Last night, as I was launching Stellaris, I got the rare but occasional Steam Hardware Survey popup. I'm always happy when I do, because I get to represent gaming on Fedora platforms. ("I'm helping!")
Then, this morning, there's the discussion of btrfs compression options, for which it would obviously be useful for us to know the typical Fedora Workstation user's hard drive and CPU characteristics.
I know some of us have been thinking about implementing a system-info metrics tool similar to what Endless presented at last GUADEC, or what Canonical does for Ubuntu. I'm not ruling those out, but what if we had something (a shell extension? something else?) that would unobtrusively offer a survey, with a chance of happening on a given system maybe twice a year?
On Wed, Jul 8, 2020 at 12:06 PM Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Last night, as I was launching Stellaris, I got the rare but occasional Steam Hardware Survey popup. I'm always happy when I do, because I get to represent gaming on Fedora platforms. ("I'm helping!")
Then, this morning, there's the discussion of btrfs compression options, for which it would obviously be useful for us to know the typical Fedora Workstation user's hard drive and CPU characteristics.
I know some of us have been thinking about implementing a system-info metrics tool similar to what Endless presented at last GUADEC, or what Canonical does for Ubuntu. I'm not ruling those out, but what if we had something (a shell extension? something else?) that would unobtrusively offer a survey, with a chance of happening on a given system maybe twice a year?
I'd actually like to have something like this for all Fedora variants. Server could have it in Cockpit, while desktop variants could have an applet that would pop up a simple application for hardware surveys.
There's a number of tools in Fedora for getting good hardware profiles. I know of at least hwinfo[1] myself.
[1]: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/hwinfo
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On 7/8/20 7:06 PM, Matthew Miller wrote:
Last night, as I was launching Stellaris, I got the rare but occasional Steam Hardware Survey popup. I'm always happy when I do, because I get to represent gaming on Fedora platforms. ("I'm helping!")
Then, this morning, there's the discussion of btrfs compression options, for which it would obviously be useful for us to know the typical Fedora Workstation user's hard drive and CPU characteristics.
I know some of us have been thinking about implementing a system-info metrics tool similar to what Endless presented at last GUADEC, or what Canonical does for Ubuntu. I'm not ruling those out, but what if we had something (a shell extension? something else?) that would unobtrusively offer a survey, with a chance of happening on a given system maybe twice a year?
That may be helpful for understanding what to tune for. Maybe it might be an option someone could specify when first connected to the internet upon upgrade or installation of Fedora. Would statistics be available online somewhere? Would one have the option of editing or choosing not to report some characteristics?
On Wed, Jul 08, 2020 at 07:53:16PM +0300, Benson Muite wrote:
That may be helpful for understanding what to tune for. Maybe it might be an option someone could specify when first connected to the internet upon upgrade or installation of Fedora. Would statistics be available online somewhere? Would one have the option of editing or choosing not to report some characteristics?
Yeah, the idea with the Endless-style system would be to ask for participation in GNOME initial setup, I think.
We'd make anything we collect publically available.
I don't know how granular we'd want to get with selection of specific data. I can see a "minimal" vs. "share lots of non-personal system info" split, but what's the user benefit of, say, chosing to share everything but graphics card model? Or editing that graphics card model to be something else?
I don't know how granular we'd want to get with selection of specific data. I can see a "minimal" vs. "share lots of non-personal system info" split, but what's the user benefit of, say, chosing to share everything but graphics card model? Or editing that graphics card model to be something else?
Sometimes people swap out components, or disable components. Hwinfo package mentioned earlier seems useful, perhaps this could be filtered. Could this be coupled with some simple optional hardware tests? This would allow checking that the system is functioning correctly.
On Wed, Jul 08, 2020 at 12:06:49PM -0400, Matthew Miller wrote:
Last night, as I was launching Stellaris, I got the rare but occasional Steam Hardware Survey popup. I'm always happy when I do, because I get to represent gaming on Fedora platforms. ("I'm helping!")
Then, this morning, there's the discussion of btrfs compression options, for which it would obviously be useful for us to know the typical Fedora Workstation user's hard drive and CPU characteristics.
I know some of us have been thinking about implementing a system-info metrics tool similar to what Endless presented at last GUADEC, or what Canonical does for Ubuntu. I'm not ruling those out, but what if we had something (a shell extension? something else?) that would unobtrusively offer a survey, with a chance of happening on a given system maybe twice a year?
Yes, please!
Some people are justifiably worried about privacy, so any solution like this should be opt-in. But I think we would be able to make our Fedora more useful by knowing what type of systems we are really targeting.
A similar consideration applies to package profiles: I would love to see the equivalent of Debian's popcon implemented in Fedora. Opt-in. It'd guide the work of packagers so that they'd know which packages are actually worth spending time on.
Zbyszek
Yes, please!
+1
Some people are justifiably worried about privacy, so any solution like this should be opt-in.
I am also in favour of this being opt-in. However, I am not sure if Gnome Initial Setup is the right place to go. How would spins do it, if they do not use Gnome? I'd suggest to place such thing in Anaconda and make it part of the installation process.
You should still be able to opt-out. So it shouldn't be only in Anaconda.
Michal
On 09/07/2020 09:32, Lukas Ruzicka wrote:
Yes, please!+1
Some people are justifiably worried about privacy, so any solution like this should be opt-in.I am also in favour of this being opt-in. However, I am not sure if Gnome Initial Setup is the right place to go. How would spins do it, if they do not use Gnome? I'd suggest to place such thing in Anaconda and make it part of the installation process.
