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