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.
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The comments on this article are closed.
appetrosyan Oct 18, 2018
Liam, Thanks for removing the comment explaining what the terminology means. I really appreciate it when I don't even know whom I've offended and how.
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Quoting: appetrosyanLiam, Thanks for removing the comment explaining what the terminology means. I really appreciate it when I don't even know whom I've offended and how.The original 5 comments were completely going off the road in regards to what this was about, due to my own confusion and how I wrote it. Hence their removal and the re-posting of this article.
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Quoting: GuestQuoting: red193Quoting: 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.
I'll have to disagree with you because it's not talking about the kernel, but hardware. Even the kernel might schedule differently based on whether an allocated core is on the same CPU or not as something else. I'm not a kernel dev, so I don't know how aware the kernel is in that regard - but I would be very surprised if it wasn't.
More on-topic-ish:
Ideally I would like to see more depth from the stats. Physical disk storage for example: I do wonder on physical disk count, if raid is used, ssd vs hdd, that sort of thing. On a gaming angle, the more information developers have about what hardware people are using, the better development targets can be determined.
Except the only method of probing the information about the hardware through the OS is the kernel, and that terminology has a basis in the hardware anyway. The man page of lscpu lists the topology in order as CPU, Core, Socket, and then a bunch of stuff relating to NUMA nodes. The author section of the man page lists two guys from Red Hat and another from IBM. If they don't know what they are talking about, who does?
Last edited by red193 on 18 October 2018 at 10:54 pm UTC
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Since it's made me genuinely very curious on the whole CPU wording thing and what people think it means, I did a little Twitter poll: https://twitter.com/thenaughtysquid/status/1053053701211017217
Also, red193, I do appreciate your comments (same as anyone else). I've gone and schooled myself a bit to read up on any differences between multi-core stuff and multiple sockets. Turns out, I really did know very little, so hey something interesting came about from this. Gotta own up to our shortcomings right?
Anyway, the poll is already quite interesting with the replies and the votes on it, I'm clearly not alone in how I felt.
Also, red193, I do appreciate your comments (same as anyone else). I've gone and schooled myself a bit to read up on any differences between multi-core stuff and multiple sockets. Turns out, I really did know very little, so hey something interesting came about from this. Gotta own up to our shortcomings right?
Anyway, the poll is already quite interesting with the replies and the votes on it, I'm clearly not alone in how I felt.
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Comandante Ñoñardo Oct 18, 2018
Quoting: GuestI always love statistics that prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that 1080p and lower resolutions still form the vast majority of desktop pcs and that only a tiny minority uses 1440p and 4k. Not only Ubuntu's but Steam's statistics are similar.I agree..
Sure, 4K will be an standard in 10 years, but today 1920x1080 is the queen, followed by 1366x768. Developers and game reviewers must take note on that..
Quoting: GuestIt is especially interesting considering that anywhere you look online when gpus are discussed, 99% of the comments speak about the 1080ti and 2080ti and nothing else, that AMD has no viable/competitive product to buy, that they need a 1080ti competitor. I even recall some people on Phoronix forums telling me the same stuff, that they don't consider amd gpus as viable despite the opensource drivers cause they absolutely need 1080ti performance on Linux...I think that the gamers obsessed with the 4K, 1080ti and the 2080ti are trying to compensate something...You know..something physical.
A true game reviewer should do the game benchmarks and reviews using a wide variety of hardware .. true reachable hardware and not just the overpriced top cards supplied by an sponsor...
I don't trust in official game requirements because, sometimes, publishers are sponsored by a GPU brand..
I think the same about the CPU side.
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Quoting: Comandante ÑoñardoWell, my testing is 99% on 1080p for GOL.Quoting: GuestI always love statistics that prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that 1080p and lower resolutions still form the vast majority of desktop pcs and that only a tiny minority uses 1440p and 4k. Not only Ubuntu's but Steam's statistics are similar.I agree..
Sure, 4K will be an standard in 10 years, but today 1920x1080 is the queen, followed by 1366x768. Developers and game reviewers must take note on that..
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Even Microsoft just calls every virtual cpu thread(if you have simultaneous multi threading(hyperthreading is what Intel calls it), there is more than one per core. While on amd64 it's usually double, newer POWER and MIPS architectures have quadruple SMT) a CPU.
It's just something you learn the first time you run lscpu(?) or open Hardware manager
It's just something you learn the first time you run lscpu(?) or open Hardware manager
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Will there be a new round of stats for GOL post? There wasn't one in a while.
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It's awesome having this bundle of stats. I can see it helping a lot of folks :) I think it's also re-affirming to see a lot of it matching of with the GoL stats! :)
As far as the CPU stuff goes, I understand the curiosity, but there's really effectively no difference between having two single core CPUs and a single dual core CPU. Minus a ever so slight performance hit if they need to communicate with each other (which would be inefficient code) they're programming-wise the same. Plus, distinguishing between the two in the survey is meaningless except for helping one's curiosity. How many CPU dies are in the machine doesn't really help to know how much they need to worry about multi-threading. You program for two quad core CPUs the same way as you program a single 8 core CPU.
In other words, having a CPU core count is extremely important. Having a CPU die count is pretty much useless.
If they add it great, but don't be disappointed if they don't :)
Edit: To reinforce my point, here are the docs from Microsoft, Unity, and Godot engine with their description of what it does. The one thing you won't find in the docs, is how many CPU dies there are, because developers simply don't care.
Microsoft
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.environment.processorcount
Gets the number of processors on the current machine.
Godot
http://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/classes/class_os.html#class-os-get-processor-count
Returns the number of cores available in the host machine.
Unity
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/SystemInfo-processorCount.html
Number of processors present (Read Only).
Last edited by Natedawg on 19 October 2018 at 1:54 am UTC
As far as the CPU stuff goes, I understand the curiosity, but there's really effectively no difference between having two single core CPUs and a single dual core CPU. Minus a ever so slight performance hit if they need to communicate with each other (which would be inefficient code) they're programming-wise the same. Plus, distinguishing between the two in the survey is meaningless except for helping one's curiosity. How many CPU dies are in the machine doesn't really help to know how much they need to worry about multi-threading. You program for two quad core CPUs the same way as you program a single 8 core CPU.
In other words, having a CPU core count is extremely important. Having a CPU die count is pretty much useless.
If they add it great, but don't be disappointed if they don't :)
Edit: To reinforce my point, here are the docs from Microsoft, Unity, and Godot engine with their description of what it does. The one thing you won't find in the docs, is how many CPU dies there are, because developers simply don't care.
Microsoft
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.environment.processorcount
Gets the number of processors on the current machine.
Godot
http://docs.godotengine.org/en/3.0/classes/class_os.html#class-os-get-processor-count
Returns the number of cores available in the host machine.
Unity
https://docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/SystemInfo-processorCount.html
Number of processors present (Read Only).
Last edited by Natedawg on 19 October 2018 at 1:54 am UTC
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