Hi,
Thanks for all the very useful input!
In sifting through the input and in my own diggings around, I think the most interesting find is from the Debian "Popularity Contest" site (popcon.debian.org), pointed out to me by Colin Marquardt. A little filtering of the data shows that about 7% of Debian users who participate in the automatic poll (more than 12000 users) regularly use Inkscape. This number more than doubled in the past year and shows an exponential growth. The number of users who have Inkscape installed also is increasing rapidly, up to 30%. For comparison, Gimp usage is at about 20% and is relatively flat. xfig usage has dropped to less than 5%. A PNG graph of Inkscape's growth is attached.
See also: http://people.debian.org/~igloo/popcon-graphs/index.php?packages=inkscape (Turn on percentage to normalize the graph to the number of overall users.
Tav
