Canonical Pursuing A Hardware/Software Survey For Ubuntu Installations

[UpsetingFact]

That's not the real answer, what Linux need is a stable ABI.

[UpsetingFact]

One word: Fingerprinting

Money has to come from somewhere, if they can't use Amazon's, they'll find another way.

Don't even trust those "annonymous" reports anymore, the fact that you don't usually change hardware is a way to know who you are without your ip address.
Marketters will be marketters after all.

[paupav]

are you commenting on the right story here? this is about collecting installation information.

which I am cool with - especially if we have access to it steam style!

“We want to be able to focus our engineering efforts on the things that matter most to our users, and in order to do that we need to get some more data about sort of setups our users have and which software they are running on it,”

they know which hardware most of the people are running, which software they are running. Why not choose the best compiler flags to make (most) apps run better?

[boxie]

“We want to be able to focus our engineering efforts on the things that matter most to our users, and in order to do that we need to get some more data about sort of setups our users have and which software they are running on it,”

they know which hardware most of the people are running, which software they are running. Why not choose the best compiler flags to make (most) apps run better?

Ahh, I see where you are going with this - good point.

It would nice to see a "-modern" distro as well as a "-compat". where -compat maintains backwards compatibility for the long tail and -modern utilises CPU instructions from much more recent CPUs ala clear linux.

[microcode]

Ubuntu is surveying the people who use it. Why would they care about people not running it? It's not intended to be a general Linux user survey.

Because if it doesn't work, then they will not get far enough through the installer for it to submit the survey.

[grok]

... the useful data point is whether you were connected to the internet (or at least used a http proxy) during the installation.

I do agree the data is not very anonymous, and would have to be curated too. E.g. telling the world that 5% did not use straight ext4 would be fine, but not that the nvidia gk208 user with 6GB RAM made a 16,384,000,000 byte partition.