Was just wondering if there is any solid data available as to how many people are using ubuntu. I was also interested in the attrition rate with ubuntu users, etc.
It is obviously not possible to provide solid data, since everyone can distribute Ubuntu for free (e.g. via a CD). Canonical (as one distributor) has therefore no way to know the exact number. (As a note: even companies like Microsoft might only know the number of legal owers of their software, but never the number of users).
What you can get are indicators of the number. You can estimate the percentage of Ubuntu users which are online with the default software configuration and multiply that by the number of registered website accesses that identify Ubuntu users, and multiply this by the percentage of those Ubuntu users who might have visited those websites.
Similar ways are applied in most estimates that you can read on somewhere on the internet. Often unique IP addresses are counted on security update repositories, but since I run an ubuntu server on strato, where all updates are always coming from strato servers, Canonical would never be able to include that server in any statistic. Also, since that server never browses on any websites, estimates from statcounter or similar will never track that installation. So again: no way to get to a solid number. Only estimates (and plenty of them)...
(I am very confident to say however, that we will have 200 million users in the next 4 years :-)