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On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 9:49 AM Michal Konecny mkonecny@redhat.com wrote:
You should still be able to opt-out. So it shouldn't be only in Anaconda.
Michal
True, but in that case, it should not only be in Gnome Initial Setup either. I think that reporting could have a very simple configuration file - a one liner - that would be placed in its location during installation and the presence of such file would enable reporting, while the absence would prevent it. Maybe even just a presence or absence of such file could be checked so a simple "touch report_enable" would do to opt in and "rm report_enable" to opt out.
Each desktop could handle that in their GUI settings if they wanted to.
On 09/07/2020 09:32, Lukas Ruzicka wrote:
Yes, please!
+1
Some people are justifiably worried about privacy, so any solution like this should be opt-in.
I am also in favour of this being opt-in. However, I am not sure if Gnome Initial Setup is the right place to go. How would spins do it, if they do not use Gnome? I'd suggest to place such thing in Anaconda and make it part of the installation process.
--
Lukáš Růžička
FEDORA QE, RHCE
Red Hat
Purkyňova 115
612 45 Brno - Královo Pole
lruzicka@redhat.com TRIED AND PERSONALLY TESTED, ERGO TRUSTED. https://redhat.com/trusted
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On Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 09:56:41AM +0200, Lukas Ruzicka wrote:
On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 9:49 AM Michal Konecny mkonecny@redhat.com wrote:
You should still be able to opt-out. So it shouldn't be only in Anaconda.
Michal
True, but in that case, it should not only be in Gnome Initial Setup either. I think that reporting could have a very simple configuration file - a one liner - that would be placed in its location during installation and the presence of such file would enable reporting, while the absence would prevent it. Maybe even just a presence or absence of such file could be checked so a simple "touch report_enable" would do to opt in and "rm report_enable" to opt out.
Each desktop could handle that in their GUI settings if they wanted to.
I'd split any effort like this into two steps: 1. provide an implementation and build the backing infra. Make this available as package that can be installed using dnf by early adopters. 2. figure out how to make it easy to opt-in during installation.
That second step is not really important now if we haven't even started working on the first. I think we'll need different mechanisms for different installation methods, but it seems too early to think about the details.
Zbyszek
Hi Mathew,
Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote: ...
I know some of us have been thinking about implementing a system-info metrics tool similar to what Endless presented at last GUADEC, or what Canonical does for Ubuntu. I'm not ruling those out, but what if we had something (a shell extension? something else?) that would unobtrusively offer a survey
I'm a bit confused - what's the difference between what you have in mind and a metrics tool? This is more for getting data that's inputted by a human?
For hardware data, I'd imagine that a tool which pulls the information from the system would be better.
Allan
On Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 11:51:28AM +0100, Allan Day wrote:
I know some of us have been thinking about implementing a system-info metrics tool similar to what Endless presented at last GUADEC, or what Canonical does for Ubuntu. I'm not ruling those out, but what if we had something (a shell extension? something else?) that would unobtrusively offer a survey
I'm a bit confused - what's the difference between what you have in mind and a metrics tool? This is more for getting data that's inputted by a human?
The metrics tool is a one-time opt-in that from that point onward does stuff in the background on its own schedule. The Steam hardware survey is an occasionally-appearing thing that collects system information automatically but which you then submit yourself right then by pushing the button.
You can see their results here: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welco...
I was thinking about this and why not sending the survey as Fedora magazine article with link to the survey itself. In this case it will be available to anyone without the need to install anything. We could even have the user to only copy/paste hwinfo output or output from some similar utility that is available in default Fedora installation.
This is the approach that protondb [0] is using to collect the system info from user. You just copy/paste system info from Steam.
Michal
[0] - https://www.protondb.com/
On 09/07/2020 20:12, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 11:51:28AM +0100, Allan Day wrote:
I know some of us have been thinking about implementing a system-info metrics tool similar to what Endless presented at last GUADEC, or what Canonical does for Ubuntu. I'm not ruling those out, but what if we had something (a shell extension? something else?) that would unobtrusively offer a survey
I'm a bit confused - what's the difference between what you have in mind and a metrics tool? This is more for getting data that's inputted by a human?
The metrics tool is a one-time opt-in that from that point onward does stuff in the background on its own schedule. The Steam hardware survey is an occasionally-appearing thing that collects system information automatically but which you then submit yourself right then by pushing the button.
You can see their results here: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welco...
Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Allan Day wrote: ...
I'm a bit confused - what's the difference between what you have in mind and a metrics tool? This is more for getting data that's inputted by a human?
The metrics tool is a one-time opt-in that from that point onward does stuff in the background on its own schedule. The Steam hardware survey is an occasionally-appearing thing that collects system information automatically but which you then submit yourself right then by pushing the button.
Ah, thanks!
There are definite advantages to being able to run one time or limited scope research exercises, and that's a capability that I'd like us to develop. It's better from a privacy angle, since participants could grant permission for particular purposes. It also makes sense from a design and development perspective, since we often don't know the research questions we want to ask until we start looking into a problem.
We have talked upstream about using the metrics framework as a platform for running one off or limited scope research exercises, and I think there is agreement that it would be good, although I'm not sure whether the Endless framework is capable of doing it at the moment.
In the future it could be good to get to the point where the vast majority of the data we collect is for limited research exercises, and the ongoing telemetry is just for basic baseline info or data which has a longitudinal aspect.
Thanks,
Allan
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