An Estimate on the Total Number of Xfce Users
Recently, my wife asked me how many people in total actually use the software I develop in my free time (mostly thunar).
I never thought about that question, so I just made a wild guess. Based on the number of people I believed are active on the Xfce Matrix / IRC channels, I answered: "... maybe between 2000 and 10.000 people do use Xfce".
I know nobody can give exact numbers. It's all about package downloads, OS types reported by browsers, and other more or less biased data harvesting.
However, the question nagged me, so I searched for some more reliable numbers.
Ubuntu came to my mind. Since it collects some user-data, I thought it might be a good starting point for my investigation.
Via web search, I found out that there seem to be about 40 Million Ubuntu users.
According to this post, 15% of them use Xubuntu.