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.
The fact that you need consent to get this data would make a randomized approach impossible.
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.
Could always go for opt-out instead opt-in metrics. Fedora had some recent controversy with it.
canonical has been doing this for years too, and a significant portion of linux users are on ubuntu. i’m not sure if a good portion of users enable it though.
Yeah, this is pretty textbook selection bias.
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.
This is the important point IMHO. This kind of feedback is exactly something I’d love to do, but I don’t think I had any idea about it before this post. Just a little popup on a new install/upgrade would be a much broader net.
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
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”.
fair
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
yep, plasma was still x11 from default when steam deck launched, plasma 6 switched to wayland as default, now i don’t know if steam deck was updated to plasma 6
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?
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.
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?
Anonymous polls are indeed useless for several reasons.
Man I spent 4 paragraphs saying what you just said in one sentence. 😅
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?
I just did that, why not, but it misreported my DE anyway, so I’d take the OP post with quite a grain of salt.
respects to “unknown” and tty users.
fuck display servers. All my homies love ASCII display tech.
Seeing unknown: “What’s he building in there? …we have a right to know.”
That’s Canonical building Mir 2.
oh god, not canonical.
LET MEEEE INNNNNN
TTY through telekinesis
Framebuffers and TUIs: are we a joke to you?
mmmm lack of proper double buffering on i3wm my beloved
There’s Twin.
I will add some more once i’m home.You know what? I’ll just dump this here:
- draw: mouse drawing on the shell!
- imgfb: Draws a farbfeld or jpeg image to the Linux framebuffer
- baca: TUI e-book reader
- Terminal Image Viewer (tiv)
- FIM: framebuffer image viewer
- derasterize: cli pixel to ANSI converter
- fbterm: framebuffer terminal
- twin: Textmode WINdow environment
- directfb2: framebuffer desktop
- csv to ascii art table via python pandas
Removed by mod
i like this, this is good.
Removed by mod
kmsdrm is tty, but not ascii. Or fbdev.
links -gis best browser in Gentoo Minimal CD
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.
Wait, is it on a population of 5000 computers? Bruh, why are we even looking at this?
No the sample size is ~5000, which is pretty OK if representative of the population (big if though)
Given that it requires self-reporting from the command line, I feel like the people that are more likely to be on the cutting edge may be more likely to report as well
To the contrary, I would expect the sample to skew more towards people who have a heavily customized X session and strong opinions about window managers while drastically underrepresenting average GNOME users who stick with the default Wayland session. Someone who likes their custom setup can still be waiting for a Wayland equivalent while casual Ubuntu users have been defaulted to Wayland on new non-nvidia installs since early 2021.
People who voluntarily report usage are more likely to be new users, experimenting with Linux distributions etc. Greybeards like me will check out new stuff every few months or years, and won’t shout about it one way or another. We’ll probably not send statistics when prompted, either.
This isn’t prompted. To send your data, you have to install a cli tool and run it with 2 specific options.
I don’t think any new users are represented in the sample.That indeed changes things, potentially introducing much more bias. What motivation would somebody have to install this tool and run it? Is it being marketed/advertised somehow? How, where, and to whom? :-P
It collects system info that helps you troubleshoot, or check a computer’s compatibility with Linux.
It offers a switch to upload your anonymized data to the web site where it’s visualized and ordered for better readability, and also entered into the statistical analysis.
Hence the big if
I doubt it’s representative of the population. Because it’s from self reporting, at best it’s representative of those who advocate their favourite platform, which is just a particular portion of the population. Though it would be cool to see Wayland surpass X
Yeh, I’ll wait until the bugs are ironed out and my distro (mint) determines it’s stable. No need to start asking for troubles when everything is working smoothly.
Then there’s ppl like me: dual 4k with Wayland on Nvidia in Gnome with VRR. Hoorah!
Just waiting for explicit sync and I will be complete.
Which nvidia, if I may ask
Obviously a fictitious one.
