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The Ubuntu blog has a report on installation metrics:
We first announced our intention to ask users to provide basic, not-personally-identifiable system data back in February. Since then we have built the Ubuntu Report tool and integrated it in to the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS initial setup tool. You can see an example of the data being collected on the Ubuntu Report Github page.
At first login users are asked if they would like to send the information gathered and can preview that data if they wish.
One thing to point out is that this data is entirely from Ubuntu Desktop installs only and does not include users of Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core, our cloud images, or any of the Ubuntu derivatives that do not include the ubuntu-report software in their installer.
For example, the average install took 18 minutes, but some systems were able to install in less than 8 minutes. Available RAM was most frequently reported at 4GB followed closely by 8GB, but there were systems reporting in with as little as 1GB and as much as 128GB.
How do your system(s) compare?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday June 24 2018, @09:20PM (10 children)
I run Ubuntu MATE 16.04 on Win7 using Virtualbox (yeah, I know it should be the opposite, and I plan to make the move after verifying that my killer apps will work) with 2GB RAM allocated to the virtual machine. Works like a champ, no slowdown in either OS, hell, Ubuntu in a 2GB VM is snappier than Win7 with 6GB left over. One of the things I've been meaning to do is go 100% Linux but that will take considerable effort given that I don't have a lot of patience for fiddling nowadays. I'm still pissed as fuck about Compiz-fusion not staying up to date with all of its rad effects, it leaves me convinced that the people responsible for maintaining it have been compromised by fifth-columnists who want to keep the lackluster Crapple OS-GayseX as the "prettiest" OS. One of the more noticeable and huge advantages of desktop Linux is that it boots way fucking faster and usably than Microsoft Trash.
It seems with Win7 Microsoft has come full-circle back into the Win98 days when periodic reinstalls were the norm. Even with safe habits it's easy to shit up Win7 over time and it becomes slower, and having to install LabVIEW and other NI garbage probably ain't helping the speed. There's no excuse for periodic slowdowns on a machine with 8GB ram that isn't rendering or otherwise running computationally-intensive simulations. Even an XP box could run Cubase 5 recording in full-duplex without causing anything else to choke.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Sunday June 24 2018, @10:10PM (4 children)
When you complete your switch to linux, i'll say "Welcome to the dark side... we have Hamantaschen", then you'll shoot me and say "Mazel tov".
We'll have good times, as we always do. :)
Seriously... yes, make the switch!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday June 24 2018, @11:01PM (3 children)
Actually that's a good idea for a follow-up discussion or poll: Which killer apps besides games (though game discussions would be welcome from the perspective of a WINE/VM standpoint) are keeping you running windows?
I do know as fact that Military and other government organizations such as the VA are still running dos apps(run on a more advanced OS, but still). I'll state the more obvious ones:
- Office (Openoffice and derivatives have made great progress but still blow ass)
- DAWS such as Cubase (yeah, they and other killer apps run on Mac, but that's not my point)
- Scientific applications? (this is probably the domain that has made the greatest progress supporting UNIX/Linux: Matlab, LabVIEW, etc.). Of course Unix and Linux have had historically strong association with scientific applications and any Embedded Linux dev would be batshit insane to dev in Windows.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @07:34AM (2 children)
> Which killer apps besides games (though game discussions would be welcome from the perspective of a WINE/VM standpoint) are keeping you running windows?
In descending order of importance, Total Commander, IrfanView, Winamp.
I tried a bunch of FOSS alternatives for these three, and all of them sucked. Most of the functionality is there, sure, but man they're clunky :/ I dread the day when I'll have to move away from my Win7, as Win10 is just... no. I'm fervently hoping that at least Total Commander will eventually get a Linux port, as running a file manager through Wine is, uh, not ideal.
