The team behind the free desktop environment Gnome has published the results of a large-scale survey. The data from the evaluation of the tool gnome-info-collect should help the project with the further development of the software. Gnome called for participation in August 2022, around 2,500 Gnome users followed the call and uploaded their data to the server.
According to this, more than half of those who rely on Gnome for the desktop environment use Fedora (54.7 percent). This is not surprising given that Gnome is the default Fedora interface. The same now applies to Ubuntu, which is only used by 10.6 percent of Gnome users. In second place is Arch Linux, which was installed at 18.6 percent. When it comes to hardware, Lenovo is 23.5 percent ahead of Dell (15 percent) and ASUS (11.9 percent).
Gnome users like to share
When it comes to sharing features, remote login via SSH is particularly popular: 21 percent have activated the function, and remote desktop is in second place among the sharing applications with 9.9 percent. Almost all Gnome installations also have the Flatpak desktop app distribution and virtualization software installed (93.1 percent) and in use (84 percent). Over 83 percent also had at least one shell extension enabled. The image processing Gimp was installed on 58.4 percent of the systems, VLC on 53.7 percent.
Contrary to the distribution across all operating systems, the majority of those surveyed used Firefox (73.1 percent) for the browser. Google Chrome follows in second place (11.6 percent) in the group with an affinity for open source. More than half of the Gnome users have also registered at least one online account (55.7 percent); a Google account (75.3 percent) is represented most frequently in the subgroup, followed at a distance by a Nextcloud (28 .4 percent) and a Microsoft access (19.1 percent).
Non-representative but insightful data
correctly concedes the blog post by Gnome designer Allan Day but one that the survey data cannot be regarded as representative. Because participation was only called for via social media, it is only a matter of a committed subset of the Gnome user community. Nevertheless, a total of 2560 people took part.
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The results, the blog post concludes, give “strong indications as to which features the Gnome project should focus on” – but which conclusions are drawn specifically are not explained further. Due to possible privacy concerns regarding the information collected, the raw data will not be published, however, the blog post lists the results in detail.
(jvo)
