In a recent article entitled "Tendering with Ubuntu," Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, revealed the fact that the world's most popular free operating system now counts over 20 millions of user, as well as that the Ubuntu Linux is adopted by more and more people each day.

According to Canonical, it appears that there's a growing demand on the Ubuntu operating system from both public and private entities worldwide. As such, the company builds new tools that will help these entities get Ubuntu running on their hardware of choice.

"The demand is coming both from enterprise and consumer segments," says Canonical. "However, we see a growing number of education and government entities make the step towards Open Source. [...] Not only does Ubuntu provide a secure OS for desktop, laptops, tablets and servers, but it comes with literally thousands of applications free and paying that can be installed in just a few clicks."

How does Canonical tracks its user base?

While Ubuntu is indeed one of the most used Linux kernel-based operating systems, which now powers desktop and server computers around the world, as well as smartphone and tablet devices, Canonical does not provide any detailed information on how they're tracking user installations.

We do know from a few years ago that there was a package installed in Ubuntu Linux, called canonical-census, which sent an "I am alive" ping to Canonical in order for them to track new installations of the acclaimed operating system.

However, this method did not prove to be relevant at all, simply because of the fact that a single user can install Ubuntu on multiple computers he/she owns, or in virtual machines. The canonical-census package created a lot of controversy back in 2010 and it is no longer installed in Ubuntu.