How Many of Us Are There?

Tonight, on the WFTL Linux Show http://flash9.ustream.tv:18881/broadcast/247959/247959_1220427291891.flv Marcel and I were talking about the number of Linux users that were out there. A prediction of 20% for Linux in 2008 was a bit high in my estimation because I saw another website that placed us around 2% http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php. Of course that 2% number is not reliable either, for instance, even though the sample is as large as 14,052 sites registering unique visits, there are some questions that come to mind. Do all of the sites accept all browsers or even recognize all of them? Are any of the websites connected to a pool of computers that only run Windows? Is this sample from around the world or just the United States? Marcel is right, the Linux counter at Linux International is not helpful either. We may never know how many of us are out there. But it is encouraging to see that of the 24 top selling laptops on Amazon 8 were Linux based. There are a lot more of us today than there was when I first installed RedHat 5.0. Percentage of total computers is not that important right now. Whatever percentage of computers we are at, it places us in the millions of computers. All that matters is that in 2008 there were more computers offered for sale and sold with Linux preloaded than ever before. We are moving forward.