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posted by martyb on Sunday June 24 2018, @08:05PM   Printer-friendly
from the show-me-the-numbers dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday June 24 2018, @10:12PM (12 children)

    by Arik (4543) on Sunday June 24 2018, @10:12PM (#697756) Journal
    While what you say is likely in large part true, it's not only distro tourists who format and reinstall when the OS revs. Some of those numbers will just be people who know what they're doing.

    If you setup your partitions right you don't lose any data, you can have more certainty that the OS is correctly installed when you're done, and it's often faster as well.
    --
    If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday June 24 2018, @11:08PM (4 children)

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Sunday June 24 2018, @11:08PM (#697785) Homepage

    It's 2018. Periodic reinstalls should not be necessary for any operating system. Fetishists enjoy the process of reinstalling, normal folk like me don't.

    • (Score: 2) by Arik on Sunday June 24 2018, @11:16PM (1 child)

      by Arik (4543) on Sunday June 24 2018, @11:16PM (#697793) Journal
      So you have a process that takes longer, and is less certain, and you think it's better because it's $current_year compliant?

      Sorry man, that just sounds dumb.
      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday June 25 2018, @01:03AM

        by frojack (1554) on Monday June 25 2018, @01:03AM (#697869) Journal

        Doesn't take longer. Especially if you follow your own prescription and set up your partitions right.

        In production, I run a rolling release (Manjaro) and a Periodic Release (Opensuse). Manjaro is WAY easier to maintain and keep current.

        Opensuse is becoming wackier and more problematic with each release (every 18 months).

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @01:03AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @01:03AM (#697871)

      "it's $CURRENT_YEAR"
      mate, that doesn't matter, it's not like the various issues of long-standing OS installs disappeared

      mind you, I haven't absolutely had to reinstall anything in a while, other than a Windows 10 machine (bleh) that was choking on its own ass trying to update itself and getting nowhere quickly
      but in terms of various small issues piling up over time, sure -- some shit doesn't install or uninstall correctly, various settings alterations you made forever ago or some program you used to use had causing issues, package conflicts (because of pure human oversight), disk usage piling up (annoying on Windows in particular)

      these aren't the issues of ten years ago, these are issues that happen right now

    • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Monday June 25 2018, @04:06AM

      by Nerdfest (80) on Monday June 25 2018, @04:06AM (#697955)

      I upgraded on every release of Kubuntu for five years without a problem, as a data point. I eventually reinstalled as I upgraded to SSDs. Exceptionally stable as well (now).

  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday June 25 2018, @01:26AM (6 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Monday June 25 2018, @01:26AM (#697879) Journal

    you can have more certainty that the OS is correctly installed when you're done, and it's often faster as well.

    Not at all.

    More certainty? Seriously?
    Do it your way and there is a week worth of chasing small-ish packages you added along the way which neither you or your notes will remember, and your fresh install won't include. Because you forgot them, you also forgot the configuration files for them that reside in /etc or /var/lib, or some such place, so now you are making multiple passes through your backups retrieving config files.

    If you let the system update, it will update everything you previously had installed, handle new and old dependencies and warn you about all manor of pitfalls, point out to you the packages for which you have no updates because they were dropped from the distro, or what ever.

    So no. I would rather update in place. I have my partitions set up properly, my private data is in a separate partition and I have full backups. I find I NEED my backups far fewer times doing an in-place upgrade.

    I used to do it your way. Its Much More work your way.

    Also the Ubuntu Blog differentiates between "Erase Device and Reinstall" and "Erase existing and Reinstall". I read Erase Device as nuke the entire machine from orbit. That's 53% all by itself. Not likely to be "people who know what they are doing". People who don't know what they are doing nuke and reinstall. Because they aren't confident enough of their skills to manage anything else.

    Their "Manual" category (21%) sounds like people who might actually know what they are doing.

    (Quite frankly, I don't know what they mean by this "erase" word they continue to use.)

