
A first look at Ubuntu desktop metrics - popey
https://blog.ubuntu.com/2018/06/22/a-first-look-at-desktop-metrics
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smacktoward
_> Full HD (1080p) is the most popular screen resolution, followed by 1366 x
768, a common laptop resolution. HiDPI and 4k are not yet commonplace. 4k
screens have been around for a while now but are often priced much higher than
the full HD counterparts so the numbers are not entirely surprising._

There is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here, though: Ubuntu (or rather,
Linux in general) doesn't have a great reputation for consistent, high-quality
HiDPI support, so there's less incentive for its users to buy HiDPI displays.

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josteink
Ubuntu and Gnome handles _doubled_ resolution just fine, much like the retina
MacBooks.

It’s the fractional scaling required for all the other resolutions in between
which is troublesome, and I believe that applies to Macs too.

In this space, I think the only contender doing it _really well_ is Microsoft
Windows.

That said, I prefer Linux. For me having a few warts here and there is an
perfectly acceptable price to pay for having a full computing environment I
can fully trust and adapt to my needs.

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joombaga
> Ubuntu and Gnome handles doubled resolution just fine, much like the retina
> MacBooks.

Not if you have a secondary monitor that doesn't need doubled, e.g. laptop
built-in 4k with a 1920x1080 external. As far as I know this is an X problem.

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om42
It is an X problem, there's (sorta) support for fractional scaling in Wayland

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magicbuzz
It’s also an app issue. I run a 4K monitor on Ubuntu and the majority of apps
take the entire screen when they start or open a window. And in many apps I
have to tweak things so it becomes readable.

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DC-3
Worth noting that these days, Will Cooke is a host on the Late Night Linux
podcast - so if this interests anyone, they might be interested to listen in
as he will surely talk about it on an upcoming episode.

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magicbuzz
I’m not too surprised by the relatively strong showing of 128GB memory. I’ve
worked with scientific datasets where the primary constraint was always
memory. So we would always be chasing motherboards with the most memory
support, and with such a machine around why not have it as your desktop :-)

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Theodores
Reading this makes me nostalgic for 'multiple CPU' PCs. Haven't seen a lot of
them for a long time, but was it 'hyper-threading' or 'multi-core' that killed
the 'multiple CPU' workstation? Having more than one CPU had cool value and
exclusivity - everyone has multicore, whether faked by hyperthreading or not.

I was also surprised by the amount of people choosing automatic login. I
thought there was a downside to that regarding the 'keychain' thing or has
that been solved over the last decade or so?

Also

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kitsunesoba
Dual and quad CPUs used to be defining features of PowerMac towers back in the
PPC days. The competition might’ve had Pentium 4’s with much higher
clockspeeds, but the PowerMac towers had multiple PPC G4s or G5s where most of
the competition only had a single P3 or P4.

The Intel Mac Pro’s that followed had options for multiple Xeons, but the
multi core nature of everything from the C2D forward put a major damper on the
demand for multi CPU configs.

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sunstone
The popularity of manual install shouldn't be a surprise. If you want to keep
your /home data intact when you upgrade to a new version of Ubuntu then it's
best to put it on a separate partition from the system partition. Since that
requires two partitions and two partitions requires a manual install a lot of
users are doing this.

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tetha
Huh, what are these graphs taken from?

The single stat metrics look a lot like grafana single stat panels with
sparklines and a light theme. The bar charts and the geographical view look a
lot like kibana 5/6 though.

Either of these could point to an elasticsearch based storage? That would make
sense, because linux installations with all of their annotated metrics are
pretty event-based.

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captn3m0
First is Grafana for sure

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majewsky
A question to those who have the full dataset: How many _unique_ records are
there? In other words, how many bits of information is in each individual
record? ("Record" being the set of data submitted by a single machine.)

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mankash666
I wish they published total number of installs and active monthly users.

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cirosantilli
I wonder why they didn't. Either too few installs would look bad, or they want
to keep data secret for evil purposes :-)

