gnome-info-collect: What we learned

Last August, we ran a research exercise using a small tool called gnome-info-collect. The tool allowed GNOME users to anonymously send us non-sensitive data about how their systems were configured. The plan was to use that data to inform our design and development decisions. We got a fantastic response to our call for participation, with over 2,500 people uploading their data to the GNOME servers.

We’ve just finished the final parts of the analysis, so it’s time to share what we’ve learned. This post is on the long side, so you might want to get a brew on before you start reading!

Research limitations

The people who provided their data with gnome-info-collect were primarily recruited via GNOME’s media channels, including Discourse and Twitter. This means that the data we collected was on a fairly particular subset of GNOME’s users: namely, people who follow our social media channels, are interested enough to respond to our call for help, and are confident installing and running a command line tool.

The analysis in this post should therefore not be treated as being representative of the entire GNOME user base. This doesn’t mean that it’s invalid – just that it has limited validity to the group we collected data from.

It should also be noted that the data from gnome-info-collect is by no means perfect. We collected information on GNOME systems rather than individual users. While there were some basic measures to avoid double counting, they weren’t foolproof, and there was nothing to stop the same person from submitting multiple reports using different accounts or systems. We also have no way to know if the systems which we got data on were the main desktops used by the reporters.

Who responded?

In total, we received 2,560 responses to gnome-info-collect. Of the 2,560 responses, 43 were removed from the dataset, due to not being GNOME installations, or being a virtual machine.

Distro used

A little over half of the responses came from a Fedora installation. The other main distros were Arch and Ubuntu.

Distro	Number of responses	% of responses
Fedora	1376	54.69%
Arch	469	18.64%
Ubuntu	267	10.61%
Manjaro	140	5.56%
Other	78	3.10%
EndeavourOS	66	2.62%
Debian	44	1.75%
openSUSE	38	1.51%
Pop!	38	1.51%
Total	2516	100.00%

Hardware manufacturer
The data we got on the hardware manufacturer of each system was poor quality. Many systems didn’t accurately report their manufacturer, and the names were often inconsistently written. Of the manufacturers that we could identify, Lenovo was the most common, with Dell, ASUS, HP, MSI and Gigabyte making up the bulk of the other systems.

Manufacturer	Responses	% Valid Responses
Lenovo	516	23.54%
Dell	329	15.01%
ASUS	261	11.91%
HP	223	10.17%
MSI	213	9.72%
Gigabyte	211	9.63%
Acer	86	3.92%
Other	353	16.10%
Total valid responses	2192	100.00%

Desktop configuration

We collected data on a number of different aspects of desktop configuration. Each of these areas are relevant to ongoing areas of design and development work.

Workspaces

We collected data on both the “workspaces on primary” and “dynamic workspaces” settings. The former controls whether each workspace is only on the primary display, or whether it spans all displays, and the latter controls whether workspaces are automatically added and removed, or whether there is a fixed number of workspaces.

In both cases, the default setting was used by the vast majority of systems, though the number of systems where the default was changed was not insignificant either. It was more common for people to change workspaces on primary, as opposed to the dynamic workspaces option.

	Enabled	Disabled	% Enabled	% Disabled	Total
Workspaces on primary	2078	439	82.56%	17.44%	2517
Dynamic workspaces	2262	255	89.87%	10.13%	2517

Sharing features

GNOME’s sharing settings include a variety of features, and we collected information on which ones were enabled. When looking at this, it is important to remember that an enabled feature is not necessarily actively used.

Remote login (SSH login) was enabled more than any other sharing feature, which suggests that the gnome-info-collect respondents were relatively technical users.

Activation of the other features was relatively low, with multimedia sharing being the lowest.

Sharing Feature	Systems Enabled	% Enabled
Remote login	527	20.95%
Remote desktop	248	9.85%
File sharing	160	6.36%
Multimedia sharing	108	4.29%

Online accounts

Around 55% of the responses had one or more online accounts set up. (Again, an enabled feature is not necessarily used.)

Number of Online Accounts	Responses	% Responses
0	1115	44.30%
≥1	1402	55.70%
Total responses	2517	100.00%

Google was the most common account type, followed by Nextcloud and Microsoft. Some of the account types had very little usage at all, with Foursquare, Facebook, Media Server, Flickr and Last.fm all being active on less than 1% of systems.

