It might be useful to gather some information about which versions of Gramps our community members are using, the operating systems you use it on, and the reasons behind your choices. Your feedback will help us understand our user base better. And it might help improve future releases. (Of course, this survey only covers the portion of our community that frequents this forum.)
Please take a moment to participate in the poll below. Thank you!
1. On what operating system do you use Gramps?
Linux (Debian)
Linux (Red Hat)
Linux (SUSE)
Linux (other distribution)
Windows 64-bit
Windows 32-bit
macOS
0voters
2. What version of Gramps software are you using?
Before 4.2.8
4.2.8
5.0.0
5.1.6
5.2.1
5.2.2
5.3 alpha
master
0voters
3. Why do you use that version of Gramps?
Newest version in installers available
Has all the features that I need
Newest version compatible with my system
Procrastination (havenât updated yet)
Other (please specify in the comments)
0voters
4. Comments
Please Reply with any additional thoughts or reasons for your choices here.
We appreciate your participation and look forward to your insights!
Have 5.1.6 and 5.2.2 on my system. I maintain tree on 5.1 and still test things on 5.2. Due to not being able to go backwards from 5.2 to 5.1 if there is an issue, I have not gone forward with the tree that I update.
I answered Debian, but it is Mint 21.3, based on ubuntu 22.04, which is based on an older Debian version than bookworm. This is important for 2 reasons:
Dependencies work better on ubuntu than Debian, because itâs older,
Mint 22 will probably be based on ubuntu 24.04, and in that, there is no standard support for Flatpak, because Canonical is trying to promote snap.
There is a chance that the Mint team will keep Flatpak support, because they see snap as âevilâ, because it allows Canonical to do the same kind of app monitoring as Microsoft does. Users that upgrade from ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04 will loose Flatpak support however, although it can be added afterwards.
Just saying this, because this means that in practical situations, these differences can influence the kind of help needed by users, even when they all seem to use a member of the Debian family.
I am currently using Kubuntu 23.10, although I would like to upgrade to 24.04. But my first attempt to upgrade broke so many things that I went back to 23.10 until I can do some more testing.
I am using Gramps 5.2.2 with a few patches to the narrative web report to fix the new Updates feature and improve performance when generating media pages. I try to use the latest version as long as it doesnât cause any serious problems, although I did go back to 5.1.6 briefly until I found these patches. I was able to do that because I create a backup almost every day.
I put âotherâ I use Ubuntu 22 I have read about 24 but have reservations
in particular had a lot of issues with snap and essentially avoid it
like the plague. With Firefox being the main program effected.
phil
I dont hurry up make upgrades because of upgrads reset all my hacks in the code which I made for myself. So, I make upgrades not for each release. And also, installing isnt so easy on ubuntu comparing with Windows because of dependencies.
So part of the other is actually Debian based. Wonder how many more answerd that for ubuntu. Someone running Fedora may also not know that itâs Red Hat.
Answered âLinux(other)â while using Fedora. Not sure what is meant by âLinux (Red Hat)â since usually Red Hat is targeted towards enterprises (RHEL) with professional support from RH. Fedora is of course based on RH but with a few differences.
I have also a heavily patched experimental version to try out various paths. I am presently working on (DB) storage representation to escape from Python opaque model and make the DB available for other programs.
5.2.2, do have features I use that 5.1.6 does not. Personally I skipped 5.1.6, I came from 5.1.5.
Personally, I think if there is anyone that use the 32 bit version, I would guess the reason is more that they installed it or their OS as 32 bit as a mistake, and not because of hardware.
Really, 20 year old machines? (For consumers, dont count industrial use as they wouldnt be used for gramps anyway)
If there actually are anyone, as you say, its probably less than those that have 32 bit OS or 32 software installed on their 64 bit hardware, because mistake or not knowing. (Just guessing).
The person who used to maintain the PortableApps package handed it off when a 32bit version stopped being developed. WinXP was his target and only interest.
Since Genealogy is often an interest of users on a fixed income (or older users who grew up in Public Education before the personal computer age), it seems reasonable that some will be using very old equipment or be anxious about migrating.
Our Development guidance has us locked into âGUI for 800x600â⌠which is increasingly repressive. (It is another 20-year-old machine specification.)
(Personally, I am philosophically opposed to migrating to OS versions where the commercial licensing model changed to SaaS.)
And it is likely that poorly funded public education and libraries use equipment until it is beyond recovery. Some of the most destitute areas must use cast off equipment.
I was under the impression that BSDDB had to be moved to be an addon since it was no longer included in the MSYS2 distributions as discussed in another thread. However BSDDB isnât listed in the Addon Manager or Plugin Manager Enhanced on my 5.2.1 installation.
There was a discussion of proposing inclusion of the Berkeley Database in the MSYS2 forums. (And from this search, perhaps that happened?)
To be clear: I fully understand why it makes very much sense to stop using a BSDDB backend and I agree with all those arguments. But this basically means that Gramps will not be usable with large databases any more.