2015 End-Of-Year Phoronix Reader Survey

[pernila]

<How many times per day/week do you read Phoronix?
Pretty much everyday

<Generally what time each day are you reading Phoronix?
Looking at the RSS feed several times a day

<What kernel subsystems interest you the most?
graphics, networking

<Do you consider yourself a Linux gamer?
yes

<What are your graphics driver preferences?
kms for office use. nvidia for gaming

<What news item(s) or reviews interested you the most this year?
BSD related news

<What sort of Linux hardware reviews would you like to see more of?
OS/distro comparisons, more specifically BSD vs Solaris vs Arch vs Ubuntu type of benchmarks. Also cpu, gpu or memory scaling benchmarks

Also i would be interested in more BSD related benchmarks and reviews.

[jmalo]

Here's an end-of-year Phoronix.com survey, for those that would like to share their feedback in ensuring for an even more successful 2016, etc.

This thread is intended for the non-premium readers.

How many times per day/week do you read Phoronix?

Generally what time each day are you reading Phoronix?

What kernel subsystems interest you the most?

Do you consider yourself a Linux gamer?

What are your graphics driver preferences?

What news item(s) or reviews interested you the most this year?

What sort of Linux hardware reviews would you like to see more of?

What price/features would be needed for you to consider Phoronix Premium?

You can answer all/part of the questions and share whatever other constructive feedback you would like. Thanks!

- 2 times/day
- 30 minutes
- Graphics and filesystems
- Yes, I do
- Intel and Nvidia
- Performance of Intel Graphics and Broadwell processors
- The current type of contents is fine for me
- Not sure about it.

[villeneuve]

How many times per day/week do you read Phoronix?
I'd guess between 7 and 20 times a week.

Generally what time each day are you reading Phoronix?
When having lunch alone, when going to sleep, during TV-adbreaks, generally whenever there is a short leisure time during the day.

Do you consider yourself a Linux gamer?
I'd like to be a Linux gamer, but currently I'm not, because of a lack of games of my interest outside of Steam, which I boycot since it's launch. When a racing simulation comes out and force feedback steering wheels and surround sound are fully supported on Linux I'll become a Linux gamer.

What are your graphics driver preferences?
Currently open source Radeon drivers and the propietary drivers on Nvidia equipped machines.

What news item(s) or reviews interested you the most this year?
Linux distributions for hardware like Tablets, Smartphones. Apart from that the development of the new AMDGPU kernel driver.

What sort of Linux hardware reviews would you like to see more of?
Apart from AMD CPUs all hardware, where running Linux on it/running it on a Linux system is the manufacturers primary intent.

What price/features would be needed for you to consider Phoronix Premium?
Other forum software, no disruptive ads, a filter (at least for the RSS feed) to exlude certain topics (for example I want to read about new kernel releases, but do not need to release about the preceding release candidates) or an RSS-feed that excludes "minor news" such as release candidates, rumours etc.

More feedback: a bit less focus/love for Intel would be appreciated.

Greets!

[SystemCrasher]

How many times per day/week do you read Phoronix?

Varies wildly. Really depends on how busy I am at the moment. Usually I could read it once a day, or maybe once in ~2-3 days. Sometimes I can check for fancy news or interesting comments several times a day. Sometimes I can be missing for a while.

Generally what time each day are you reading Phoronix?

This varies wildly as well, I never bothered myself to gather stats, but its all around the clock. I do not have fixed timings. Furthermore, phoronix readers are surely coming from different time zones, so this question makes little sense. You can get a better idea when you have most readers online by parsing web server logs or just using things like collectd/rrdtool.

What kernel subsystems interest you the most?

1) Open GPU drivers, mostly radeon & amdgpu.
2) Filesystems, mostly btrfs/ext4/f2fs/ubifs/squashfs/jffs2.
3) Network/wireless. Mostly ath9k, but others could be interesting as well.
4) MTD/NAND.
5) USB.
6) Most things related to little ARM boards. These are really spread over various subsystems and platform parts itself.

