On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 10:07 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm@fedoraproject.org> wrote:

On Mon, Jun 04, 2018 at 03:50:34PM -0400, Jeff Backus wrote:
> Thanks for the data. 25k is still a pretty healthy number. :) I realize

Yeah, absolutely. And it's likely that those mirror numbers undercount,
because not every system checks in daily, and then there's also NAT.

But, my gut feeling is that about half of those are not using a current
release _anyway_. Honest question: do you think that 12k would still
count as a healthy number? I mean, it's not peanuts. But maybe it'd be
better served by a Fedora remix (or similar) specifically targetting
older and low-powered systems?

Good question. I think it would be more productive to think in percentages instead of raw numbers, in this case. There are a lot of FOSS projects out there that would love to have 12k users. :)

Certainly, I would consider 10% a healthy number when talking about portion of user base. I would even argue that 1% is still a healthy number, particularly with regard to decisions that have a reasonable chance of disenfranchising those affected. While I hate seeing people leave a community, I wouldn't be able to defend 0.1%. So, somewhere in there is my general boundary.

Now cost changes all of that, of course. Obviously if 75% of our effort is going to please 10%, then 10% isn't a healthy number.

Clearly effort is going into enabling Fedora to work on non-SSE2 systems by teams invested in the success of Fedora in general and not the success of non-SSE2 systems in particular. I just don't know how to quantify it.

Based on Smooge's awesome numbers, it looks like x86_32 is in the 2.3% range. It would be interesting to see how this stacks up to AArch64 and other secondary arches. Unfortunately, what complicates things is how x86_32 is so intertwined with x86_64.

To your point re: a remix, that is an option we've discussed within the SIG and is one we are open to exploring. A remix wouldn't resolve issues introduced by enabling SSE2 by default, unless we maintained a parallel set of packages e.g. i586 (which I've already been warned about. :) )

> that there are a lot of unknowns in the data, so it is difficult to draw
> any hard conclusions, but 25k is still much larger than 0. Splitting into
> i686 into i586 and i686 would give more insight into who still needs
> non-SSE2... Probably hurts my argument, though. :)

Soooooo.... this is the kind of thing that more a detailed hardware
census could really help us with!

Yes, I would agree :)

Jeff Backus
jeff.backus@gmail.com
http://github.com/jsbackus