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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: 2) by Arik on Monday June 25 2018, @08:38PM (2 children)
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)
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
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?