    --
    No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Arik on Monday June 25 2018, @01:58AM (4 children)

      by Arik (4543) on Monday June 25 2018, @01:58AM (#697895) Journal
      Seriously. Upgrading an OS in place is a devilishly complicated process with lots of details that can be lost, forgotten, gotten wrong. I've seen all sorts of issues caused by it, but don't believe me, look at how complicated those systems are, how many bug reports they've processed - and how many remain unprocessed. It's a fundamentally unreliable procedure, no matter how thoroughly you polish that turd it's still going to be a turd.

      "Do it your way and there is a week worth of chasing small-ish packages you added along the way which neither you or your notes will remember, and your fresh install won't include. Because you forgot them, you also forgot the configuration files for them that reside in /etc or /var/lib, or some such place, so now you are making multiple passes through your backups retrieving config files."

      Nope.

      Seriously, I don't know what else to say. I've been doing it this way for decades and that has literally never happened.

      "If you let the system update"

      Then you should just forget about security entirely. No point at all in patching the little cracks and crevices when you have deliberately opened a grand-canyon sized gap in your fortifications already.

      It's crazy to think people actually go along with such an insane idea.

      "I used to do it your way. Its Much More work your way."

      Yeah, nah, it just isn't.

      I'm not saying it's always quicker, but that's a strong tendency.

      It's definitely not more work than trying to fix the corrupted system you get when you discover a flaw in your upgrade-in-place routine.

      "Also the Ubuntu Blog differentiates between "Erase Device and Reinstall" and "Erase existing and Reinstall". I read Erase Device as nuke the entire machine from orbit. That's 53% all by itself. Not likely to be "people who know what they are doing"."

      Even people who know what they're doing might install Ubuntu occasionally, for reasons.

      "(Quite frankly, I don't know what they mean by this "erase" word they continue to use.)"

      Yeah, that just tells me the people that wrote the installer didn't know what they are doing.

      Given those options, you're right, manual would be the only sane thing to try.

      When I say nuke and reinstall, I mean you format your system partitions and install the OS.

      There's no need to damage any data or call for backups unless you hit the wrong button somewhere...
      --
      If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday June 25 2018, @06:55PM (3 children)

        by frojack (1554) on Monday June 25 2018, @06:55PM (#698270) Journal

        Then you should just forget about security entirely. No point at all in patching the little cracks and crevices when you have deliberately opened a grand-canyon sized gap in your fortifications already.

        Are you intentionally being daft? Or do you run such a crap distro that you can't even trust it to upgrade one kernel to the next without opening security holes?

        How about one CONCRETE example where an inplace system-upgrade opens a security hole that a fresh install doesn't?

        Do you even know how this process works these days? Because it sounds like you don't. Or your distro is utterly brain dead. Or you've been nuking for 30 years and have no clue how well the auto upgrades work.

        You do realize that an in-place upgrade retains all your configurations and settings? They are saved where ever possible, and warned about where not possible. Those ports you blocked in the firewall are still blocked by the upgraded firewall. Those permissions you set are still set. Your MTA is still properly configured with the proper certificates. Old kernels are replaced with new, but fall-back copies are retained.

        NONE of that happens when you Nuke and Reinstall. NONE of it. You have to recreate it from scratch. And you WILL forget something.
        You tell me you've never forgotten ANYTHING in 30 years of nuke-and-install, and I'm going to call you a liar.

        You've already stated you've nuked for decades. So how the fuck would you know nothing else works and security holes are created? Bullshit of the highest order.

        --
        No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
        • (Score: 2) by Arik on Monday June 25 2018, @08:38PM (2 children)

          by Arik (4543) on Monday June 25 2018, @08:38PM (#698361) Journal
          "Are you intentionally being daft?"

          Are you?

          "Or do you run such a crap distro that you can't even trust it to upgrade one kernel to the next without opening security holes?"

          That's daft right there. You're implying that only a 'crap distro' could get pwned. That's just bullshit. If your security is based on such bullshit then it's bullshit too!

          Trust and secure just don't mix. Trusting a server outside of your control to alter running systems however it sees fit - now that's truly daft.

          "Do you even know how this process works these days?"

          Like a finely polished turd, I am sure.

          "You do realize that an in-place upgrade retains all your configurations and settings?"