[uote]Do you consider yourself a Linux gamer?[/quote]
I do not have too much time to play, but I do not mind e.g. launching Xonotic and kicking some asses eventually, as well as eventually playing some other games. While in no way I count as hardcore gamer, I'm quite interested in opensource graphic drivers performance.

What are your graphics driver preferences?

Opensource AMD GPU drivers are my favorite thing. These leverage best of opensource world, good enough for my use cases, have plenty of nice features, good in dealing with bugs, and so on. While they are not super-high speed and do not support highest GL versions, they are IMHO good enough for everyone but most hardcore gamers around and lack all issues associated with proprietary drivers. I'm looking forward for AMDGPU thing as well - its very interesting to see how it would work .

What news item(s) or reviews interested you the most this year?

1) More AMD GPU benchmarks. Intel is boring and their hardware suxx, Nvidia's opensource policy suxx. So it is very interesting to take a look on how opensource AMD drivers evolve and how it performs. Technically, it is interesting to see VLIW5 vs VLIW4 vs GCN 1.0 vs GCN 1.1 vs later and evolution of performance over time. Too bad recently Phoronix benchmarks are using very few AMD GPUs. Like 2 or 3 years ago, AMD benchmarks featured more GPUs and were much more interesting to read. It is also interesting to compare evolution of Radeon/R600g vs Radeon/RadeonSI vs AMDGPU/RadeonSI stacks. This could be quite a big matrix overall...

2) I would like to see security alerts about things which potentially affect Linux users. It is not very convenient to use different resources, phoronix is good in aggregating Linux related news and security is clearly wrong topic to ignore. While turning security to theater can be annoying, downplaying it could be much worse. This is one of major omissions on Poronix to my taste.

3) More filesystem benchmarks and, ideally, rough experiments on stability, integrity and recovery of various filesystems. While foronix is hard to be called center of competence in filesystems and their benchmarking, some benchmark results are still interesting.

4) Some opencl benchmarks, including opensource stacks of AMD and Intel. E.g. something like recent John The Ripper featuring OpenCL parts would be nice. Because it gives some rough idea what you can expect in terms of e.g. crypto acceleration, etc.

5) OpenHardware & little boards. World does not consists of just raspberry pi. And openness matters. E.g. I admire Olimex efforts in making OPEN 64-bit computer design. They already put some drafts & sketches and at the end of day they would release CAD files. So everybody can manufacture PCB themselves, possibly changing something. Sure, it takes some competence. Just like programming does. This is IMHO next big mark in terms of degrees of freedom.

6) Uhm more benchmarking of some raw/general things like mem bandwidth, CPU performance, simple things like "openssl speed", "7z b", x264/vp9 encoding/decoding, and similar compression/encryption/hashing benchmarks. Speaking for myself I'm having fun with Lzbnech - tool to benchmark various LZ-based compression algos (opensource, https://github.com/inikep/lzbench). This gives me more insight on how various hardware platforms perform, what is their RAW performance in terms of CPU, memory, etc, how it evolves over time, how it compares for various platforms, etc and how good various algos are optimized for particular platform. E.g. ARMs can show a really different picture of the world. At the end of day it could be unteresting to understand how much time it takes to decrunch XZ file on particular system. Or which FPS it can afford decoding VP9 in software. And this is very general bench. Most of us does it almost every day, by just visiting youtube, and so it is fairly important algo, isn't it? .

What sort of Linux hardware reviews would you like to see more of?

All sorts of little embedded boards & open hardware, AMD GPUs, various wi-fi, SSDs, Wi-Fi, and how it performs in Linux...

What price/features would be needed for you to consider Phoronix Premium?

I do not even log in most of time, so it would be nearly useless for me. At the end of day, Phoronix is hardly can be called privacy-friendly. It attempts to report my visit to like a 5 different, unrelated entities, and when I launch adblocker to thwart that, it annoys me with extra message (sorry, I've killed it either, not a hard thing to do).

