I’ve had a look at our statistics for February, and they look pretty good. More than 120,000 users installed openSUSE 10.3 in February. 124,780 to be exact. That’s a pretty good clip for a release that’s been out since October. Our total install base for 10.3 is at 765,722.

To put it in perspective, we had 137,831 installs in January, and 124,878 installs in December. Obviously, the holidays put a crimp in installs.

It’s difficult to come by hard numbers when you’re talking about Linux installations — particularly when you’re talking about community distros like openSUSE where anyone can download and install openSUSE and distribute install media to friends, family, etc.

Counting downloads doesn’t quite cut it because some people download openSUSE (or any other distro) and never install it. Some people might download it and install it on their computer, their friend’s computers, 100 computers at a school, and so on. We track people who opt-in to be counted after the install — so we probably miss some, but at least we rule out false positives as much as possible that way.

Note also that 10.3 installs don’t show the entire picture — we still show more than 10,000 installs of openSUSE 10.2 in February, too. We don’t know how many users are still running 10.2 or older versions, and we don’t know how many people have chosen not to be counted.

Community Participation

Let’s look at a few other numbers.

• 34,517 packages live in the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) — which is up 2.7% from last month.
• 4,570 users registered with OBS — up 14.3% from last month.
• 34,860 users are subscribed to openSUSE mailing lists — up 1.6% from January.
• We had 10,840,400 page views last month for opensuse.org. That’s up from 10,492,357 in January, and 9,376,785 in December.

I think the Build Service is showing nice, steady growth. Overall, we have a lot of steady growth for openSUSE — but, of course, we always have room for more. If you’re running an older version of openSUSE, I’d definitely encourage you to install 10.3. If you have friends and family that haven’t tried openSUSE yet, now’s a good time to get them on board.

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