One of the top leaders of Ubuntu project, Dustin Kirkland stated in a open letter to Ubuntu Community that Ubuntu obtained over one billion users in the world.

Phoronix reported previously and indicated that Ubuntu wont be able to obtain 200 million users by the end of 2015. However, the statistics reported by Kirkland showed a large amount of people use Ubuntu with willingness or unwillingness in the world.

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of Ubuntu once estimated it would obtain 200 million users by the end of 2015. This figure concerned the personal PCs or laptops installed the Ubuntu operating system.

The situation made a great change since then. Besides millions of Dell, HP, Lenovo and Asus laptops are installed with Ubuntu operating system, the servers of IBM, Dell, HP, Cisco, Lenovo, Quanta are also pre-installed Ubuntu. Ubuntu is compatible with OpenCompute project.

The problem we concerned is no one could calculate all the Ubuntu users. Ubuntu does not demand each user to register Ubuntu which is different from Apple, Microsoft and Google operating systems.

Dustin Kirkland collected all the public records as he could, including servers, the Ubuntu that deployed in the Cloud, Ubuntu mobiles and the enterprises which used Ubuntu.

The result surprised the public. It turned out there are over one billion users using the Ubuntu operating system in some or other devices. Among its users, most of them are unaware of using Ubuntu operating system.