Some other applications that are not critical but are much nicer than their Linuxy counterparts: DisplayFusion, TortoiseSVN/TortoiseGit, Notepad++, Process Explorer, wgnuplot (... why?), WinSCP, uTorrent 2.2.1 (what do you mean it's from 2011?), Everything (clarification: that's the name of the application, I don't mean "all software")...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @08:39PM
File manager? ls, mv, rm, find and/or xargs - that's all you need to know., The man pages have everything, just make sure to use the docs that shipped with your distro or you might run into some strangeness due to differing implementations. Learn a shell, any shell (except csh). You'll never think GUI shit is elegant or powerful or has killer features again. Music software is hard to recommend as it seems there's no clear best for everyone and it's down to personal preferences regarding features, display, and styling. I think winamp runs in wine though IIRC (wasn't there an article with a lot of discussion about this a month or two ago?). As for wgnuplot, maybe it's using Qt on windows and your distro ships a gtk version? If it's not too big you might just want to try building it yourself with some different configuration settings. For everything else, either never heard of or I just can't understand why you would ever think that was better. Task management, version control, backups, and ssh should be done with aliases and functions and cron jobs/modern init. My transmission-daemon is sitting on a huge pile of scripts that I've fine-tuned to the point that I only use a client when I run into more windows jackasses putting all kinds of unmentionable shit into filenames and breaking my automation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @08:43PM
Containerized VMs would probably work for most of the stuff if newer versions don't break compatability too badly. You could even do file management with some sshfs hackery and proper attention to security.
(Score: 5, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Sunday June 24 2018, @11:48PM (4 children)
tl;dr Windows 10 and Linux are both a hot mess.
Ha. I'm in the Same boat. I've been making some more connections and doing some interesting side work which is all industrial automation related which is all windows only. So every time I think about my 100% perfectly fine windows 7 box that happily hums away is ever inching to the windows 10 abyss, I get some serious anxiety. And it's a shame because 10 offers me nothing over windows 7. And I know this because I run windows 10 at work and it can go jump in a fucking fire.
It has this dreaded glitch where explorer does not update the directory contents after performing a file system operation such as creating a new directory. you click the new folder button and you have to press F5 to manually refresh the directory contents, even in file dialogue boxes. and the print spooler likes to randomly shit the bed to the point where I have a fucking script on my desktop that I run as admin to stop and then restart the print spooler and any associated printing services. updated every bloody print driver and purged old drivers and nada, spooler still dies. Piece of shit architecture that services idiocy. Why arent they regular windows processes? "Oh that was our brilliant idea to reduce memory foot print, services are light weight dll processes hosted by a single service process" fucking stupid. Same with the registry. Why not an actual file tree like /etc? NOPE! Fuck you we engineered the fuck outta that problem by make a file system in a file that needs its own shell and uses an api interface. and god help you if it's corrupted (thankfully ultra rare these days). the fetid crust is still thick in that mess of an os. rant off.
I do use Linux but it is fast becoming a bloated mess itself. And no automation vendor takes Linux on the desktop serious. Embedded real-time linux? Of course! Plenty of that: Delta Tau, National Instruments, Siemens, Opto22, MKS Instruments, etc. Linux desktop support tools like IDE's, programming tools, diagnostic tools, programmers, etc? HA! Nope! Windows only chump. You just cant get the hell away from it.
On the down side, Linux is getting more and more windows like by the day. The kernel is a bloated mess along with the rest of user space thanks to system derp. I've had tons of issues with USB drives hanging, dropping off, all sorts of instabilities. I also run a raid 5 using mdadm which itself is now a complex fickle mess that tries to figure out everything plugged in because it's so much smarter than you only to fall flat on it's face and drop random disks off the array. smart says nothing. Maybe shit hardware? who knows! Linux kinda sucks now. Then again, I haven't tried gentoo, arch, or slack in a long, long time. Maybe they are better distros with tweaked kernels
but my patience for tweaking/building linux installs is long gone. Gimme a clean, stable base with a lean kernel, a simple GUI and i'll handle the rest.
And I don't have that behavior on the windows machine. then again, the linux box is its an older AMD A8 and the windows machine an older i7 2600k. Maybe the amd drivers or hardware is shit. The stability just isn't there anymore. Perhaps a linux mint is the issue but I doubt they stray far from vanilla kernel sources. just disappointing. I've used openBSD and it feels like a solid unix platform that has enough modern stuff to the point where I can play you tube videos on old IBM Thinkpads. But again, takes more patience, hardware support isnt as broad, and getting a useable desktop takes patience I dont have.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday June 25 2018, @12:05AM (1 child)
I see you don't work for the military industrial complex. Take your problems, magnify them by a thousand, and that's your daily routine.
Or maybe you do, and you've been blessed with some form of admin access. I remember those good ol' days.
(Score: 3, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Monday June 25 2018, @12:15AM
We're a job-shop at the far edge of that complex but DFARS had made everything a pain in the ass. Though getting compliant wasnt hard, just very annoying.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @12:18AM
"Help us Google Fuchsia, you're our only hope."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 26 2018, @01:36AM
You can only choose one.
Gentoo and Slackware were good picks since neither will make you use "system derp". Disclaimer: I run Gentoo with OpenRC.