The Grumpy Editor's guide to surviving the systemd debate

From reading debian-users archive, I doubt that the expressed voices ( who I would count as less than 100 people ) count as a lot.

Another data point, this old petition, around 235 people who signed it.
https://www.change.org/p/lennart-poettering-stop-writing-...

So we have around 500, maybe 1000 people who seems to complain, and just on lwn, we have at least 90 000 accounts ( provided the id is increased by 1 for every account ).

Canonical announce numbers of users/systems around 12 to 20 millions, Fedora numbers of unique ip are around the same order of magnitude ( 1 to 2 millions ).
RH announced 1 billion of $ of revenue 2 years ago, so you can divide by the price of 1 subscription ( from the website ) after removing the part of jboss/rhev/etc and remove the services/training of the revenue ( from Sec fillings ). Then you will have a idea of the installed base. And while there is maybe not 1 admin per server ( that wouldn't be efficient ), but something like 10 to 100 servers per admin ( per latest industry stats, maybe not up to date nowadays with cloudification of application ).

All of this seems to say that we can safely count gnu/linux users around the million or even more. So even if there was 10 000 of people complaining ( and I frankly do not see anything to back that estimation, but we can be generous ), this would still be only 1% of the most pessimist estimation of the total number of Linux users.

Now, of course, for a individual, 10 000 may count as a lot. But for the whole population, that's still a minority.