In the spirit of data based assessment, I present the following. As background, when I retired almost 5 years ago from a large 40K student university, i was responsible for computer hardware and software usage tracking in the University Library, which was the most visited building on campus. As a director and manager, I set up software usage tracking for public computers, of which we had several hundred. Most of these were general purpose Windows computers, but I was personally responsible for specialty labs such as the “3D Animation Lab” and the “Digital Media Studio”. As things worked out, the 3D Lab was Windows machines as all 3D software ran on Windows, but less than half ran on Mac OS at the time. The Digital Media Studio computers were iMacs, mostly because of user preference for Macs in video and music editing. We only had Linux machines in research labs and server rooms, mostly.
So, for each computer and groups of computers I had commercial software which showed total number of logins, number of unique user logins, time of day of login and day of the week (we were a near 7x24 resource), how many times each title was launched, how long a title was used. Over the course of a year we are talking of millions (I think) of logins by very close to 100% of the number of enrolled students.
In addition to assessment of usage of what we had, we also did a computer based needs assessment survey where users could tell us what they liked, what they disliked and what they needed that we did not have. During most of my time there, we had Lynda.com video tutorial subscription where students could view very high quality tutorials on just about every software package we had (licensing and compliance was a job in itself).
The bottom line is that I could always back up my annual plans and assessments with very reliable and complete data.
So, in the same spirit, I spent a very brief amount of time this afternoon seeing what I could determine and summarize of how people find plugins and modules on VCV Rack.
For my sampling, I chose plugins that I know are heavily used and have been in the library for 3 years. What I found was a high-water mark of 178K unique installs for the most installed plugin. The 2nd most installed plugins had around 80K-100K installs, but the installs ranged from 43K to 100K in this tier.
From this, I would tentatively guess that the number of users was around 180K, assuming that almost everyone downloaded the top runner. But, otherwise it appears that no more than 60K on the average downloaded all of the top tier software, or about 33%. If we include all plugins, the number would probably be that less than 10% download every free module.
My PurrSoftware Meander module is 3 years old and has been downloaded by 14.3K users, or about 8% of users given the above assumptions.
Whereas the above does not say anything about how users found plugins, by and large they had to go seek each plugin they installed.
One could make the case that it would benefit the user to have a ranked list of plugins by installs as a starting point for finding most used. I’m not aware of any way to get such a ranking.
I would surmise that users would used improved search capabilities including more tags or meta-tags as well as capability descriptions;
I may have misunderstood or mistaken this data, so take it with a grain of salt.