Account type	Responses	% Responses	% Responses With ≥1 Accounts
Google	1056	41.95%	75.32%
Nextcloud	398	15.81%	28.39%
Microsoft	268	10.65%	19.12%
IMAP and SMTP	153	6.08%	10.91%
Fedora	114	4.53%	8.13%
Ubuntu Single Sign-On	70	2.78%	4.99%
Microsoft Exchange	55	2.19%	3.92%
Enterprise Login (Kerberos)	50	1.99%	3.57%
Last.fm	20	0.79%	1.43%
Flickr	15	0.60%	1.07%
Media Server	9	0.36%	0.64%
Facebook	4	0.16%	0.29%
Foursquare	2	0.08%	0.14%

 

Flatpak and Flathub

Flatpak and Flathub are both important to GNOME’s strategic direction, so it is useful to know the extent of their adoption. This adoption level is also relevant to the design of GNOME’s Software app.

Over 90% of systems had Flatpak installed.

Flatpak status	Responses	% Responses
Installed	2344	93.13%
Not installed	173	6.87%
Total	2517	100.00%

In total, 2102 systems had Flathub fully enabled, which is 84% of all reporting systems, and 97% of systems which had flatpak installed. (The Flathub filtered status refers to Fedora’s filtered version of Flathub. This contains very few apps, so it is more like having Flathub disabled than having it enabled.)

It would be interesting to analyse Flatpak and Flathub adoption across distros.

Default browser

The default browser data referred to which browser was currently set as the default. It therefore doesn’t give us direct information about how much each browser is used.

The following table gives the results for the nine most popular default browsers. This combined the different versions of each browser, such as nightlies and development versions.

Most distros use Firefox as the default browser, so it’s unsurprising that it came out top of the list. These numbers give an interesting insight into the extent to which users are switching to one of Firefox’s competitors.

Default Browser	Responses	% Responses
Firefox	1797	73.14%
Google Chrome	286	11.64%
Brave	117	4.76%
Web	49	1.99%
Vivaldi	47	1.91%
LibreWolf	44	1.79%
Chromium	42	1.71%
Junction	38	1.55%
Microsoft Edge	37	1.51%
Total	2457	100.00%

Shell Extensions

gnome-info-collect gathered data on which extensions were enabled on each reporting system. This potentially points to functionality that people feel is missing from GNOME Shell.

Extension usage levels

When analyzing extension usage, we removed any pre-installed extensions from the data, so that data only included extensions that had been manually installed.

The vast majority of systems – some 83% – had at least one enabled extension. Additionally, 40% had between 1 and 5 enabled extensions, meaning that the majority (around 60%) had 5 or less enabled extensions.

At the same time, a substantial minority of systems had a relatively high number of enabled extensions, with around 25% of systems having between 6 and 10.

Number of Manually Enabled Extensions	Number of Responses	% Responses	% Responses With Enabled Extensions
0	421	16.84%
1-5	1058	42.32%	50.89%
6-10	635	25.40%	30.54%
11-18	341	13.64%	16.40%
19+	45	1.80%	2.16%
Total	2500	100.00%	100.00%

Extension popularity

The data included 588 individual extensions that were enabled. When analysing the popularity of each extension, we grouped the extensions which had similar or identical features. So, for example, “appindicator support” includes all the various status icon extensions as well. The table below shows the 25 most common enabled extension types, after grouping them in this way. Some of the extensions are included as part of GNOME’s classic mode, and we didn’t have a way to filter out those extensions which were enabled due to the classic session.

Extension	Enabled Systems	% Systems
Appindicator support	1099	43.66%
Gsconnect	672	26.70%
User theme	666	26.46%
Dash to dock / panel	579	23.00%
Sound output chooser	576	22.88%
Blur my shell	530	21.06%
Clipboard manager	510	20.26%
Caffeine	445	17.68%
System monitor	346	13.75%
Just perfection desktop	318	12.63%
Drive menu	310	12.32%
Apps menu	308	12.24%
Place menus	276	10.97%
Openweather	242	9.61%
Bluetooth quick connect	239	9.50%
Night theme switcher	208	8.26%
Tiling assistant	184	7.31%
Launch new instance	180	7.15%
Rounded window corners	158	6.28%
Game mode	146	5.80%
Alphabetical app grid	146	5.80%
Burn my windows	140	5.56%
GNOME UI tune	116	4.61%
Auto move windows	99	3.93%
Desktop icons	98	3.89%
Background logo	2	0.08%

As can be seen, appindicator support was by far the most common extension type, with 44% of all reporting systems having it enabled. Gsconnect, user theme, dash to dock/panel, sound output chooser, blur my shell and clipboard managers were all enabled in over 20% of the responses.

Installed apps

Knowing which apps are installed was one of the most interesting and valuable aspects of the data. It was also one of the most challenging aspects to analyse, and required processing to remove duplicate and spurious entries from the data set. The data set is still by no means perfect, but it is good enough to draw some initial conclusions.

In general, we are interested in which apps get used, which apps people have a strong need for, plus which apps people really like. App installation does not directly indicate any of these things directly, and is a relatively poor indicator for measuring them. We therefore need to be careful when drawing conclusions from this part of the analysis.

