Source: https://linux-hardware.org/?view=os_display_server
Reporting is done by users who voluntarily upload their system specs via
# hw-probe -all -upload
Reporting is done by users who voluntarily upload their system specs via
# hw-probe -all -uploadSo not skewed at all…
Do you have a better way of measuring it?
In what direction would voluntary self-reporting of all system specs skew the display server statistic (and why)?Do you have a better way of measuring it?
No better way of measuring doesn’t mean this is a good way of measuring.
What way do you imagine would be more precise?
A method that attempts to collect data from a randomized or representative population rather than relying on self-report.
Yeah, this is pretty textbook selection bias.
The fact that you need consent to get this data would make a randomized approach impossible.
Could always go for opt-out instead opt-in metrics. Fedora had some recent controversy with it.
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Yes. It just may be possible that accurate poll data on such things isn’t possible.
Steam hardware survey but that will skew towards gamers. That said, it would be a good indicator on how compatible Wayland is.
What way do you imagine would be more precise?
Unavoidable analytics, apparently. Yay?
Well do you want useful stats or not /s
But seriously, a lot of opt-in (that never get opted in to) data is insanely useful for developers, but it has such a bad stigma that we never get anywhere close to the amount of usefulness a larger dataset could provide.
Tbf a lot of that stigma has to do with trust violation.
I like the way kde does it. On first install it gives a slider with how much analytics you want to send. I just do all of it because I trust KDE, but it’s nice that it asks you. They probably have some pretty good data.
I imagine people who care about this sort of thing are more likely to report it. And people who care about this sort of thing are also more likely to be early adopters and go through the effort of switching to Wayland.
The way to get a more random sample is not something I want (built-in, automatic telemetry by default). So I’m fine with having skewed data for something like this.
Its a pretty good survey and has a good sample size. Statistics is hard. I won’t take the criticism too seriously.
err, why? actually it can be skewed against wayland(wayland users tend to be more security aware), and why the suprise, KDE, GNOME are wayland from the get go, steam deck too, hyprland and sway etc
Wait Steam Deck now runs Desktop mode in Wayland?
plasma do, unless valve changed that
On launch Steam Deck had it’s desktop/Plasma session set to X11, hence my question
It can skew either way equally. We’re just left to do armchair psychology about the type of people who would submit data to this site. So the numbers are effectively useless.
You’re discounting the trend here. Assuming the methodology is consistent, over a short time we’re seeing a noticeable change, bias or not.
I’m not actually. Does anybody doubt that wayland use is increasing? Distros have increasingly been making it the default. I’d be surprised if use weren’t increasing. In fact it might be under-represented in this data depending on whether all distros are being accurately represented or not.
But the change in the numbers is not useless since the psychology of the Wayland users vs. x11 didn’t change
That seems probable but was there any doubt that Wayland use is increasing? Wayland has been changing to the default distro by distro. The only reason this is “news” is because somebody has claimed that “Wayland usage has overtaken X11”.
Why would it be skewed? What would be the cause for a subset of linux users, that upload hardware probes with extraneous information about their display server, to skew the extraneous data?
by default, your content is all rights reserved, the most restrictive license possible. AI trains on “all rights reserved” content all the time. You really think adding a CC-BY-NC is gonna do anything?
Because a huge portion of the people willing to do this are already on Wayland, but I believe there exists an even larger percentage on X that are not submitting any data.
And another commenter said:
We’re just left to do armchair psychology about the type of people who would submit data to this site. So the numbers are effectively useless.
Because a huge portion of the people willing to do this are already on Wayland, but I believe there exists an even larger percentage on X that are not submitting any data.
What is the basis for that assumption?
And another commenter said:
We’re just left to do armchair psychology about the type of people who would submit data to this site. So the numbers are effectively useless.
So because one cannot know which type of people submit data to the site it should be disregarded? That’s basically saying any poll or questionnaire with anonymous yet unique answers are invalid. That’s a pretty bad argument.
Anonymous polls are indeed useless for several reasons.
Man I spent 4 paragraphs saying what you just said in one sentence. 😅
So because one cannot know which type of people submit data to the site it should be disregarded? That’s basically saying any poll or questionnaire with anonymous yet unique answers are invalid. That’s a pretty bad argument.
