Linux Hardware/Software Enthusiast Trends Over The Past Year

Written by Michael Larabel in Phoronix on 28 January 2016 at 01:44 PM EST. 6 Comments
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With the new OpenBenchmarking.org that's coming soon, besides the UI refresh, restored search functionality, and other improvements, the statistics access has also been re-enabled.

Riding off the new codebase in conjunction with PTS 6.2-Gamvik, the OpenBenchmarking.org re-architecting, and a more powerful server, the statistics fun is back. I'm still working on exposing different ways to expose the stats on the millions of PC hardware/software components we have access to at OpenBenchmarking.org, so stay tuned for more updates in the weeks ahead along with sharing any other interesting ideas you might have. From OpenBenchmarking.org there's been more than 14 million test downloads and statistics on literally millions of various hardware/software combinations.

One of the first statistical features re-enabled for the new OpenBenchmarking.org that's coming soon is the month-by-month tracking of the popularity of different items within the various components tracked by PTS/OpenBenchmarking.org (display drivers, CPUs, file-systems, etc). Here's a look at these trends for over the past 12 months. Keep in mind those running the Phoronix Test Suite aren't your typical users but more along the lines of enthusiasts / power users or in the enterprise space by server administrators and other professionals.


EXT4 remains the most popular file-system used when benchmarking by far.


Ubuntu remains the most popular Linux distribution used when benchmarking, but CentOS, Arch, Debian, and others are gaining ground as well. There are spikes at times for others (like CentOS) when companies are bringing onboard many thousands of new servers for benchmarking that can shift the perspective out of whack by displacing the independent users.

The Radeon and Intel drivers continue to be the most popular Linux display drivers... They're competing quite heavily while the NVIDIA binary driver spikes at times. Given all of the enterprise Phoronix Test Suite users, VMware and Matrox drivers are actually very common.

Intel CPUs totally dominate to no surprise, with usually seeing around 80% of the results coming from Intel-backed systems followed by Intel and then ARM. (With there being some other odd results showing up and their tiny amounts, still working on better sorting and gathering of some strings in an automated manner for these statistics showings, but it will never be fool-proof with PTS running on many different architectures and often times pre-production hardware.)

ASUS and Gigabyte motherboards are very common.

GCC is still the dominant compiler.

Stay tuned for a lot more Linux hardware/software statistics that can be tapped using the new OpenBenchmarking.org. Beta access to the next-gen OpenBenchmarking.org should open up in the next few days followed by its official launch alongside Phoronix Test Suite 6.2 in February.
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About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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