Ubuntu "User Statistics" Published, But It's A Letdown To Data Junkies

[skerit]

So a large chunk of this data comes from virtual machines, did they include the resolution of those virtual machines in the "Popular screen sizes"? Or the memory of those virtual machines in the "Size of RAM" chart? Because that would skew the results.

[birdie]

Thats uttler BS. I have 15.6 GiB or RAM and currently I have only 5.6 GiB in use and no swap at all. I am on Kubuntu 18.04 have Firefox with 12 tabs open and the Atom texteditor that is essentially another complex browser (Chromium) and more. Then I have a virtualbox VM with jet another full Ubuntu 16.04 server OS running with Vagrant for web dev local testing in the background! So to claim you can that you can only do single tasking with 4gigs of RAM is just ridiculous. Firefox Quantum can have plenty more tabs open without eating up much resources I never tested it but read about how crazy the improvements where you can have hundreds of tabs open. I could do what I do with 4 GB I would probably not even notice it when a little bit would be put into swap that is on SSD.

Considering the average user with 4GB is probably not doing what I do and just have a Browser, Libre Office or something open 4 GB is still perfectly fine for many of those people. And hell yeah they can multi task. When it goes lower then 4GB there is always LXDE and others. Its really only gets problematic when there is really not enough RAM and no SSD for fast Swap.

1 to 4 gigabytes in the original statement but who cares? ;-) But I see you signed up specifically to call me out, so I won't argue with you any longer. Also, just also, you're so smart and dandy, yet you don't even have a spellchecker enabled and you're making third grade errors which makes your rant look even less worthy.

[Guest]

Hmm, what am I gonna bitch about this one.. let's see, the statistics on https://www.ubuntu.com/desktop/statistics don't have cool enough visualizations.

[Delgarde]

4 GiB of RAM means you'd have to be fairly economical with Firefox or Chromium tabs! Would also be a bit painful for parallel compiling/linking.

Not as much as you might think... my desktop is currently running Gnome 3 and Firefox with about 30 tabs open, and that's using just under 3GB, no swap. Start up Shotwell for some photo editing and I lose a few hundred MB, open up a few PDFs and I lose a bit more, but for basic desktop use, I'm still well under 4GB used.

Now, obviously if I was doing development work on the machine – an IDE, parallel builds, etc – the memory use would go up (which is why I have 16GB installed). But 4GB is plenty if all you're doing is web browsing, watching some videos, etc.

[Spazturtle]

To all those who have 16GB who keep telling us they are using less the 4GB of it, why don't you run 'vmstat -s' and tell us how much "free memory" you actually have. Not all memory that is being used is marked as used, you also have buffered and cached memory.

[Weasel]

4GB of RAM are not even comfortable to use nowadays unless you're content with single tasking or having just few web browser tabs open.

4GB is more than enough for casual users.

"Just few browser tabs", seriously why do people have this idea that tabs are there to be open permanently, a million tabs at a time? Guys, it's okay to close the fucking browser as soon as you're done browsing a site and want to do other stuff.

Heck, I close the browser very very often and especially before logging in to something sensitive for security reasons, just in case something I browsed before hijacked it via some unknown vulnerability. Of course, I also clean the sandbox the browser lives in, at the same time.

If you have sites you come to over and over, there's an ancient thing we have called Bookmarks that works very well and you can even organize them the way you want them.

[Weasel]

tl;dr There's less people using 4k than those using non x86-64 architectures.

But sure let's focus on the 4k fad instead of high frequency displays.

[dungeon]

tl;dr There's less people using 4k than those using non x86-64 architectures.

Well, that is not really true globally as Debian see slight raise of x86 32bit usage because else started kind of to drops it

[skeevy420]

tl;dr There's less people using 4k than those using non x86-64 architectures.

That's because an ARM setup is under $150 for something really nice. We have to spend $550+ to do anything more than watching videos and basic end-user desktop stuff in 4K...and even when you do spend all that money on a GPU, you might get lucky and run a game between 30fps and 50fps. Since FreeSync wasn't available until very recently and is still being worked on, we're basically capped to 30fps with 4K on Linux (at least with AMD stuff..not sure on Nvidia/Gsync/Linux).

Personally, I prefer 1440p 16x9 and 1080p 21:9 for the time being. You can get a decent monitor and gpu that'll run games at those resolutions at 60 fps for the same price as the 4K gpu for games. It's $550ish for a FreeSync (40-75hz) enabled LG 21:9 29" 1080p and an RX 580.

I can upgrade my GPU and monitor for the cost of a Vega. That's why very few use 4K, especially on Linux.

[eydee]

Canonical managed to announced

Where's tildearrow when you need him?