Little old stat but still … Distrowatch Weekly Newsletter noted back in it’s 13th August 2007 issue that Asia is fast catching up with the readership of Distrowatch.com website, which roughly translates to a keen interest in keeping in touch with, and downloading, various GNU/Linux and BSD distributions. The following table should shed some light on this development:
| Rank | Country/Territory | 2006 | 2007 | % Change |
| 1 | Japan (JP) |
328,336 | 347,879 | +6.0% |
| 2 | China (CN) |
151,915 | 209,203 | +37.7% |
| 3 | India (IN) |
80,889 | 137,702 | +70.2% |
| 4 | Indonesia (ID) |
72,668 | 112,998 | +55.5% |
| 5 | Turkey (TR) |
67,465 | 101,789 | +50.9% |
Number of visits from Japan were very high even in 2006 but the increase in visits from India over just seven months since then is remarkable. The above four countries(other than Japan) have registered around 50% increase in the same period, India leading the table by a big margin. This is what Distrowatch has to say about it:
“While Japan has been maintaining the top position since the beginning of this web site, it’s interesting to note the dramatic growth of readership in the two most populous countries in the world – China and India. With a handful of exceptions, the number of readers visiting DistroWatch has been on the increase and a total number of Asian-based readers have grown by more than 20% since a year ago.”
Source – Distrowatch