Guest post by Smolt is a opt-in hardware profiler developed by Fedora Project and now adopted by OpenSUSE and in consideration by Ubuntu as well. While originally developed for understanding commonly used hardware, InternetNews looks at the potential for Smolt to be a tool to count Linux users.
“Smolt could also potentially be a tool for counting the total number of users for a given platform, though that’s not its ideal use case. The Linux Foundation’s Ts’o noted that Smolt probably wound not be that great for counting Linux users as a whole.
Fedora’s Frields agreed, noting that Smolt is probably not as good for counting users as it is for counting proportional use of hardware across the user base.
‘We prefer to count users with other methods, which we document on our wiki openly and transparently,’ Frields said.”
What a waste of time, people still bothers “counting” linux users? Why? What’s the purpose? I can understand that they want to know what hardware is linux people using, but “counting”? I can tell you how many Linux users are there: Not enought of them. And wasting time with things like that is not going to help to solve that issue. (/rant)
Edited 2008-11-08 23:54 UTC
How could you say that counting users is not useful and two rows later say that there aren’t enough user?
To state that there aren’t enough users you have to count it before.
So, your post is inconsistent.
Because linux isn’t a company,per se, it is nearly impossible to know how many users there are. It may not be important to you, but the number of people using a product allows companies to market to linux users, who won’t port their products blindly. I don’t know about you, but i would love Blizzard, for example, to do a population survey of linux users. I want my Diablo 3!