Whatever, these days phoronix even lacks working HTTPS on login form and uses it incorrectly in most other places, triggering shitload of browser errors/warnings about mixed content and somesuch. And if I have to send creds plaintext, any further use of https makes very little sense. That's why I'm not very fond of logging in to Phoronix at all. I guess I'm better off with something like some bitcoin donations without asking for anything in exchange. At the end of day I just fail to see major benefits of premium but I can see major privacy breach due to lack of https. I'm pretty sure my ISP runs DPI on the wire and I really do not want them to know my creds and collect stats on my activity.

Either way, thanks for what you do and have a happy holidays

[EricBlair]

How many times per day/week do you read Phoronix? See it 4 times per day, read it once/twice per day

Generally what time each day are you reading Phoronix? 8pm

What kernel subsystems interest you the most? general

Do you consider yourself a Linux gamer? NO

What are your graphics driver preferences? open source

What news item(s) or reviews interested you the most this year? open source AMD graphics cards for when I was buying a new PC

What sort of Linux hardware reviews would you like to see more of?

What price/features would be needed for you to consider Phoronix Premium? For me you are a linux news site and I would not become a subscriber for this purpose

[FLHerne]

How many times per day/week do you read Phoronix?

Once/twice daily.

Generally what time each day are you reading Phoronix?

Evenings.

What kernel subsystems interest you the most?

Filesystems, hardware support, whatever the latest release broke on my laptop.

Do you consider yourself a Linux gamer?

Yes.

What are your graphics driver preferences?

Open-source - Intel/AMD Mesa.

What news item(s) or reviews interested you the most this year?

RadeonSI improvements, everything by Eric Griffiths.

What sort of Linux hardware reviews would you like to see more of?

Pretty much any hardware, but with more analysis or at least background information.

Your power-usage measurements really are useful - across multiple devices and kernel versions, detailed plots of the usage over time, in total and against performance. You also call out specific commits that changed the results, which is great. More of these, and other articles with similarly-useful results, please!

On the other hand, the vast majority of your 'hardware reviews' are raw PTS output, of a stock set of tests, with a sentence stating the obvious for each graph. Without any more description, it's impossible to generalise those results beyond the specific hardware/driver/software combination you happened to test.

For example, "in this test, X didn't work on Y" is a common phrase. What went wrong? Did it work with previous versions? Was it a bug or an uimplemented feature, and is there a bug report?
Similarly, "X performed no better than the [much more expensive] Y" - CPU bottleneck? Not all units enabled? Max clocks not reached? If it's only true for one benchmark, what's different about that?

That information is almost never in the articles, so in most cases I find them completely useless.

What price/features would be needed for you to consider Phoronix Premium?

A more general version of my last answer, really.
Non-PTS-based articles are effectively a blog/mailing-list aggregator, with very little added value. They never stand alone without reading the source post, and don't add contextual information that's needed for that post to make sense.

For example again - "NIR Mesa Functions Support Is Coming Along With SPIR-V To NIR". The article doesn't say what a 'real function' is, what they're used for, which GL version/extension they're described in, nor which software uses them. Neither does the source, nor any page linked from the article. It's completely, utterly meaningless to anyone who isn't a Mesa dev or willing to spend some time researching something without even being told why it's important.

Even for articles where the linked-to post or mail makes sense on its own, that link is (deliberately?) buried within dozens of internal links. If your 'articles' are really a blog aggregation, making them hard to use as such undermines the remaining purpose.

What I'd love to read - and definitely pay for - would be one or two articles a day describing some particular area, without simply rewriting other people's individual posts.
Say, for the common video-driver performance case:
- Summary of changes between the versions being compared, with enough context to explain what those (should) mean.
- Standard set of tests.
- Extra tests to investigate unusual results.
- Requesting comment from devs on any results that are still unexplained.

[trifud]

How many times per day/week do you read Phoronix?

3-5 times per week.

Generally what time each day are you reading Phoronix?

Morning hours on workdays or evenings on weekends.

What kernel subsystems interest you the most?

Interested in the whole kernel in general.

Do you consider yourself a Linux gamer?

I don't play games at all.

What are your graphics driver preferences?

Proprietary drivers only.

What news item(s) or reviews interested you the most this year?

Software news, CPU and SDD related articles.

What sort of Linux hardware reviews would you like to see more of?

HDD/SDD benchmarks and articles.

