Here are the download statistics for source tarballs and the darcs repository of xmonad, going back to April 2007, when we initially released version 0.1
From April 2007 to March 2009 xmonad core source releases were downloaded more than 35 thousand times. In addition, the darcs repository for xmonad was cloned 24 thousand times, and the xmonad-contrib extensions library was cloned 16 thousand times. In total, xmonad source has been downloaded just over 75 thousand times in 22 months.
By March 2009, the 0.8 release makes up just over 90% of xmonad source downloads. The extensions library also represents 45% of xmonad checkouts now.
The most active source download time was December 2007, prior to xmonad binary packaging in Linux distributions removing the need to build from source. All major distributions currently ship with the current release of xmonad, making source builds unecessary.
These numbers only count xmonad tarball releases on hackage.haskell.org, and the darcs repositories hosted on code.haskell.org. It measures those intending to build xmonad from source, by hand (or with cabal). It does not include any downloads from mirrors, such as those provided by Linux and BSD distributions, and it doesn’t track binary installations via the Linux distributions (particularly Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and Arch).
And, finally, we graph xmonad source installs per month against Debian popcon statistics (to see whether there’s some correlation between the decline in source downloads, and a rise in binary installs from distributions). We directly overlay the popcon statistics from Debian:
