Using XMPP4R, I did some stats about Jabber clients usage on the Apinc Jabber server, which hosts im.apinc.org, jabber.fr, and many more using virtual hosting. I already did similar stats in March 2006 and September 2005.
The poll was done by sending jabber:iq:version to online users, around 1:00 PM (french local time, most of the users are french). 1343 clients were pinged, and 1315 answered, which is better than last year (1145 answers). Of the 1145 jids that answered last year, 368 were also part of the poll this year (I don’t know if this is good, or not enough).
Systems:
- GNU/Linux: 43% (2006: 38% ; 2005: 34%)
- Windows: 35% (2006: 37% ; 2005: 34%)
- Mac OS: 16% (2006: 18% ; 2005: 23%)
- Unknown: 4 (2006: 5% ; 2005: 6%)
- Others: 0% (12 clients ; 2006: 0% ; 2005: 1%)
Clients:
- Psi: 24% (2006: 28% ; 2005: 28%)
- gaim: 22% (2006: 25% ; 2005: 25%)
- Gajim: 12% (2006: 5% ; 2005: 3%)
- Kopete: 11% (2006: 7% ; 2005: 7%)
- iChatAgent: 9% (2006: 13% ; 2005: 18%)
- libgaim (Adium): 5% (2006: 4% ; 2005: 3%)
- Pandion: 4% (2006: 4% ; 2005: 2%)
- Miranda: 2% (2006: 2% ; 2005: 1%)
- BitlBee: 2%
- neos: 1%
- Unknown client: 0%
- Exodus: 0%
- Imendio Gossip: 0%
- Jabbin: 0%
- Spark IM Client: 0%
- Trillian: 0%
- JBother: 0%
- jabber.el: 0%
- JETI: 0%
- JAJC: 0%
- Class.Jabber.PHP: 0%
- Jabberwocky: 0%
- Tkabber: 0%
- Gush: 0%
(all clients with at least one reply are listed here)
I also did some stats on the Linux distros. With 566 Linux users, one can consider that statistically signifiant.
- Client answers with the kernel version, not including distribution information: 62%
- Debian: 14%
- Ubuntu: 12%
- Gentoo: 2%
- Unknown distros (not provided by the client): 2%
- Fedora Core: 1%
- Arch Linux: 1%
- Mandriva: 1% (despite the fact that most users are french!)
- Slackware: 0%
(Other distros are below 5 replies)
The Debian/Ubuntu situation is interesting. Debian is not dying, even on the desktop ! The server is hosting jabber.ubuntu-fr.org, so the results are biased towards Ubuntu.
Update: it seems that Psi reports “Debian GNU/Linux (testing/unstable)” even when running on Ubuntu. This is the case for ~5% of linux users.
To server admins: if you are running a large jabber server with jabberd 1.6, it’s easy to give me the right to get the list of online users, so contact me if your are interested in me doing your users stats. It would be interesting to see if users from different servers/countries have different behaviours. I’m not sure if it’s possible with ejabberd and other servers.