This is basically a survey or poll. You want people to provide you with data about what they’re running. To get an accurate view of the entire population you need a representative and randomized sample. If you’re relying entirely on self-reported data you’re not going to be getting a reliably randomized subset of people. You’ll get people who are motivated to report their usage to a third party. That can lead to persistent biases in the data.
It may be that Wayland use is being under represented because the people reporting want to show that “X11 is still king!” Or it could be that this website is shared frequently with certain user groups (e.g. in some arch (btw) forum or something) and so you’re getting a skew towards that population and away from the whole.
We don’t know who these users are and we can’t “offset” for those factors. And the data isn’t reliably randomized so it’s subject to those biases whether we know about them or not.
Though as another person pointed out the trend itself may be of some interest if the population being polled is consistent. Though I doubt anybody suspected that Wayland use is NOT increasing?
respects to “unknown” and tty users.
fuck display servers. All my homies love ASCII display tech.
kmsdrm is tty, but not ascii. Or fbdev.
links -gis best browser in Gentoo Minimal CDFramebuffers and TUIs: are we a joke to you?
mmmm lack of proper double buffering on i3wm my beloved
Seeing unknown: “What’s he building in there? …we have a right to know.”
That’s Canonical building Mir 2.
LET MEEEE INNNNNN
There’s Twin.
I will add sone more once i’m home.
i like this, this is good.
Give me sixel apps, I want a sixel destop with hardware video decoding
Crazyy!
Btw I am XWayland free since today!
I have a list of recommended apps here
Some apps need environment variables:
Qt:
- qpwgraph
GTK
- GPU Screen recorder, I guess
Electron
- Nextcloud Flatpak
- MullvadVPN RPM
- Signal Flatpak
- (Element, I switched to the Webapp in Librewolf)
- Freetube Flatpak
You can use
xlsclients -lto detect apps using XWayland.Some may even want to run apps through XWayland on purpose, like KeepassXC for Clipboard access or autotype. Lets see how long it takes to implement all the needed protocols.
Let me know when wine finally gets ported to Wayland!
True, if I use bottles Flatpak as a GTK wayland app, the actual apps still use XWayland.
Not using any Wine apps though.
Yeah, games are the big reason I jumped ship and I’m pretty excited about the ongoing work porting Wine to Wayland. I’m also too broke to upgrade from my Nvidia card so the efforts improving Nvidia on Wayland are greatly appreciated.
Gotta save up for an education somehow.😄
Yes, “just buy new hardware” is not a solution.
But dont let some news fool ya. NVIDIA already won the AI race, so their “new open source driver” will only benefit their newly sold products
Yeah, thankfully I’ve got a turing card (2000 +)which is said to be the cutoff for the open source drivers.
/circlejerk
flatpak bad lmao
Flatpak saved my ass when I super broke my Arch upgrade but didn’t have time to fix it before work. I ran using only Flatpak apps for like 6 weeks because they were the only thing that worked
Funny. True, on superstable but also super unstable systems, having separated apps makes most sense.
Not actually on rpm-ostree systems, as these have the best and most solid package management.
Decent use case. You do use snapshots now, right?
Trying to set up snapshots is what broke my system. Not sure what the issue was exactly, but BTRFS was reporting a different amount of used space than there actually was, and my snapshots started recursively backing up until everything died
Next time I install Linux I’m going to use Ext4 and snapshots out the gate
That’s weird. I’ve had zero issues with BTRFS and I have both compression and snapshots.
Have you looked at bcachefs, by the way?
Honestly, I’m kind of tired of complicated stuff. I just want a fs that works and is easy to do recovery operations on when it doesn’t work. My SSD is big enough
I tried switching to Wayland on Mint, it did not go well. Unfortunately I do not care to follow an hour long guide to figure out how to get it to run games properly.
Mint Wayland support is experimental and was released in Mint 21.3 ~3 months ago
The Wayland session isn’t as stable as the default (X11) one. It lacks features and it comes with its own limitations.
It was added as a preview for people interested in Wayland and as an easy way for them to test if they want to give us feedback.
A board was set up to keep track of Wayland development. It’s available at https://trello.com/b/HHs01Pab/cinnamon-wayland.
A dedicated Github repository was created for issues related to Wayland, whether they need fixing in Cinnamon, in an XApp project, a Mint tool or anything software project we maintain: https://github.com/linuxmint/wayland.
