Is this supposed to be a cocky joke? I can’t tell. What metric of “most popular” is the author usiing?
Number of active users.
those numbers are nonexistent for most distribution, since forcing telemetry isn’t really a cool move in the free software world
The number of IPs hitting their software repos can be a decent way of estimating active users. Also, ISO downloads and so on.
Local repo mirrors are pretty standard in the enterprise world are they not?