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.
appetrosyan Oct 19, 2018
Quoting: liamdaweQuoting: 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.
Ok, in that case explaining it again: their terminology is perfectly fine, albeit a different convention to what you as a user are used to.
The confusion as red193 had pointed out numerous times, rises because users tend to call the CPU package, the Just CPU. A CPU core is a CPU core, and a thread is a logical Processor, I.e. CPU. So a hexa core with multi threading provides 12 CPUs to the kernel.
That’s it. Since this is a technical statistics overview, I hardly see why they need to conform to our wrong conventions. Or in, fact, how this explanation of “you’re confused because your convention is not the same as theirs” is “off the road”.
Quoting: appetrosyanA CPU core is a CPU core, and a thread is a logical Processor
... which, from a programmers perspective (where the term stems from!) is a crazy misnomer to begin with.
But the true question is Statistics should be presented using RAW DATA (absolute frequency rather than relative: number of computers rather than percentage!!)
How many survey they received? If it's 12 or 2 000 or 200 000, that's not the same picture!
edit: syntax
Last edited by Geppeto35 on 19 October 2018 at 9:12 am UTC
Going by the poll on Twitter that's still going: https://twitter.com/thenaughtysquid/status/1053053701211017217 at time of writing 49% of 294 votes think they mean a separate CPU. Clearly this is something that people are split on.
I really do wonder, if I literally said in the article "27% of people have 4-6 CPUs" without mentioning the wording - how many comments would we get complaining on the other side hmm?
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.
What I hate about statistics is that there's so much truth in the saying, "there's lies, damn lies and statistics". There's too much that we don't know about these numbers to really make any value of the information at all. One thing is what Liam mention in regards to virtual machines running in low resolutions. Another massive factor is where in the world these resolutions are used. Do we find a hjigher percentage of low resolutions (and thus old hardware) in poorer regions of the world? Extremely likely. How many of the <1080 desktops are used for gaming? Etc.
Without that background knowledge this really only tells us... Pretty much nothing.
To me a CPU is a physical thing I can hold in my hands. Using the word CPU to refer to both that and number of threads total seems confusing to me. How can you, using that terminology, distinguish between a situation with multiple separate physical units, and one multicore unit?
So it's both possible and easy to track each individual stats if one wants to. And yes there is a difference between two single threaded CPU:s and one dual core CPU if you are a programmer but that is possible even more beyond the topic of this thread.
The kernel separates all this for good reason and things like the scheduler threats them differently.
Quoting: KristianAm I crazy in thinking that if you wanted to refer to the number of cores you would use the word "cores, if you wanted to refer to the numbers of threads you would use the word" threads" and if you wanted to refer to the number of cpus, you would use the word "cpus".That was my problem and why I mentioned it, but apparently to some of the more technical minded folk using "CPUs" is fine due to how they work, essentially.
To me a CPU is a physical thing I can hold in my hands. Using the word CPU to refer to both that and number of threads total seems confusing to me. How can you, using that terminology, distinguish between a situation with multiple separate physical units, and one multicore unit?
Quoting: ShmerlWill there be a new round of stats for GOL post? There wasn't one in a while.
Maybe Liam is busy incorporating Proton in the stats? :-)
appetrosyan Oct 19, 2018
Quoting: EikeQuoting: appetrosyanA CPU core is a CPU core, and a thread is a logical Processor
... which, from a programmers perspective (where the term stems from!) is a crazy misnomer to begin with.
As in thread the lightweight process. Yep, there’s a lot of misnomers out there.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me