What price/features would be needed for you to consider Phoronix Premium?

I don't know. Pricing is not a problem. I haven't subscribed because I haven't decided to do so.

[Krejzi]

How many times per day/week do you read Phoronix?

Depends on when I can use my laptop, whether I'm doing something else that requires a lot of time during a day - so ranging from 0 to several times a day (at least 6 times a week).

Generally what time each day are you reading Phoronix?

Whenever I'm using my laptop (any time between 8:00 and 0:00 work days, extending to 3:00-4:00 on weekends, CET/CEST timezone).

What kernel subsystems interest you the most?

DRM/Intel, Audio, IO Schedulers

Do you consider yourself a Linux gamer?

Does Solitare count? I have Steam installed, but due to having Intel only graphics, not many games can be run and they usually make my computer run several times hot as it would be on Windows, which is my prefered gaming platform.

What are your graphics driver preferences?

I have hybrid Intel SNB/Radeon HD6470M Graphics, but due to Linux not yet properly supporting PowerXpress, I'm using Intel with UXA as 2D acceleration method.

What news item(s) or reviews interested you the most this year?

I like all the news/reviews regarding Linux and other OSS software, but anything related to Mesa/OpenGL, Wayland or systemd was fun to read (especially the forum comments for the latter).

What sort of Linux hardware reviews would you like to see more of?

I'm really interested in Wayland, so more benchmarks in that area as the situation improves, please!

What price/features would be needed for you to consider Phoronix Premium?

Well, considering that I'm a college student living in a 3rd world country, and that 35$ is what some people in this country are forced to survive for a month, I can't say that any price is right for me, at least for now.

[Cyber Killer]

How many times per day/week do you read Phoronix?
A couple of times per week.

Generally what time each day are you reading Phoronix?
Whenever I check my rss reader, usually in the morning.

Do you consider yourself a Linux gamer?
Yes

What are your graphics driver preferences?
Mesa

What sort of Linux hardware reviews would you like to see more of?
New releases.

What price/features would be needed for you to consider Phoronix Premium?
None, I give a small flattr subscription each month, I'm not interested in any premium subscriptions

[Dieter]

> How many times per day/week do you read Phoronix? Usually once/day. Why do you care? > Generally what time each day are you reading Phoronix? Usually mid-late morning. Why do you care? > What kernel subsystems interest you the most? The ones that have the most potential to put my data at risk, so FFS and device drivers. > Do you consider yourself a Linux gamer? HELL, NO! Linux is not ready for production use, and at the glacial rate of improvement, I don't expect to live long enough to see it ready for production use. Fraking penguin scrambled my data, so this is now a penguin-free zone. The only game I'm currently interested in requires a heiss Fraeulein, not a computer. > What are your graphics driver preferences? FLOSS obviously. AMD > Nvidia. This is an inthell-free zone. > What news item(s) or reviews interested you the most this year? FLOSS other than penguinix. Hardware that supports ECC. > What sort of Linux hardware reviews would you like to see more of? What is "Linux hardware"? Does someone actually laser-etch an obese cartoon penguin on hardware? FLOSS-friendly hardware reviews: non-inthell mainboards that support ECC. It has been over 10 years since I've seen one on phoronix. (Did I miss one?) You bought a Carrizo laptop to review, but it was defective. Why didn't you ask them to send you one that worked? Or, if it was just a fan blade hitting a loose wire, why not take the thing apart, fix the problem, put it back together, and run your tests. Write up how to take it apart, including any special tools needed, any problems you ran into, and of course photos of the interior. That would be a VERY useful review. Carrizo supposedly supports ECC, but I don't recall seeing anything about ECC in the articles. Did I miss it? Does that laptop support ECC? > What price/features would be needed for you to consider Phoronix Premium? Stop typing "Linux" when you mean (or *should* mean) FLOSS. The website used to work fairly well, but keeps getting more and more browser-hostile. For example: "image/svg+xml" is unknown and does not get displayed. Do you have something against standard image types like png? The oddball URLs cause problems also. p.s The "preview" and "cancel" just say "button", and nothing happens when clicking them. :-(