          That's one of the many ways they wind up causing trouble, too. There's no guarantee the old configuration files are even in a compatible format with the new software! But worse than that it may have changed subtly, and old directives are interpreted in different ways... it's better to keep your modifications separately.

          "NONE of that happens when you Nuke and Reinstall. NONE of it."

          Happily so.

          "You tell me you've never forgotten ANYTHING in 30 years of nuke-and-install, and I'm going to call you a liar."

          Sure, I've forgotten things. I've nuked and reinstalled many hundreds, probably several thousand times, I've spent a few hours on minor issues caused by forgetfulness, sure.

          I've upgraded in place using distros that are built for it (Debian, Redhat, others) a few hundred times as well. I've spent a lot more time cleaning up those messes, out of a much smaller sample. I've seen subtle corruption caused by that process on several occasions, and full on trash the disk and halt the system failure once. On good machines, as shown by the fact that after a nuke and reinstall there was no problem. So I've used that in certain situations where I saw an advantage, but even then, I sometimes wound up regretting it.

          So no, I'm not bullshitting at all. It's true that most of my experience with those systems is from past years, when they were less mature, so they may well be more polished than what I've worked with, but the fundamental idea is still flawed, and it's still this massive complicated system to do something that just isn't really needed to begin with, and certainly could not be permitted to exist under any reasonable security policy on top of that.

          --
          If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @11:47PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @11:47PM (#698451)

            I won't deny that apt is a steaming pile of shit and I've loathed debian-based systems and other automagical "package managers" that invariably always manage to fuck something up, but I don't think that's the result of upgrading in place as much as having systems that try to do way too much. Once a system tries to do automatic dependency resolution and removal and incompatible packages and saving the user from being stupid it will invariably fuck shit up for anyone who has their own idea about how something should work. Crux, which is source-based, has the simplest and sanest package management I've seen in any linux distro (it's very similar to the BSD pkg utils but a step further in the right direction IMO). Every package is literally a bog-standard shell script that can be read and modified by anyone with a modicum of experience. The packages are normal tarballs with an index file generated when the package is built that checks for file collisions and adds them to the index. Every command dealing with installing and removing packages can be forced through the few safeguards which are in place. Making a new package is as simple as writing a file with the same commands you would to build it on the normal interactive commandline in a function called build with a name and version variable defined. I don't run Crux anymore myself, but I still use their packaging tools to build easily deployed and modifiable root tarballs from scratch and I highly recommend them to anyone looking for sane utilities that enable that kind of workflow.

            • (Score: 2) by Arik on Tuesday June 26 2018, @01:40AM

              by Arik (4543) on Tuesday June 26 2018, @01:40AM (#698522) Journal
              "I won't deny that apt is a steaming pile of shit and I've loathed debian-based systems and other automagical "package managers" that invariably always manage to fuck something up, but I don't think that's the result of upgrading in place as much as having systems that try to do way too much. Once a system tries to do automatic dependency resolution and removal and incompatible packages and saving the user from being stupid it will invariably fuck shit up for anyone who has their own idea about how something should work."

              Very, very true. And yes, that's not exactly what we were talking about, but it is related. Package managers suck. The more they do the more they suck. And they're fundamentally wrong-headed, really. What's the problem this is supposed to solve? In the end there are a lot of them, but most are better solved with other tools, or else not even really a problem. So often the problem is really 'I don't understand X' and then the solution is not 'I will learn how to X' instead it is 'I will build Y, which will allow me to continue to be ignorant of X.' Yeah, that's not actually such a great method of solving problems.
              --
              If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @07:29AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @07:29AM (#698007)

      Do it your way and there is a week worth of chasing small-ish packages you added along the way which neither you or your notes will remember, and your fresh install won't include. Because you forgot them, you also forgot the configuration files for them that reside in /etc or /var/lib, or some such place, so now you are making multiple passes through your backups retrieving config files.

      Exactly.

      This is the reason that I refuse to reinstall, no matter what. I have almost 20 years worth of customization (I installed from scratch in late 1998 or early 1999), everything is customized to my liking, and it's going to take a looooong time before I'm happy with everything.