He’s only the second person I’ve seen to claim working dual monitor on wayland with Nvidia. All my attempts have lasted 5 mins max before something drove me back to X11.
Same, hence my extreme disbelief.
I have three monitors and a NVIDIA GPU. I’ve only been able to get them to work properly on Wayland.
Dunno, I used to run 3 monitors until I got an ultra wide, now I’m down to 2. Never had any issues getting the displays to work in either. It was mostly graphical glitches and screen tearing that drove me back to X11.
It might be because one of my monitors is actually a graphics tablet. GNOME’s scaling just didn’t work in either session such that all three monitors were scaled correctly, but KDE’s Wayland session was able to handle it properly. Or at least, the least bad.
I also use Wayland because X11 had some lag when operating the desktop normally (I guess the pros call it “frame-pacing issues”?), whereas only XWayland programs will flicker for my NVIDIA GPU. And games aren’t part of that category. I don’t use a lot of XWayland applications anymore, so I actually haven’t seen the flickering for a while. The Steam client is the absolute worst, but… I’ve been doing my gaming on Windows lately 😬
What about PRIME, though? I’d like to give it a shot, but I only just ironed out my setup with triple-gpu(all different vendors) and a ton of sweat, I’m afraid it’s going to be back to square one with wayland.
Same. I don’t see why people need to argue about it or make a conscious decision about it anyway.
(My distro determined it was ready to use a while ago, so I’ve been switched over for a long time now. Indeed it’s working fine, and I think I hardly even notice the difference.)
Every now and then I think ‘OK, this time I surely should be able to switch over to Wayland!’
And there’s always one application or use case that stops me.
Yeah, I’m on nvidia which hasn’t helped either…
For What application you face issue? I’m curious as XWayland should provide backward compatibility.
Electron applications are notorious and prolific, and resolutions are very specific to versions and details of the program’s build process.
Steam can be a big old flashy boi
+1, I have huge issues with Electron apps running on native Wayland. Fractional scaling doesn’t work, when I maximise an app it’s not covering my whole screen, same happens when manually resizing windows. What’s worse some apps do scale button positions, ex. native Discord, so when I click a button, something else to the left gets clicked. XWayland works fine though
Except it also has said issue. Additionally it causes my VPN connection to drop when watching streams, and does noise cancellation despite that option being disabled.
That’s bizarre, i have no such issues on hyprland or sway.
what DE are you using? Are they running in native wayland mode?
KDE Plasma, yes that happens when electron apps run in native Wayland mode
Isn’t there some way to force Electron to use Wayland?
There are multiple ways depending on the version of electron the app was built against
Same I want to move over so bad. It’s so smooth and the animations feel much nicer but there is always a deal breaker issue that sends me back to x11 within a few hours.
Yeah, had a rtx 2060 and sidegraded to an intel arc a750 just to avoid the nvidia xwayland issues.
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
This is the solution to your problem:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-24.1-Released
It may take a while to get to your distro.
who is using linux through their web browser
Users of ESXI, 3CX, Univention and Nextcloud
would that show up as their display server though? surely VMWare et al run some other display server on the backend and then stream to clients via VNC?
No, that’s why the web frontend graph is at 0%.
And those systems don’t have a display server, they open up a web server to interact with.if the graph is really at 0%, and not 0.0001%, why’s it there at all?
also, i’m really confused as to why an HTML webui would qualify as a display server.
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I’m sure Nvidia will become stable on wayland by the time xfce also migrates lol
NVIDIA is likely to be stable on Wayland next month. If you wait for other people to ship you code, it will arrive with the fall releases ( eg. Ubuntu 24.10 ).
Xfce is targeting 4.20 for full Wayland support. If you use Xfce 4.20 on kernel 6.9, you may break the Internet.
Don’t let your memes be dreams
Bc if you had meme dreams they would be nightmares?
NVIDIA is likely to be stable on Wayland next month.
Do you have a source for that?
