DVDs, Europe, 64-Bit: openSUSE Number Crunching Shows Growth

This is a guest blog from Markus Feilner, Team Lead Documentation.

openSUSE is growing, and one third of its users is located Germany. Most of them download a DVD image and update that later on, and they are running 64-Bit systems. That’s what openSUSE number cruncher Alberto Planas showed in his oSC 2016 presentation.

“Weeks of processing” were necessary to convert the raw log files to Berkeley DB format. Only days, however, were necessary to “analyze (via regular expressions) the lines and then serialize the data”. Planas used Jupyter and Maplotlib to create fancy charts that show the growth and even the decrease in some aspects of the openSUSE communities’ download actions.

The input data for Planas’ charts came from ISO image downloads, general update counts (Tumbleweed) and a count set based on anonymized unique user IDs (UUID).

Though this method returns a lot of data, the output sometimes may be misleading: openSUSE 11.1 for example will for a long time be one of the top downloads – simply due to its age.

Nevertheless, Planas’ data clearly shows:

• An average of 400.000 ISO images are downloaded per month.
• This number is pretty stable, aside from a small decrease.
• openSUSE is growing, at a rate of 1600 new installations and 500.000 package installations per months.
• The openSUSE team sees about 60.000 Tumbleweed users, half of which are frequently updating.
• Tumbleweed has doubled the number of installations during last year.
• Most openSUSE installations are done via DVD-Images.
• x86_64 is the CPU architecture of choice.
• The standard way to install openSUSE hence is: DVD on x86_64 and then upgrading to a recent system.
• The geographical distribution of openSUSE is unchanged: About one third of the users come from Germany (according to GeoIP), many others from the rest of Europe, followed by 12 % out of the USA, 5% from Russia and 3 % from Brazil.