When installing Ubuntu 18.04, Canonical's installer will offer to send some statistics to them. Canonical have now released some of this. One thing to note, is that this data does not include Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core, cloud images or and any other Ubuntu derivatives that don't include the report in their own installer.
They've had some good results from it, with 66% of people sending them their data although they don't mention how many results this is actually from. It's a nice start, but I think they really need to do some separation of physical and virtual machines, since it seems they're merged together which will skew a bunch of the data I would imagine. If you're interested in seeing what data is sent on Ubuntu, it can be found in "/.cache/ubuntu-report/".
Their data shows that 98% of people are using the 64bit version on Ubuntu, which lines up with our own user survey. On top of that, a desktop resolution of 1920x1080 remains the most popular at 28% with 1366x768 being the next highest at 25%. What's interesting, is that higher resolutions have a pretty low use with 2560x1440 and 3840x2160 both only seeing 1% although that could easily be watered down due to virtual machines.
One thing that's quite odd is the CPU section under the "Number of CPUs" heading, which claims 27% of people have 4-6 CPUs. Something about that doesn't seem right. 27% of people have at least 4 CPUs in the computer they're installing Ubuntu on? I think they need to improve the wording on this quite a bit just so it's crystal clear on exactly what the statistic represents. Likely CPU cores. I've let them know about it to take a look.
Take a look here at their full statistics page if you're interested.
Article edited and re-posted due to a mess up with the text causing some confusion, mostly my own—apologies.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
ThePierrasse Oct 18, 2018
Last edited by ThePierrasse on 18 October 2018 at 7:59 pm UTC
Quoting: red193To the linux kernel, a multicore CPU is effectively multiple CPUs and is treated as such. Running lscpu on any distro will result in showing CPU(s):x where x is the number of what people would traditionally call cores. This is because a core is effectively it's own CPU sharing cache with other cores in the same way multiple sockets would share memory, and can act independently.We can talk about the technical details of stuff like that all we want, they likely just mean cores and they need to make it clear. Already spoken to them about this :)
Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: red193To the linux kernel, a multicore CPU is effectively multiple CPUs and is treated as such. Running lscpu on any distro will result in showing CPU(s):x where x is the number of what people would traditionally call cores. This is because a core is effectively it's own CPU sharing cache with other cores in the same way multiple sockets would share memory, and can act independently.We can talk about the technical details of stuff like that all we want, they likely just mean cores and they need to make it clear. Already spoken to them about this :)
The usage is correct, that's all I'm saying.
Quoting: red193I get what you're saying, but what I'm saying is this just isn't the "normal" way to describe it. As I said, I already spoke to them about this and from what they said it was supposed to say cores but that got lost somewhere so they will be updating it.Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: red193To the linux kernel, a multicore CPU is effectively multiple CPUs and is treated as such. Running lscpu on any distro will result in showing CPU(s):x where x is the number of what people would traditionally call cores. This is because a core is effectively it's own CPU sharing cache with other cores in the same way multiple sockets would share memory, and can act independently.We can talk about the technical details of stuff like that all we want, they likely just mean cores and they need to make it clear. Already spoken to them about this :)
The usage is correct, that's all I'm saying.
Quoting: GuestQuoting: red193Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: red193To the linux kernel, a multicore CPU is effectively multiple CPUs and is treated as such. Running lscpu on any distro will result in showing CPU(s):x where x is the number of what people would traditionally call cores. This is because a core is effectively it's own CPU sharing cache with other cores in the same way multiple sockets would share memory, and can act independently.We can talk about the technical details of stuff like that all we want, they likely just mean cores and they need to make it clear. Already spoken to them about this :)
The usage is correct, that's all I'm saying.
As someone who deals with hardware designs where the difference between core and cpu matter an awful lot, and knowing quite a few people dealing with server racks, the distinction between core and cpu is an important one to some people. The technical details probably don't matter much to people here, but it's something that Canonical (considering they have builds for servers) should definitely make clearer I think.
Of course, there are details from each section that would benefit from more detail depending on who you ask anyway, and they can't show it all on what is essentially a PR web page.
The distinction is already made, except using the terminology of CPU/socket instead of core/CPU.
Quoting: red193The distinction is already made, except using the terminology of CPU/socket instead of core/CPU.Except it isn't. Did you even read the linked statistics page? "Number of CPUs" - show me where there's any kind of distinction in that.
I always find this sort of thing amusing, how a few people seem to just latch onto something so specific like this rather than talk about the actual topic at hand ;)
Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: red193The distinction is already made, except using the terminology of CPU/socket instead of core/CPU.Except it isn't. Did you even read the linked statistics page? "Number of CPUs" - show me where there's any kind of distinction in that.
I always find this sort of thing amusing, how a few people seem to just latch onto something so specific like this rather than talk about the actual topic at hand ;)
Because what is life other than wasting time on meaningless things? I didn't mean the distinction was mentioned on the page, but rather that's the terminology used in that segment (specifically in the linux kernel development space). Just because it's different doesn't make it incorrect.
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