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

Canonical managed to announce on the same-day as the Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" debut their goal for this cycle of opening up their software/hardware survey results that began with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS desktop installations. Those initial results are now available but the available data and analytic capabilities are rather underwhelming.

The site posted today on the Ubuntu web-site appears to be a static snapshot of the current "Ubuntu user statistics" for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Among the numbers they highlight are:

- 66% of users opting into the survey.

- 80% of the Ubuntu installations being clean installs.

- 98% of the users using AMD64 (x86_64).

- 99% of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS users relying upon X11.

- 1920 x 1080 is the most common screen resolution at 28% followed by 1366 x 768 at 25%. Only 1% of Ubuntu users are using a 4K display.

- Most Ubuntu users (51%) have 1 to 4GB of RAM while 63% have a reported 1 to 3 CPU cores.

A look at some of the opt-in data collected on Ubuntu 18.04 installations.

And some other statistics are shared. It's nice for a static snapshot but sadly not as in-depth as was hoped for... There are no searching capabilities or being able to slice and dice any of the data to dig deeper into the statistics. Additionally, the Ubuntu survey is collecting information like the PC OEM vendor/product strings, CPU family/model/stepping, GPU vendor/model, and other details. That is arguably the most interesting data to a lot of people for seeing the most popular CPU brands/models and graphics cards in use currently on Ubuntu. But none of that data is made public... Perhaps Canonical just doesn't want to potentially disturb any of their hardware partners? Digging through that data is what I had been most looking forward to but at least isn't available at this stage.

Sadly these Ubuntu survey results leave out the most interesting hardware data of what's collected.

Those wanting to look through the stats available so far can find them at ubuntu.com/desktop/statistics.