A Look At Linux Hardware/Software Trends Over The Past Seven Years

Here are some Linux hardware and software statistics going back to 2011.

Using the plethora of data available from OpenBenchmarking.org, generated by the Phoronix Test Suite, here's a look at various hardware/software metrics since the roll-out of PTS 3.0-Iveland / OB in 2011. Keep in mind the Phoronix Test Suite is predominantly used in enterprises so the statistics are slightly skewed more towards server/workstation hardware and clouds/VMs but still with its fair share of desktop and laptop hardware too. The sample size was limited to 100,000 systems per year. All of these statistics / hardware information is automatically parsed and generated.

When it comes to popular HDD/SSD drive manufacturers, over the past few years "Other" -- an assortment of smaller vendors -- has dominated. Western Digital used to be the dominant drive manufacturer, but as you can see that's been declining with the rise of more brands producing SSDs, etc.

On those drives, EXT4 by far remains the most dominant Linux file-system in use with more than 80% marketshare still. Btrfs and XFS meanwhile are generally on less than 3% of the drives being benchmarked.

Intel CPUs continue to be found on about 80% of the systems. Given the launch of Ryzen and EPYC last year, I would have expected the AMD share to rise a bit more, but that may become more apparent in 2018. The anomaly in 2012 appears due to a large PTS user(s) deploying a cluster of thousands of systems with PTS and having made their statistics available at that time online, which distorted the overall figures that year.

Intel (now in the form of NUCs, etc), ASUS, MSI, and HP are among the popular motherbooard manufacturers but the results are distributed among many vendors with no clear front-runner.

Ubuntu by far remains the most popular operating system being benchmarked with still around a 60% market-share on Openbenchmarking.org followed by an assortment of smaller distributions, Debian, CentOS, Fedora, and Arch.

Given the popularity of Ubuntu, for systems running with a desktop environment Unity remains the most popular though in 2018 that will likely recede to GNOME's increasing usage.

GCC remains the dominant compiler on these systems.

Still playing around with some analytics on the treasure trove of data on OpenBenchmarking.org as time allows and if coming up with any other interesting statistics for year end 2017, will post them in the days ahead.