Not digging them all up but this is the next article up for me: https://www.phoronix.com/news/XWayland-24.1-Released
Thanks for the link :)
He said the numbers.
Nice.
Pretty much all the Xfce4 apps support Wayland. We just need Xfce4 panel and the desktop.
I wonder how representative that is of actual software used. I would imagine hardware probes are run from installers and live systems quite frequently. I would certainly not expect several percentage points of “neither” in practical settings.
“Neither” are Linux systems that don’t use a display server, i.e. CLI only systems.
Yeah, but when was the last time you decided to upload hardware device data for a root server to some hardware survey? That is something almost exclusively done by the kind of people who want to show off their system in some way.
Counterpoint: OS market share from the corresponding BSD-hardware site:
Four kinds of blue in that graph.
And green. All associated with the more popular variants pfsense, opnsense, truenas, and freebsd.
Data truly is beautiful
Especially on servers I make sure to attend in the software packages survey. Just so that the holy-gods and kings of maintainers are aware of me, the peasant running old packages.
No yield saya. I’m sorry.
I would guess not very representative at all. I don’t believe wayland usage is higher, like at all. Maybe in a limited setting like NEW installs of the most popular distros, just because they default to it. But the existing install base? No way.
This is a graph of recent reports (one year time frame). The total reports from all time are over 70% X11.
But since the statistics are based on one time uploads, there’s no way to know how many of those systems are still in use, or still run X11.
I’ve switched to X11 last week, because kwin_wayland crashes each time my monitor enters low-power mode.
My intel laptop on kde is unreliable, but gnome is super stable.
If you want windows like taskbar, you can turn it on gnome and other features that will make it more like windows.
On desktop with AMD video card I saw no difference between kde and gnome.
I ended up back on gnome. Because it was less distracting. I am a long time gnome user and kde was a curiosity. Latest versions of both (Arch Linux).
Would love to know how you’re dealing with Gnome and HiDPI. I found it really wacky, massive title bars and such. Went to KDE Plasma 6 and it all looks right, but agree it seems a little wonky sometimes. I’m hoping the bugs get ironed out.
I don’t think my monitors are high def.
It is simply 3440x1440.
It’s UWQHD. It’s higher than fullHD, so it is high def by definition.
Given that my monitor is HiDef, no I have no size issues in Gnome.
KDE apps under gnome look like kde apps.
Gnome look like gnome.
After I installed KDE, vscode title bar got bigger.so, KDE impacted look of some apps. Not gnome itself.
Out of curiosity, what GPU do you have?
Intel UHD graphics.
I switched to Wayland the moment my distro went moved to KDE Plasma 6 because according to my logic: if things are going to be broken and I’m going to adjust to them anyways, I might as well do it all at once: shock therapy style.
Plasma 6 broke a lot of my desktop customization, but that is to be expected. And Wayland? It has been surprisingly okay. I am experiencing some keyboard-related problems that I can’t even begin to track down (sometimes the keyboard flat out refuses to work for certain programs, sometimes it’s the numpad). However, I am not sure if it’s really related to Wayland, so I’m withholding judgement.
How are you enjoying EndeavourOS?
… I actually use Arch. Sorry.
But really, I would have gone with EndeavourOS (instead of Arch) if it were not for my friend who really strongly advocated for Arch (even installing it for me—or rather, converting my Manjaro install into an Arch one).
If I’ve had any regrets in my Linux journey, it’s choosing Manjaro instead of EndeavourOS as my introduction to Arch-based distros.
… I actually use Arch. BTW.
FTFY
Swing and a miss! Well, I can take solace in the fact that 99.9% of the packages you are using are in EndeavourOS too. So, I was mostly right. :)
I also wish we could replace Manjaro with a green themed EndeavourOS. So many people could be saved the pain. Manjaro is the next biggest Linux honeypot after OpenOffice ( which exists only to ruin the experience for people that should have used LibreOffice instead ).
