The Linux community shrunk by a whopping 92,000 users today as the organisation that keeps track of users of the operating system did a bit of housekeeping.

But geeks aren't abandoning their anoraks left, right and centre. Rather, the Linux Counter Project, which has been tracking Linux users for over seven years, has dropped dead entries from its record of over 200,000 registered users.

After this morning's clean out of accounts that hadn't been accessed for two years, the number of users registered on the Linux Counter dropped to 122,981, while the number of machines fell to 90,490.

Unsurprisingly the most densely populated Linux country is the US, boasting 55,636 users, while the Wallis and Futuna Islands and Turkmenistan are on equal footing with the lowest density of users, boasting only one each.

However, statistics show that the most penguin friendly city in the world is Copenhagen, with 904 registered users. But Sievi in Finland, and Haapsalu in Estonia, seem to shun the operating system and have only one user in each city.

Linux Counter said that Red Hat is the most popular distribution, hogging a sizeable 29 per cent of the user base, followed closely by Debian with 19 per cent. SuSE was the least used mainstream Linux distribution.

More than 60 per cent of installations were on workstations, suggesting that most registered users are either running Linux at home, or on the desktop at work. Other popular uses were in schools (41 per cent) or as a programming platform (42 per cent). Only 32 per cent of installations were as web servers.

Although 92,000 registrations were knocked off the counter today, resulting in a sharply diving red line on the user graph, users keen to bump up the figures can still log in and get their data put back on line (see link above).

Although the statistics are based on voluntary registration, the Linux Counter also makes an educated guess that there are probably more than 18 million penguin fanatics currently using Linux today.