What is the most accurate estimate for the current number of Ubuntu Desktop users?

Question

It's quite hard to keep track of Ubuntu Desktop users. Ubuntu doesn't have to be licenced like Windows or OS X. It can be shared freely by any means - over the internet, by DVD or CD; and it is.

You could use the number of computers that get updates, but it's likely that Canonical don't track that at all (other than their own download metrics).

I'm interested in the most accurate estimate of Ubuntu users, as of the beginning of 2016 / end of 2015. If you have an estimate, and an explanation of that estimate, please post it!

Answer 1

I'm going to post an amalgamation of statistics of web visitors, from many different sites.

From W3schools, which is likely to be biased in the favor of Linux, we have 5.6%, (34.5 for Windows and 9.9% for Mac). It's likely to be biased because it's a coding site, and lots of coders use linux.

^{The Stack Overflow Developer survey found that of the 20.5% of people that use "Linux", 58% use Ubuntu. That seems a little high - we may be able to get a more accurate number.}

As of June 2015, Wikimedia said that 16.36% of visitors had Linux. This is broken down into 15.01% Android and just 0.48% Ubuntu. Each month they had 1,237,511,100 requests from Ubuntu machines.

StatCounter thinks that 5.38% of people use "Other" as of Dec 2015. This is exclusively Desktop OSes, but that includes all Linux distros.

Web-Stat says that 1.1% of visitors use Linux, and 60.3% use Windows

Statista lumps Ubuntu in with "Linux", and puts it at 4.53%, and here at 4.03%. Finally, Linux is 1.43% here.

Net Marketshare puts "Other" at 5.14%. It also suggests Linux is 1.66 or 1.62%

Piwik put Linux at 6.3% for January 2016.

The average for "Linux" and "Other" is 5.80%. 50% of these users being on Ubuntu and variants seems reasonable, so around 2.9% of internet users are on Ubuntu. Let's call it 2.5%.

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And for the number?

ITU estimated that as of 2015 there were 3.2 billion internet users.

2.5% of 3.2 billion is 80 million Ubuntu users. This is short of the 200 million that was aimed for, but double the 40 million Ubuntu.com mentions as of 18th June 2015.