Converting Manjaro to Arch in place is a labour of love. I have done it myself and it is was more steps than I expected it to be. Worth it though. Good friend.
Well, I can take solace in the fact that 99.9% of the packages you are using are in EndeavourOS too. So, I was mostly right. :)
Yeah, also I think EndeavourOS and Arch moved to Plasma 6 at around the same time too? I tried holding off the update to Plasma 6 for a few days but finally took the update on March 12.
I also wish we could replace Manjaro with a green themed EndeavourOS. Manjaro is the next biggest Linux honeypot after OpenOffice.
I think with enough faffing around customizing things in KDE Plasma, I think a green-themed EndeavourOS is doable. Would I recommend it? Not really, lol! From what I’ve seen, I like EndeavourOS’ default theming.
It’s just a shame EndeavourOS isn’t as known as Manjaro (at least during the time I first jumped into running Linux as a daily driver). But then again, with Manjaro shitting the bed becoming more known, I hope EndeavorOS can take the place of Manjaro as the Arch-based distro for newbies.
Converting Manjaro to Arch in place is a labour of love. I have done it myself and it is was more steps than I expected it to be. Worth it though. Good friend.
Oh yeah, I was there with him when he was doing it. I can’t do any help other than cheering him on, and to have another eye on the screen making sure he doesn’t make any stupid mistakes in the process. At few points, I reminded him of the fact that I’ve backed up my files, and if things really get FUBAR, we can just do a clean install and restore the files from backup.
EOS uses the Arch repos. So, EOS and Arch got KDE 6 together since whatever is in the Arch repos hits them both at the same time.
Way to go Wayland
@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 😮
Those poor Nvidia users lol.
I’m currently on Wayland with Nvidia hardware and it’s running fine tbh
yup, same. especially after explicit sync lands in a couple of days, even the rest of the minor problems should vanish.
I can’t wait for my GPU to not be at 70c running Firefox.
Same here. With the exception of the explicit sync, which will hopefully be resolved this week, I have been running Plasma 6 wayland since February. And honestly when I tried the X11 version it had more issues.
fine here as well. I don’t game much these days but when I do, it’s pretty nice. Ever since the update that made the “night light” functional (the blue-light filter), I’ve been pretty happy!
I mean, by now everyone should know not to buy Nvidia hardware if you want to run Linux on it.
It’s been more than 10 years since Linus’ finger to Nvidia.
“Everyone” who wants to be informed, but linux is also for the unconcerned or for newcomers.
Not to mention the monopoly that nvidia has on laptops.
I know it would be great if we could install Linux on any hardware, but unfortunately we’re not there yet.
So you can either buy a laptop with Linux preinstalled, from a manufacturer who will support it, or do some research before hand.
And Nvidia doesn’t have a monopoly on laptops, you can buy an AMD gaming laptop
Sorry. Wife’s Christmas present. She wanted to surprise me. Gotta make do.
Bought a brand new machine. Top of the line. Installed windows on it. Thought “You know what, fuck this, time to give Linux another go”. Discovered that nvida and Wayland don’t get on…
Linux is becoming more and more popular on the desktop because it is now well suited for gaming. In addition to Proton, you also have to consider all the handhelds like SteamDeck. Valve certainly doesn’t want an Nvidia product with crumbling proprietary drivers. With AMD, Nvidia could see that there is a market for it and has now established itself. It was only logical that Nvidia would not stand still. They will do everything to dominate the market as well.
nvidia works better for me on Linux than both nvidia/amd on windows. I know not everyone’s experience is the same, but it’s at least not universally bad in case you were trying to say that.
Wayland works way better for me than X. GTX 1660
That’s great for you. But it also has tons of problems with a lot of other users. Including issues with proprietary drivers, XWayland compat for many apps/games, screen tearing, multi-monitor setups (esp. with different aspect ratios and/or dpi scaling factors), VRR, HDR, rotation, color management, many accessibility features etc.
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