus a sources.list file with an intranet address don't count as using Debian?
I'm not arguing about the contents of the article, I'm discussing specifically the relevance of generating usage statistics based on IP hits and ISO downloads.
For the purpose of the article: no they don't.
If you want to discuss telemetry or how to measure popularity of Linux Distros, please submit and link me an appropriate post, I'll be happy to discuss it there. But it simply adds nothing to the discussion here.