In terms of timing Wayland support doesn’t need to be fully ready (i.e. to be a better Cinnamon option for most people) before 2026 (Mint 23.x). That leaves us 2 years to identify and to fix all the issues. It’s something we’ll continue to work on and improve release after release.
@KISSmyOSFeddit
Hw-probe is a nice project. To buy my laptop I created an usb bootable linux that auto connectet my mobile hotspot and uploaded the report.
I went to som shops and usbbooted their devices.
Most shops had no problem with that.
So I found a working convertable laptop. 👍What’s sad ont this linux-hardware.org website is the poor desin of this homepage.
It is really not usable, except for your own device. But also there its difficult to analyse for certain hardware details.I’m quite surprised they actually allowed to stick unknown USB into computer they will be selling to their customers 😮
I’m willing to bet that, like Linux usage statistics, Steam Deck had something to do with this.
Anyway, I wish I could switch to Wayland, but back when I used it it caused a dozen programs I use everyday to get very crashy.
Pony? Pony.
Sorry I’m a little horse.
You sound a little hoarse
Doesn’t steam deck use x11?
After doing some sniffing: Yes AND no
The default “gaming mode” that the Deck boots into is running wayland, specifically valve’s own gamescope compositor which has a lot of workarounds and breaks from wayland’s spec to allow for better gaming performance.
When you quit out to “desktop mode” it loads into KDE Plasma with X11, although with recent changes to Plasma, it may well be that the desktop mode will change to being wayland based too.
How many Steam deck users are uploading their hardware stats though? This is opt-in reporting.
Here’s a smaller sample size (2417 people at the time of writing) but all you need to do is fill in your details on the website: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/users/statistics/
X is at 66% and Wayland is at 33% for GamingOnLinux.
Wayland has a mouse capture bug in proton / wine. It particularly seems to be an issue in FPS games. That may contributing to slower adoption for Linux gamers.
Speaking of Valve, they probably have numbers for Wayland vs X too, unfortunately they don’t seem to publish this statistic in their survey.
Valve is difficult. On the one hand they have their own Wayland compositor with gamescope. Which works by launching an explicitly configured XWayland session for the game.
And on the other hand there’s Steam, which is still an X application.
And on top of that are stupid Steam Input bugs that only happen when you try to launch a game with gamescope.
On the Steam Deck in gaming mode Gamescope is the main compositor which launches two XWayland sessions. I guess one for Steam and one for the game.
It’s bizarre.
Works fine here, on mutter with mesa. Looks mostly like a KDE bug.
Web is no display server.
It is possible, although unlikely, that it is the display server for WebOS, the OS Palm built and LG bought. I seem to recall them having their own display server.
Which nvidia drivers work with Wayland? I have one pc that only has 470 supported card, l guess all hopes are lost there… But my 980 gtx machine seems to work mostly on wayland, except somehow minecraft only works on Xorg
That’s a good question for Nvidia.
Gtx 470 should work just fine, but 980 will not work because nvidia locked it down.
Yea, it works with 470 using nouveau drivers but the card isn’t as fast as with the proprietary drivers, at least it felt like that for me
I think you need to change pstate in debugfs
Edit: 🥺gifs don’t work?
/sys/kernel/debug/dri/*/pstatehttps://nouveau.freedesktop.org/KernelModuleParameters.html
I had gtx 760 ti(yes, it exists) long time ago. It worked slow until I changed pstate.
🤩I’ll try
Way to go Wayland
thats so pog, i wished it actually worked
Finally, it’s the year of the other desktop!
Not really surprising considering that (IIRC) it’s the default on the Gnome variants of Ubuntu, Debian and Fedora
But keep in mind that voluntary data tends to be pretty skewed
voluntary data tends to be pretty skewed
Yea and a strangely (to me) large proportion of people seem vehemently opposed to apps even asking to collect usage data, which is incredibly helpful for developers, putting aside the more controversial things like privacy/marketing uses of the data.
Personally I don’t believe for one second that Wayland has actually surpassed the install base of X11-like display servers.
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With most of the big distros defaulting to Wayland and NVIDIA finally under control, I expect most new installs will be Wayland ( and stay Wayland ) by the end of the year. So the Linux noon numbers may be 90%. I would be surprised if Wayland does not hit 80% overall by the time we hit 2026.
I’m still using x11 as Wayland always make my screen blinking and tearing no metter what distro or driver version.
