Ubuntu Popularity Contest - 37% Wine install base, 10% who use, and 7% who use regularly

[Scott Ritchie]

The Ubuntu "popcon" package is installed when a user opts to share
anonymous usage data during the install process (or within the synaptic
package manager).

Analyzing the data (http://popcon.ubuntu.com/), we can see the following
for Wine:

wine 215262 installed 41731 use regularly 156710 don't use

compare this with dpkg, which every Ubuntu system has:

dpkg 576989 installed 151098 use regularly 411213 don't use

Doing some division, this means that a rather high 37% of Ubuntu users
have Wine installed, and 10% of all Ubuntu users actually make use of
Wine. 7% use Wine "frequently", however popcon defines that.

Combine this with other estimates of Ubuntu's user base (about 8 million
last I heard), and you have approximately 800,000 Wine users.


This data is slightly biased - it doesn't include most Wubi users who
installed Ubuntu from within Windows, since they aren't given any
installation questions.  I believe, though can't prove, that this means
we are under-representing Wine users, as it seems reasonable that Wubi
installs would be more likely to have Windows applications to run and
thus need Wine.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie

Ubuntu Popularity Contest - 37% Wine install base, 10% who use, and 7% who use regularly

[Clarence "Sparr" Risher]

This statistic also neglects people who install wine from source
without building a package, and I know that is a non-trivial number of
people.

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 10:17 AM, Scott Ritchie <scott(a)open-vote.org> wrote:
> Doing some division, this means that a rather high 37% of Ubuntu users
> have Wine installed, and 10% of all Ubuntu users actually make use of
> Wine. 7% use Wine "frequently", however popcon defines that.
>
> Combine this with other estimates of Ubuntu's user base (about 8 million
> last I heard), and you have approximately 800,000 Wine users.

Ubuntu Popularity Contest - 37% Wine install base, 10% who use, and 7% who use regularly

[Tom Wickline]

On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 10:17 AM, Scott Ritchie <scott(a)open-vote.org> wrote:
> Combine this with other estimates of Ubuntu's user base (about 8 million
> last I heard), and you have approximately 800,000 Wine users.

That would be 800,000 Wine users on Ubuntu right? 10% of the
(8 million) So with all the other Linux distros, BSD's, Mac, Solaris...
The total user base would be closer to 2 million or more?

Tom

Ubuntu Popularity Contest - 37% Wine install base, 10% who use, and 7% who use regularly

[Scott Ritchie]

Tom Wickline wrote:
> On Fri, May 30, 2008 at 10:17 AM, Scott Ritchie <scott(a)open-vote.org> wrote:
> > Combine this with other estimates of Ubuntu's user base (about 8 million
> > last I heard), and you have approximately 800,000 Wine users.
>
> That would be 800,000 Wine users on Ubuntu right? 10% of the
> (8 million) So with all the other Linux distros, BSD's, Mac, Solaris...
> The total user base would be closer to 2 million or more?
>
> Tom

Indeed.  If Ubuntu still represents the ~30% marketshare it had in 2007
when they did the dekstoplinux.com survey
(http://www.desktoplinux.com/cgi-bin/survey/survey.cgi?view=archive&id=081320...),
and if users of other distributions are just as likely to use Wine as
Ubuntu users, then we can estimate there are about 2.6 million Wine
users out there.

Wow!  Of course, this estimate is too high if Ubuntu has grown
substantially in marketshare since the 2007 survey, but even if Ubuntu
has climbed to 40% that's still 2 million Wine users out there.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie