More on relative popularity of Debian by arch
Following Marco's lead with data from Italy, we now have Swedish data from Tollef as well as UK data thanks to Steve. Getting more data should alleviate some of the concerns regarding specific biases as our coverage of users increases, as does our coverage in time as Steve's data covers two months.The next question then is whether the data reveals any pattern, or confirms or denies what we saw so far. The logical step is to compare this across architectures and countries. Following Cleveland and Tufte, we prefer a chart to a table. Below is a dotplot which shows download percentage by architecture, with grouping by country (with code and data for the chart).
This suggests that Sweden and Italy are more alike than different, indicating that maybe neither is all that unique. The UK has many more downloads for what appear to be less used architectures in IT and SE. That is good news inasmuch as it shows that there seem to be some users for just about every architecture. However, it would be nice to get data from maybe one or two more 'big' hosts to corrobate these findings further.
Lastly, some concerns were raised about various biases from local mirrors, web caches, multiple installs and what have you. These are fair questions as they all affect how Debian is obtained, installed and updated. But for as long as we don't know why that should be different across architectures, this is not a concern for the question at hand. The concerns reflect uncertaintly about the absolute level of users, but barring additonal information (or hypotheses), they do not affect the distribution of users across architectures which is what this exercise is about in the first place.
