Approximately how many are we ?

[Drygar_2016]

Hey,

Does anybody know approximately how many users are there worldwide who use Linux Mint ?

I just noticed the main page of >> https://community.linuxmint.com/
It says "Users by edition" ? What is this ? Users part of the Community or users of LM ?
If the second, they are way less than 10 000 users which is way too small, in my opinion.

Thanks in advance for anybody who knows.

[Pjotr]

Impossible to tell. Those numbers are nonsense, by the way. Far too low.

[thx-1138]

...this reminded of this Arch thread that i had stumbled upon at some point.
Arch's forums have approx 93000 members...and the Reddit page around 90000.
LM forums have 115000 members, the FB page has 132000 likes, and the Reddit page 28000 followers.
Ubuntu, 2.1 millions in the forums, 1.32 million on FB...116000 on Reddit.

For what is worth it however, most of the relatively reputable online stats,
estimate overall Linux usage at roughly 2.3%...
Users with internet access supposedly are roughly 4.4 billion currently...so, with the above in mind,
i assume someone can make some very rough wild guesses that aren't totally 'out there'...
as the Arch forums' moderator above correctly estimated: "There are at least 10."

I mean, merely looking at the daily number of births & deaths worldwide...it's all in vein after all...

[smurphos]

Hey,

Does anybody know approximately how many users are there worldwide who use Linux Mint ?

I just noticed the main page of >> https://community.linuxmint.com/
It says "Users by edition" ? What is this ? Users part of the Community or users of LM ?
If the second, they are way less than 10 000 users which is way too small, in my opinion.

It's users registered to the community site and based on what those registered say they are using.

A better idea of numbers and proportions could potentially be derived by reviewing the Linux Mint torrent site's scrape stats which at least give total completed torrent downloads for each iso since release. Now 1 torrent download doesn't equate to one user so is likely an overestimate in that regard, and it ignores non-torrent downloads from the mirrors so is likely an underestimate in that regard but it still can give a rough idea of popularity of each release and the likely magnitude of the user base.

At time of writing for 19.1 and LMDE3 only...

linuxmint-19.1-cinnamon-64bit.iso - 154196 downloads
linuxmint-19.1-mate-64bit.iso - 39607 downloads
linuxmint-19.1-xfce-64bit.iso - 38409 downloads
lmde-3-201808-cinnamon-64bit.iso - 8096 downloads

linuxmint-19.1-cinnamon-32bit.iso - 21935 downloads
linuxmint-19.1-mate-32bit.iso - 10011 downloads
linuxmint-19.1-xfce-32bit.iso - 13477 downloads
lmde-3-201808-cinnamon-32bit.iso -1855 downloads

Source - https://torrents.linuxmint.com/scrape.php

[lsemmens]

There's at least one user of Mint that I know of. Given that I have at least 5 computers, all running mint, I can confirm 5 users.

[gm10]

More stats:

steam_linux_2019_05.png (13.01 KiB) Viewed 6511 times

[thx-1138]

There's at least one user of Mint that I know of. Given that I have at least 5 computers, all running mint, I can confirm 5 users.

...5 users courtesy of lsemmens + plus me, Drygar_2016, Pjotr, smurphos & gm10...so, yeap, that indeed verifies:

...as the Arch forums' moderator above correctly estimated: "There are at least 10."

[karlchen]

I just noticed the main page of >> https://community.linuxmint.com/
It says "Users by edition" ? What is this ? Users part of the Community or users of LM ?

The community webpage will only count users, who have registered on the community webpage.
Not every registered community user will have entered which Mint edition(s) they are using.
So the count of Mint users to be found on the community webpage is of little value, to phrase it politely.

[JosephM]

I recently heard a Canonical employee talking about this. They seem to have some idea because of the number of Mint machines that hit their repos. He put the number at around a half a million.

[gm10]

I recently heard a Canonical employee talking about this. They seem to have some idea because of the number of Mint machines that hit their repos. He put the number at around a half a million.

Is there a public source? Also did they share their own numbers?

[JosephM]

I do believe Alan Pope talks about it here a ways into the discussion. This isn't the first time I've heard him talk about something like this and give similar numbers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEED1bU5Id4

[gm10]

I do believe Alan Pope talks about it here a ways into the discussion. This isn't the first time I've heard him talk about something like this and give similar numbers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEED1bU5Id4

Cheers, here's there timestamp for the half a million comment (thank you youtube for auto-captions, just full-text searched them ):
https://youtu.be/KEED1bU5Id4?t=5706

He doesn't offer any detail at all unfortunately, maybe that's elsewhere, it's a long stream.

[JosephM]

It isn't the first time I've heard him bring up numbers like this in a podcast or interview. Have heard him talk about them for the Ubuntu based ElementaryOS as well so I'm assuming there is something to them.

[gm10]

It isn't the first time I've heard him bring up numbers like this in a podcast or interview. Have heard him talk about them for the Ubuntu based ElementaryOS as well so I'm assuming there is something to them.

Oh for sure, they'll have the numbers, at least for online installations. I'm not sure how well they can fingerprint from Mint defaults hitting up their repos, NTP server and the connectivity check host though. But at least they know the total number of Ubuntu-based installations for sure.

I browsed through the auto-captions some more, here's the better (raw) quote:

they've built up they have somewhere in the region of 400,000 users Linux men total and that's that's not to be sniffed at like you've got a bun to then Alex Mint then basically everyone else no other district comes close to Linux Mint numbers at all so they're doing something right they're really doing something right if they can if they can sustain that core base of 400,000 or so users who are some of which are donating money to keep the thing going so long as Clem can keep his mind focused on keeping that distro keeping that ship tight and running in the right direction I think that we find I think the media side of it the article was stupid

If you prefer the video over the mangled captions, it's at this timestamp:
https://youtu.be/KEED1bU5Id4?t=5289

[karlchen]

I recently heard a Canonical employee talking about this. They seem to have some idea because of the number of Mint machines that hit their repos. He put the number at around a half a million.

Cool. - 5 of the mentioned Mint systems should be mine, on 3 different machines. (Not that anyone will care too much.)

[JosephM]

I recently heard a Canonical employee talking about this. They seem to have some idea because of the number of Mint machines that hit their repos. He put the number at around a half a million.

Cool. - 5 of the mentioned Mint systems should be mine, on 3 different machines. (Not that anyone will care too much.)

Lol. Yeah, I have 4 installs across 3 machines. We're really adding up.

[gm10]

Lol. Yeah, I have 4 installs across 3 machines. We're really adding up.

Heh. If they're just counting raw installs the numbers will be way off, probably. With test installs in virtual machines and all that we'll end up finding out that there are really only 10k Mint users with multiple installations each.

[JosephM]

Haha. Maybe that number of 10 users is looking more and more realistic all the time

[gm10]

Haha. Maybe that number of 10 users is looking more and more realistic all the time

We do have the dowload numbers from the daily builds PPA, which seem to be nearly 1.1k total users having tried it at some point across all desktops, but then it becomes difficult to judge, e.g. the last cinnamon build from Friday has only 63 downloads (which beats the 12 downloads from my PPA in the same time frame, haha - stats are so much fun).

I should write an article how Mint lost 94% of all alpha testers in the last months.

[JosephM]

I'm really not surprised by that drop in numbers. At first it's a novelty. And then people will start to realize that alpha really means alpha. And sometimes things are broken. I hope that people who do use it, use it how it's meant. For testing. And that they take the time to report the problems that they find. The whole point is for us to be able to get more feedback prior to releases. To see how things hold up under the different workflows and systems that people use. In the long run it could just make Mint releases better for everyone.