Frequency distribution

The frequency distribution of installed apps is really interesting. The total number of installed apps was very high. Even after processing, the data contained over 11,000 unique app names. Within this very large number of installed apps, the 400 most common apps represented 87% of all that were installed. This bulk of popular apps was followed by a very long tail.

The number of apps and the length of the frequency distribution tail has undoubtedly been inflated by issues in the data, and more processing to improve the data quality would be helpful.

Popular apps

After removing the most obvious preinstalled apps from the data, the 20 most common installed apps were as follows:

 

App	Installations	% Systems
GIMP	1497	58.48%
VLC	1375	53.71%
Steam	1367	53.40%
htop	1184	46.25%
Dconf Editor	1108	43.28%
Extension Manager	984	38.44%
Inkscape	952	37.19%
Flatseal	942	36.80%
Discord	938	36.64%
Google Chrome	899	35.12%
Web	898	35.08%
Chromium	871	34.02%
Thunderbird	824	32.19%
GParted	795	31.05%
Wine	772	30.16%
OBS Studio	770	30.08%
Visual Studio Code	726	28.36%
Transmission	719	28.09%
Telegram	713	27.85%
Geary	672	26.25%

A longer list of the most common 110 installed apps is available separately.

Note that the removal of preinstalled apps from this lists was extremely rudimentary and the numbers in the list may represent some apps which are preinstalled by some distros.

The most common manually installed apps are a mixed bag of traditional Linux desktop apps, third-party proprietary apps, and newer GNOME apps. Examples of common apps in each of these categories include:

• Traditional Linux desktop apps: GIMP, VLC, Inkscape, GParted, Transmission
• Third party apps: Google Chrome, Steam, OBS Studio, NVIDIA Settings
• Newer GNOME apps: Flatseal, To Do, Bottles, Sound Recorder, Builder

Conclusions

Overall, the data gives some strong hints about which features should be concentrated on by the GNOME project. It also provides evidence about which features shouldn’t be prioritised.

It needs to be remembered that, while we have evidence here about some of the decisions that some GNOME users are making, the data doesn’t give us much insight into why they are making the decisions that they are. For example, it would seem that people are installing the GIMP, but for what purpose? Likewise, while we know that people are enabling some features over others, the data doesn’t tell us how those features are working for them. Do people find online accounts to be useful? The data doesn’t tell us.

We therefore need to be very careful when making decisions based on the data that we have here. However, what we do have is a great basis for followup research which, when combined with these results, could be very powerful indeed.

The app installation picture is complex. On the one hand, it doesn’t look like things have changed very much in the past 10 years, with people continuing to install the GIMP, Wine, and GParted. On the other hand, we have 3rd party apps being widely used in a way that wasn’t possible in the past, and it’s exciting to see the popularity of new GNOME apps like Flatseal, To Do, Bottles, and Fragments.

The data on apps is also some of the most limited. We need data on which apps are being used, not just just which ones are installed. It would also be really helpful to have data on which apps people feel are essential for them, and it would be great to have demographic information as part of the dataset, so we can see whether there are different groups of users who are using different apps.

Methodological lessons

gnome-info-collect was the first data collection exercise of its kind that has been run by the GNOME project, and we learned a lot through the process. I’m hopeful that those lessons will be useful for subsequent research. I have notes on all that, which I’ll share at some point. For now, I just want to touch on some general points.

First, doing small standalone research exercises seems to be a great approach. It allowed us to ask research questions around our current interests, and then generate research questions for followup exercises. This allows an iterative learning process which is strongly connected to our day to day work, and which can combine different research methods to understand the data from different perspectives.

Second, the whole premise of gnome-info-collect was to do a quick and lean initiative. In reality, it turned out to be a lot more work than anticipated! This was largely due to it being the first exercise of its kind, and there not being a preexisting platform for gathering the data. However, I think that we also need to acknowledge that even lean research exercises can be a lot of work, particularly if you want to gather large amounts of data.

Finally, we discovered some major issues with the data that we can get from Linux systems. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there was a lot of inconsistency and a lack of standardisation. This required additional processing at the analysis stage, and makes automated analysis difficult. If we want to routinely collect information from GNOME systems, cleaning up the raw data would be a big help.

Outro

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Vojtěch Staněk for all his work on gnome-info-collect. Vojtěch handled all the technical aspects of gnome-info-collect, from writing the code to processing the data, as well as helping with public outreach. He did a great job!

The gnome-info-collect data doesn’t include directly identifying information, or anything very sensitive. However, there are still privacy concerns around it. We are therefore going to be archiving the data in a restricted location, rather than publishing it in full.

However, if members of the GNOME project have a use for the data, access can be arranged, so just get in touch. We are also currently investigating options for making some of the data available in a way that mitigates any privacy risks.