Opensource

obviously there are people who downloaded it multiple times

Its been around and on enough different platforms that most people who use it would have lost count of how many times they have downloaded it.

I currently have it installed on 4 android devices (my phone, my tablet, my sons tablet, google TV dongle), 3 windows devices (personal PC, loungeroom PC, work PC), and 1 Xbox. That's 8 installs in current use but if you factor in a history of device replacement and software updates I would easily account for hundreds of downloads.

Edit: they edited their comment to add the 6 billion link, and it's super weird that VLC's website then lists 400 million. Nonetheless, that's not the actual point. They also edited their comment to spitball estimate the number of Linux servers. What they're plainly failing to account for is that 1) Android and an unfathomable amount of embedded devices are Linux, and much more importantly 2) those servers aren't just sitting there doing nothing. They're doing their job of serving to billions of people. Literally everyone directly uses Linux in some capacity unless you're part of some remote tribe. This isn't a debate; it's just a fact that Linux is 1) much more used (see below examples that are critical to modern society that don't even all represent servers), 2) used by more people, 3) more useful, and 4) much more irreplaceable. You have to genuinely have no idea how any modern technological infrastructure works on even the most basic level to think that VLC wins out in usage because of 6 billion downloads. Google alone received 3.5 billion search queries per day in 2024. Linux absolutely trounces VLC's usage by several orders of magnitude, and its usage is absolutely critical to modern society. If you're thinking exclusively of the Linux desktop and excluding things like embedded systems, servers, Android, etc., you don't know what Linux is.

• Their own website's count shows 400 million downloads if this were even a meaningful metric for anything (it isn't).
• Even accounting for duplicates (e.g. I have VLC on my Windows partition which hasn't ever been used even a single time; it exists solely "just in case"), downloads as a metric doesn't even remotely correspond to how much use has been gotten out of it. That is, treating "user" as a binary thing for the importance of a piece of software is ridiculous unto itself. One clearly sees much, much more usage than the other by orders of magnitude. Maybe every week I'll use VLC (and that's clearly above average), but almost every computerized aspect of my life and yours is attached to Linux in some way.
• If VLC disappeared out of existence today, that would really suck, but functionally it isn't crucial, and the gaps would quickly be filled with other products (some worse like Windows' built-in; some like mpv which actually has higher compatibility).
• If Linux disappeared out of existence today, the global economy would collapse, billions would lose access to their computers (Android, Linux desktop, and ChromeOS), the Internet and telecomms in general would practically vanish (and even if it didn't, your router wouldn't work to access the Internet anyway), almost any "smart device" in your home like TVs and appliances would stop working, modern cars, planes, traffic control, and much of public transit would stop working, the energy grid would probably go offline, tons of kiosks and signs would stop working, I guess game consoles would be fine since PS and Switch run BSD while Xbox's is MinWin-based, a lot of people with pacemakers would drop dead, critical military systems would stop working, and generally the world would be plunged into absolute chaos.

I'm sorry, your argument is just patently nonsense. Linux is clearly vastly more important and vastly more used than VLC. In terms of the "greatest piece of FOSS software" as the prior comment discussed, Linux wins on amount of usage, importance of usage, number of users, irreplaceability, and technical complexity – hands-down in every category.

Linux is really only a thing because it ISNT Unix (which macos is). Theyre more related than windows because they're both POSIX compatible, but share essentially no codebase.

A rooted android phone on the other hand is just plain ol linux compiled for ARM, with some custom google jazz. It utilises a lot of Linux components like cgroups and SELinux - commonly found on desktop Linux (especially with containers).

Its not really that important in a broad sense to be honest, but it definitely makes android a Linux distro.