The thing is, here in the FOSS world we have absolutely no way of knowing how many people might be using a particular distro. There are no licenses to sign, and companies using Linux aren’t required to take inventory to make sure they’re staying in compliance. So while Microsoft and Apple can give us a pretty accurate figure for the number of times their operating systems have been legally installed in the last few months or so, we can’t. Unlike Windows, Linux doesn’t require users to sign draconian EULAs. Unlike Apple, our distros aren’t performing all of the installs themselves on machines they manufacture.