There are a lot of Wine users and this page attempts to estimate how many there are. It isn't just an academic question because who our users are should shape our priorities. How many are gamers? How many use Wine for a single application? How many care more about improving performance on apps that work already, and how many want more apps to work?
Now that we directly package Wine Downloads for several popular distributions, we can count statistics ourselves (not sure if we do though), but even then, there are many ways to estimate Wine's popularity.
Popcons
Several distributions offer popularity contest (popcon) packages, which report package install statistics for users who have checked the box to "send anonymous package usage data." Besides the raw figures for users with Wine installed, proportions can be estimated by taking a ratio of Wine installations to the installations of a core package for the distro. However, we suspect that popcons miscount actual Wine users for various reasons, such as self-selection bias (are popcon users more or less likely to also use Wine?)
Wine popcon pages for various distributions:
Surveys
Maybe we could setup our own survey through SurveyMonkey to get some new data?
- At the end of 2007, DesktopLinux.com did a survey about the Linux market. In their results, 31.5% of 38,500 reported using Wine to run Windows applications.
Every Linux Unix Computer User is a Potential Wine User
Work backwards from estimates of global computer and OS users (gstatcounter, Garnett, et. al).
Website Traffic as a Proxy Statistic
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While it introduces a layer of indirection, we can treat things like web traffic to WineHQ as a rough estimate of overall interest in the project.
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Use Google Trends