On 21-Apr-03 Ted Harding wrote:

For your amusement during this brief holiday, I offer you the following teaser:

Which country has the highest density (i.e. numbers per million of population) of Linux users?

And, for seconds: Which country is number 2?

(I'll post my answers later. If yours differ from mine, I'd like to know why).

My data source was the "Linux Counter" (admittedly dependent on voluntary registration, therefore potentially very dodgy statistics):

http://counter.li.org/

specifically, its by-country listing:

http://counter.li.org/reports/arearank.php

Triumphantly, at NUMBER ONE:

1 FO Faroe Islands (Føroyar) Users: 52 Popn: 46K Users/million: 1122.16

not so closely followed, at Number Two, by:

2 AQ Antarctica Users: 3 Popn: 4K Users/million: 729.04

Other cases of interest:

3 FI Finland Users: 3128 Popn: 5.2M Users/million: 604.09 (Well, you might expect something like that ... )

27 IE Ireland Users: 626 Popn: 3.8M Users/million: 162.98

35 US United States Of America Users: 28406 Popn: 285.9M Users/million: 99.3

36 GB United Kingdom Users: 5133 Popn: 59.8M Users/million: 85.90 (Interesting that US and UK come out very similar while Ireland is way above with about twice the "density").

183 IQ Iraq Users: 4 Popn: 23.6M Users/million: 0.17 (And who are/were these 4, I wonder?)

191 AF Afghanistan Users: 1 Popn: 22.5M Users/million 0.04 (and who he?)

and FINALLY:

193 CD Democratic Republic of Congo Users: 1 Popn: 52.5M Users/maillion 0.02

You can also go in and find users' names by country (e.g. for the UK at http://counter.li.org/reports/place.php?place=GB ). You may like to poke around in your locality and see if there's anyone you know ...

Note that there are 133979 linux users registered on this site, while it is "guesstimated" on various grounds that there are some 2.5M - 65M users actually out there (i.e. the site captures 0.2% - 5% of users).

So my teaser, and the answers, have value as holiday entertainment but perhaps not much else ...

(And, before those of you who know I'm a statistician enthusiastically jump up & down and suggest I come up with much better data, let me say that for precisely that reason I have no intention of getting tangled with it ... ).

Best wishes to all, Ted.

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