GNOME’s Survey Results: A Window into User Behavior

As our media reported in August, the GNOME project initiated a survey among users using a telemetry data-gathering tool (gnome-info-collect) to gain a better understanding of user habits, software installed, and overall desktop experience.

Five months later, the results were public, revealing both expected and surprising facts. So, without further ado, let’s analyze them.

GNOME’s Survey Results

The total number of users who have installed the gnome-info-collect tool and sent their system data back to the GNOME project is 2560. However, the number of participants is small, mainly because the campaign was primarily promoted through GNOME’s media channels, such as Discourse and Twitter. In other words, only those who are deeply passionate about the project and follow the official GNOME media channels participated.

However, while these data do not allow for general 100% valid conclusions for the entire GNOME community, they provide valuable information about GNOME users’ usage habits and preferences. Fedora users sent in more than half of the reports, followed by Arch, Ubuntu, and Manjaro.

Flatpak & Apps

Flatpak is a widely accepted and established software distribution format in the Linux world. Its native support is now almost always built-in by default into all of the most popular graphics software managers.

In this regard, the GNOME survey proves Flatpak’s popularity: it was installed on more than 90% of the user computers who submitted data about their systems.

There are some interesting results in browsers. Although living in a world dominated by Google Chrome, GNOME users favor Firefox as their web browser. Here are the top three spots.

GIMP, VLC, and Steam are the most popular client applications. This shows users’ tendency to rely on the Linux desktop’s multimedia and gaming capabilities. Below are the top ten.

GNOME Extensions

We come to the most exciting part – the GNOME extensions. As we know, the GNOME desktop environment has its views and understandings of how the user should interact with it. Unfortunately, many of these views are sometimes at odds with the users’ opinions, who, to tailor it to their needs, install additional extensions that extend its functionality.

In other words, the survey results clearly show where GNOME users want to see the desktop environment go. And the results show this – 83% of all systems reported using GNOME extensions.

All extensions that GNOME developers have grouped under the generic name “Appindicator support” came first, with more than 40%. But what does “Appindicator support” mean? For example, all of the many status icon extensions.

Given that most of them rely on the system tray area, which was removed after GNOME 3.26, we can confidently conclude that this is the functionality that GNOME users miss the most. So, please, dear GNOME devs, give it back to us!

Also notable is that nearly a quarter of users uses one of the two extensions, Dash to Dock or Dash to Panel, which indicates the lack of a constantly visible panel for quick access and launching apps. Another controversial decision by GNOME developers deprived users of such fundamental functionality that has proven helpful in virtually every operating system and desktop environment available today.

The survey’s top 10 GNOME extensions are shown below, with a note that some of them are grouped in so-called meta groups based on similar functionality.

Conclusion

Overall, the survey results offer valuable insight into the needs and habits of GNOME users, giving the project a better understanding of how to meet their needs. The study’s initiative is excellent, and we hope and believe that it will serve as a starting point for GNOME developers when making decisions about the desktop environment’s future growth.

GNOME deserves our sincere appreciation for making the survey results public! Anyone interested in reading them in detail can do so at the “gnome-info-collect: What we learned” article.