(Previous editions: 2005, 2006, 2007 and march 2008)

Here are my (almost) yearly stats about XMPP/Jabber clients (OK, the last one was 18 months ago).

1250 users were online on the Apinc Jabber server when I ran the poll, and 1192 clients answered. This year, I’ve also used Disco to poll the clients, allowing to detect Telepathy (thanks Sjoerd for the tip!).

Clients:

• Pidgin 43% (2008: 27%)
• Gajim 19% (2008: 20%)
• Psi 9% (2008: 16%)
• Kopete 7% (2008: 14%)
• Adium 5% (2008: 6%)
• BitlBee 2% (2008: <=2%)
• Telepathy 2% (2008 unknown)
• Other clients with less than 2%: iChat, Pandion, Miranda, mcabber, Smack, meebo, Trillian. All other clients had less than 5 users online.

The systems and distributions stats are biased, because some clients don’t disclose that information, or worse, give wrong information (Psi reports running Debian when on Ubuntu).

Systems:

• Unknown 57% (Pidgin doesn’t report the OS) (2008: 36%)
• GNU/Linux 24% (2008: 40%)
• Windows 15% (2008: 17%)
• MacOS 2% (2008: 5%)
• Others 0% (3 FreeBSD, 2 OpenBSD)

Linux distributions:
164 clients reported a Linux distribution (249 last year).

• Ubuntu 44% (2008: 45%)
• Debian 23% (2008: 36%)
• Arch Linux: 9% (2008: 1%)
• Gentoo: 9% (2008: 10%)
• Fedora: 7% (2008: 5%)
• Mandriva: 5% (2008: 3%)
• Slackware: 2% (2008: 1%)

Comments:

• The top 5 clients are the same, in the same order, but Pidgin’s lead is increasing. Gajim stays stable at the second place, while the two Qt-based clients, Psi and Kopete, both lose a lot of market share.
• Apparently the Mac hype is gone, at least for Jabber users. Or it’s just that all Mac users use Pidgin, which doesn’t report the OS.
• Regarding Linux distributions, Arch Linux gained a lot of market share over the last year.