Canonical publishes user statistics that it collected during Ubuntu 18.04 LTS cycle

Canonical has published the user statistics information that it collected during the first six months of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS cycle. The page was posted following the release of Ubuntu 18.10 yesterday and it reveals quite a lot of information about installations including computer details, the languages used, the country of the install and much more.

With Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Canonical began collecting information of users who decided to opt-in. According to the firm, 66% of users decided to do so. It found that clean installs made up 80% of the total installations, while upgrades made up for 20%. The firm also derived the location of Ubuntu users using the time zone and location options in the installer, rather than an identifiable IP address; surprisingly some of the countries Ubuntu was used a lot included Mexico, Brazil, Angola, Egypt, Afghanistan, South Korea, and Australia. They found English was the most popular language with 59%.

They found that the amd64 version of Ubuntu was the most installed, making up 98% of all installations. On physical devices, it also revealed that BIOS firmware was more popular than UEFI but they are almost at 50% each. The most popular resolution was 1920x1080 (28%), this was followed by 1366x768 (25%) and 800x600 (11%) - the firm recorded 15 different resolutions in total.

Unsurprisingly, 51% of users have between 1-4 GB of RAM, while 31% have between 5-8, 13% has 12-24% and just 2% has 32+ GB. Machines with 1-3 CPUs (63%) were more popular than those with 4-6 CPUs (27%), and just 8% have 7 or more CPUs.

Canonical was even able to determine the amount of storage space users had on their computers. It found that disks below 500 GB (79%) were most populous, with those below 2 TB making up 13%. Just 7% of disks had more than 2 TB of storage. The firm also found that the common option during installation was for users to erase these disks and do a fresh install, those opting to encrypt their devices were in the single digits.

If you’d like to have an in-depth look at the statistics that Canonical compiled, be sure to head over to the dedicated user statistics page to find out more.