NVIDIA?
Ye NVIDIA sadly they have CUDA monopoly and AMD AI is not yet mature :/
Exact same situation on Nvidia
Anyone who needs accessibility is screwed as Wayland takes over. Let’s hope we can still choose for another say 40 years. Then, I’ll be done, and Wayland can rule. Pity those who will still need accessibility options though.
How so?
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Ah ok. Thank you for the detailed answer.
I really don’t get the whole Wayland vs X11 thing. X11 works fine, why crate an alternative? What’s so great about Wayland that can’t be implemented in X11?
The problem is, X11 doesn’t really work fine for modern usage.
It kinda falls apart with multiple monitors, especially when they require different scaling or refresh rates (or both), HDR support would be incredibly difficult to add, it’s buggy, it’s virtually impossible to maintain or add features. Often fixing a bug breaks things, because the bugs in it are so old that programs have actually been designed around them, or even to utilise them.
Now imagine trying to adapt X for use with VR/AR displays and all the differences in window management that’ll be required for that.
It’s a security nightmare. Any app can see what any other app is doing. That means that if you have a nefarious app, it can scrape any information on your screen, without even needing root privileges. Then there’s a load of other vulnerabilities.
The developers have moved to Wayland because X is structurally unfixable.
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This is exactly the problem I meant. Thank you for such a detailed overview of the issue. Most apps won’t provide for it, and as you described why technically, it will mean the end of accessibility as a system whole.
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GNOME is working on a new Accessibility Toolkit for all desktops, funded by the $1M from STF. It’s intended to make accessibility better on Wayland.
Watch thisweek.gnome.org for updates on accessibility; there’s usually one. Here’s a very recent article about how it’s going from LWN: https://lwn.net/Articles/971541/
“At this point, some of you might be thinking ‘show me the code’”, he said. The audience murmured its agreement. Rather than linking to all of the repositories, he provided links to the prototypes for Orca and GTK AccessKit integration. Campbell said these would be the best way to start exploring the stack.
If all goes well, Newton would not merely provide a better version of existing functionality, it would open up new possibilities. Campbell was running out of time, but he quickly described scenarios of allowing accessible remote-desktop sessions even when the remote machine had no assistive technologies running. He also said it might be possible to provide accessible screenshots and screencasts using Newton, because the accessibility trees could just be bundled with the image or pushed along with the screencast.
The conclusion, he said, was that the project could provide “the overhaul that I think that accessibility in free desktop environments has needed for a little while now”. Even more, “we can advance the state-of-the-art not just compared to what we already have in free desktops like GNOME”, but even compared to proprietary platforms.
He gave thanks to the Sovereign Tech Fund for funding his work through GNOME, and to the GNOME Foundation for coordinating the work.
There was not much time for questions, but I managed to sneak one in to ask about the timeline for this work to be available to users. Campbell said that he was unsure, but it was unlikely it would be ready in time for GNOME 47 later this year. It might be ready in time for GNOME 48, but “I can’t make any promises”. He pointed out that his current contract ends in June, and plans to make as much progress as possible before it ends. Beyond that, “we’ll see what happens”.
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My understanding is that AccessKit is an entirely separate thing to the portal.
Unfortunately, for several things, your choices are X, which is broken by design and few developers QA their software for anymore, or Wayland, which works pretty well in many areas, but where several important (or even basic) features are quagmired by bike shedding. But things are improving really quickly, and part of that is everyone shifting focus to Wayland.
I recently tried to navigate my GNOME desktop via screen reader and did not enjoy the experience. If I ever need it, I hope it works properly by that point…
At least for me, X is a worse experience on every computer I own (including the NVIDIA one), which is why I use Wayland. Neither is problem-free. I’m fortunate enough not to depend on accessibility features; perhaps my opinion would be different then.
Are you serious? Every sane desktop is working on accessibility. I recently heard from System76 that they’re putting in the effort for COSMIC, we have GNOME focusing a portion of that €1 million they got from Germany, on accessibility (last I heard, they’re working on cross-desktop solutions). Now, I don’t remember hearing much from Plasma on accessibility, but I think it’s fair to assume they’re also working on it.
User skullgiver provides an excellent answer as to why. It’s a shame, but it’s a reality that most apps won’t expose themselves properly, and hence accessibility is over in Wayland. Despite their excellent efforts.
