A first look at Ubuntu desktop metrics | Hacker News Reader

A first look at Ubuntu desktop metrics

blog.ubuntu.com

71 pointspopey31 comments

> 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.

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.

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

Not if many apps don't have, and will not soon get, double-density assets.

Then their assets will look like they would on low dpi displays, which sounds like "just fine" for me.

(I'm a high dpi screen user)

For the non-discerning user, yes, that would be just fine.

Was responding to the argument that it works just as good as in MacOs though -- where companies were swift to change assets.

Retina MacBook renders text at 4x while scaling other things 2x as I understand it. It looks great.

> 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.

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

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.

The advantage Apple had was owning the hardware, you don't need fractional scaling if you don't offer any hardware with fractional scaling.

Windows has been getting better but it's still not brilliant, even with resolution independent frameworks like WPF there are a ton of issues.

Ubuntu/Gnome was completely broken for me when I tried it last year. KDE was the best of the desktops but still not as good as MacOS.

But you still could use an external display, which could conceivably require fractional scaling.

Through rendering at a larger resolution internally and then scaling the rendered image back down, macOS supports fractional scaling to some degree. It taxes the GPU more than 2x does and isn’t as flexible as a slider, but it also cleanly avoids issues that’d normally come with fractional scaling.

So for example a MacBook Pro with a native resolution of 2880x1800 and native effective 2x of 1440x900 can also run at effective 1680x1050 or effective 1920x1200. This works on external displays as well.

GTK does not have this requirement. I just have to know the correct DPI. Fonts are rendered natively at whatever resolution, so are the vector or procedurally drawn widgets. The only things that are not rendered at native resolution are pixmaps, which are exceedingly rare in a well designed program (svg is used everywhere in GTK ecosystem)

I have no problems with fractional scaling (150%) on my dual 27 inch 4K monitors, apart from one annoying bug that sometimes resets scaling to 100% after screen lock. Same could be said about my laptop, 13 inch 2560x1700 also 150% scaling. I'm running Unity on both obviously since Gnome doesn't even support fractional scaling, which is highly disappointing.

I'd guess many users also value battery life over screen resolution. Even when there is an option, I always take the option for 1080p on my laptops for this reason. I find 1080p to be more than good enough on a 14" screen at normal usage distances.

I really hope they realize this. The last thing holding me back from Linux on my desktop is support for fractional scaling.

... or if there were like more than 2 monitors on the market that were meant to be run at 200% scaling, i.e. 24" @ 4K and 27" @ 5K.

There might be a more general chicken-and-egg problem: Ubuntu/Linux doesn't support new desktop hardware well and is leaning towards older hardware. Look how common 1, 2, 4 GB of RAM is and of course those people don't want to gamble with HiDPI or 4k displays too.

As an example, latest well supported desktop hardware that I have is a Haswell-based system from 5 years ago. A few of my more recent systems have too many problems.

Two of our 8 developers have powerful Linux desktops. At the time, they cost around the same as a top-spec MacBook: 64GiB RAM, Xeon CPU, a graphics card that has no problem with two HiDPI screens, 2 SSDs and 2 HDDs. We're both running Kubuntu on them. I think other developers will switch, after seeing first-hand the problems with the new MacBook.

I find it really convenient that I can run a CPU-intensive task using lots of storage on my desktop and no-one (especially me) notices any fan noise. A few months ago I took on a task to adapt a local data processing pipeline to run some analysis on the Hadoop cluster. Instead I ended up running it on the desktop over the weekend: total development time about an hour, EC2 cost $0.

The systems are from Dell, a previous model of the 5820: http://www.dell.com/developers (no affiliation, this is the Google search result link).

Or in other words: (K)Ubuntu users aren't all poor.

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.

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 :-)

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

Without full disk encryption with key/password a login is not that much more secure than automatic login.

Mostly it was multiple cores that killed the multi-socket workstation.

Why spend 600+ on a board that supports 2 processors when you can buy a uni-processor board that supports a cpu that can support 2 - 4 or 8 real cores, not including HT.

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.

I'd imagine a significant chunk of "auto login" choosers are running Ubuntu in a VM on some other platform.

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.

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.

First is Grafana for sure

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.)

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

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

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