Alexander Schwinn, who is involved in the development of the Xfce desktop environment and the Thunar file manager, tried to calculate the approximate number of Xfce users. Having assessed the popularity of the main Linux distributions, it was concluded that approximately 14 million users use Xfce. The following assumptions were used in the calculation:
- The number of all Linux users is estimated at 120 million.
- Approximately 33% of Linux users use Ubuntu or distributions based on it on their PCs. Thus, the total number of Ubuntu users is 40 million (nine years ago, according to Canonical there were 20 million users). According to the survey, approximately 15% of Ubuntu users install Xubuntu, 15% of 40 million = 6 million Xubuntu users.
- If we assume that 10% of non-Ubuntu distro users use Xfce, that's another 8 million users (10% of 80 million).
- There are approximately 6000 Xfce developer accounts registered on gitlab.xfce.org, i.e. every 2000th user is registered on gitlab.xfce.org.
Source: opennet.ru