Some statistics - Ubuntu developers first published desktop telemetry

    In February of this year, the Ubuntu Report ( GitHub ) utility appeared in the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS distribution . It gave users the opportunity to send data on their working environment to the developers headquarters, which would help further develop the operating system. And last week, the developers of Ubuntu published the first telemetry. Next - we give some numbers.




    / Pixino / Hagerty Ryan / PD

    Why collect telemetry


    According to Will Cooke, a manager at Canonical who develops Ubuntu, they began to collect telemetry to improve the development cycle of the operating system and its new functions. Will noted that the developers do not pursue any marketing goals.

    Information collected includes the version of Ubuntu used, the basic PC specification (data about the processor and graphics card, storage capacity, monitor screen resolution), as well as information about the installed third-party software and the user's location. A full list can be found in Cook's February open letter .

    In general, the community welcomed the decision to collect telemetry, and about 67% of users who recently installed Ubuntu Desktop agreedshare data with Canonical. Nevertheless, some users expressed a number of concerns. In particular, they are concerned that according to the collected data it will be possible to establish the identity of the owner.

    However, Canonical assures that the user decides what data to share, marking them with the appropriate checkboxes in the menu. At the same time, IP addresses and search history in the browser are not transmitted to the company's servers. And what is transmitted is transmitted via HTTPS.

    Cook emphasizes that telemetry helps developers focus on user-critical elements of the system. It provides an overview of the hardware configuration, application usage parameters and their settings. As a result, developers get the opportunity more accurately prioritize the release of fixes and patches and adjust the development cycle accordingly.

    What the collected data showed


    According to telemetry, three quarters of users installed Ubuntu Desktop 18.04 from scratch, and the remaining quarter was updated from an older version. The average OS installation time was 18 minutes (with a minimum of 8 minutes). More than half of the users erased and formatted hard drives when they were completely reinstalled.

    As for monitors, it turned out that most users have Full HD resolution (1080p). In second place in popularity was the resolution of 1366x768. HiDPI and 4k were extremely rare.

    At the same time, most users' computers have one monitor, one graphics card, and one CPU. However, Canonical did not disclose data on the number of cores of central processing units.

    The prevalence of OS in the world was estimated based on the time zone set in the system. The data showed that most Ubuntu users are in the United States. Brazil, India, China and Russia are next in popularity. However, Canonical believes that this data may not be entirely reliable, since the US time zone is set as default for all new owners of the OS.


    / Flickr / Phillip Taylor / CC

    Some more statistics


    Ubuntu is popular not only as an operating system for personal computers. According to the Cloud Market survey, in 2018, Ubuntu dominates the number of deployed images in the cloud. On the official website of Ubuntu , it is noted that this OS is most often "found" in public clouds (deployed on 60% of virtual machines).

    In addition, Ubuntu Server is often used to work with OpenStack. According to a survey conducted by OpenStack among 70,000 members of the OpenStack Foundation, Ubuntu is deployed in 37% of production environments, in 10% of development environments and QA, and 5% of experimental environments.

    For example, in the cloud this operating system is used by companies such as Netflix, Uber, Bloomberg, Pinterest and Instagram . Often they deploy their work tools and applications in the IaaS-cloud.

    We, as an IaaS provider , conducted our research among users of the 1cloud service . And found that Ubuntu is in second place in popularity among operating systems for virtual servers - it is used by 20.5% of our clients. In the first place was Windows with 46%, and in the third place - CentOS (17%).


    And of the 20% that "occupies" Ubuntu, 14% fall on the 16th OS version. It is followed by Ubuntu 14 with 5%, and further - Ubuntu 12 and Ubuntu 18 (they have less than a percent).


    What's next


    Will Cook said that Canonical plans to launch a special site on which generalized statistics on the use of Ubuntu will be freely available. Thus, any interested user can find out how many people around the world have installed this OS, which applications are most popular among Ubuntu users, and so on.

    As they say in Canonical, this solution is in good agreement with the concept of “openness”, which they intend to actively promote in the future.

    The site will launch before the release of the distribution Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish), which is scheduled for October 2018.

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